Is Adam Silver up for this?
People who love the game are asking
In 2012, when the NBA anointed Adam Silver as its next commissioner, I got an assignment from ESPN to write about him—probably because, as a nerdy bald guy, I have a certain affinity for Adam. I’d had a lot of exposure to Adam, starting when he approached me on the street, told me he was a TrueHoop reader, and thanked me for covering the league. My article was positive, and honestly so, and included a line from David Stern who said he felt that he had kidnapped Adam for the NBA on his way to a legal career.
At the moment of the article, LeBron and Dwyane were in Miami, Blake Griffin was jumping over cars, and the Thunder were going places behind Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook. Giannis was 19, AD was 20, Kyrie was 21, Harden was 24, Steph was 25, and Kawhi was still a San Antonio Spur. TV ratings were high, the new CBA controlled costs, and the recession was in the rearview. The answer to the question “how would the league grow?” was “globalization.”
It seemed obvious Adam’s NBA would be slicker, more future-facing, and nimbler than David’s. He arrived explaining that “we’ve always done it this way” would no longer count as a reason to keep doing something a certain way.
Tanking was obviously hurting the game, the league did little to discourage doping, the TV broadcast hadn’t changed meaningfully since the 1960s and young people didn’t like it, the NCAA tournament made more money from worse players thanks to the magic of single elimination, everyone knew U.S. basketball development was corrupt, the Donaghy scandal exposed the mob’s proximity to the league, and injuries were out of control.
Now that we’re a decade-plus into the future, the league has kicked out Donald Sterling, added an in-season tournament that’s almost single-elimination, and otherwise struggled to modernize.
Some of the “innovations” feel calculated for public effect. In 2013, NFL head injuries made headlines, so the league hired an expert and made a stink in the media about their enhanced protocols. Gone, they said, are the days of playing through a blow to the head. They would make brains safer with tweaks to rules about flagrant fouls, instant replay, and protecting shooters. For a while, the league did seem different–blows to the head led to stiffer penalties, players did regularly retreat to the locker room for testing before resuming play. There are measurable reductions in the number of players getting two concussions in short order.
But that feels like a long time ago. Indeed, the best available evidence comes from an academic paper that shows concussions have just climbed higher and higher since the NBA announced its changes. In other words, the league publicly congratulated itself for addressing an issue of concern to the public, then went quiet as everything got worse.
I wish I could say that was an isolated case. When it seemed popular, the league put BLACK LIVES MATTER on the courts, then it quickly and quietly removed the phrase the following season. The league once had a testing program that lawmakers called “a joke,” under Adam’s leadership they’ve added a gargantuan loophole where players can pay not to take tests in the offseason.
In the early years of Adam’s administration, back when they talked to real journalists, the private explanation from top people was that they were smart in the league office, but had obstacles in making reforms. The obstacles were many, but mostly: billionaires.
Take tanking. It’s embarrassing for fans, players, coaches, and the culture of the sport. It’s bad for kids to see their local heroes systemically unable to compete. It’s an abomination for ticket sales and local TV ratings. (Would all those regional sports networks have gone out of business if they didn’t have to broadcast hopeless teams?)
So why have we done nothing substantive to improve tanking? Why do the mighty and proud San Antonio Spurs have Victor Wembanyama? What’s the lesson there for the shitty Suns, Wizards, and Pelicans? The league has grown elite at arranging rosters without point guards, without shooting, without big men, without hope. From the front office’s point of view, Kevin Durant played out of position and effortlessly on defense in 2007-2008 to get Russell Westbrook. Russell Westbrook shot 39 percent from the floor and led the league in turnovers in 2008-2009 to get James Harden. They became a superteam.
It’s a crime against the game, and everyone hates it. But it has barely changed a whiff for one reason: the billionaires are scared of what would happen without the welfare. What other way could the post-Luka Mavs get Cooper Flagg, or hope? Without a lottery, they might never win. Some billionaires know they don’t know what they’re doing, and don’t like to look dumb, to soul search, nor to take a back seat. So the league office protects the well-moisturized thin skin of the richest.
Ted Leonsis seems like a smart guy, but it’s tough to make the case he’s any good at running a basketball team. He took over before the 2010-2011 season when the team was rebuilding. 15 years later, they still are, having won one of their eleven games this season. The pride of the nation’s capital has lost 715 of 1,205 Leonsis-era games. Leonsis would be the next Ted Stepien, a laughingstock rich guy, but the league keeps throwing his team studs with star potential. Can you contend with John Wall? Would a Bradley Beal help? Maybe you need a Deni Avdija? Maybe the super young Wizards will figure it out with Bilal Coulibaly, Alex Sarr, and Tre Johnson, but on the other hand the Wizards just finished 26th out of 30 in ESPN’s Future Power Rankings. No worry, they’ll just keep getting incredible players for as long as it takes, they won’t get relegated nor so embarrassed that Leonsis can’t sit on panels at conferences, talk about success, and bring in his son to continue the tradition.
Adam’s a lawyer. The mistake has always been to think that his client is the game or the people who love it. Whatever his off-hours personal feelings or political giving, his day job has always been to manipulate the world on behalf of 30 of the most powerful and deep-pocketed clients in the world.
The league knows a lot about injury science, but the billionaires didn’t want to change the schedule to reduce injuries because they make a lot on parking and beer sales when Steph and LeBron came to town. The league could make drug testing serious, but what billionaire wants their team’s star to fail a drug test? And so on. The dumb is baked in.
The NBA has this guy Evan Wasch who takes the microphone here and there to talk about all the cool things the league might one day do. He might exist to remind people like Zach Lowe that the NBA has brains. At MIT Sloan a few years back, Wasch said “nothing is sacrosanct … we will have a proposal to fundamentally change the season,” and he mentioned one free throw instead of two or three, shifting the season later in the year, and something called “the octopus,” where the season would be broken into eight “legs.” But of course this stuff would never make it out of the G-League unless Wasch’s boss had the cojones to piss off billionaires.
The biggest difference I see from David Stern’s regime is that now everything is more secretive. I sat in the front row and asked Stern hard questions about tanking, injuries, Donaghy and any other thing. He enjoyed taking it on. I wouldn’t even know how to ask Adam about head injuries. As the pandemic unfolded I was at a conference with several key NBA executives, who refused to mention or acknowledge the coronavirus. It was coordinated, strange, and out of step with the public’s best interests. But it did a nice job keeping the league’s powerbrokers from having to lead.
Later, there was convincing evidence that stadiums full of people led to deaths. I emailed one of Adam’s key staffers questions about returning to play. Through a bit of a laugh, he asked “why would we tell you that?” Like they couldn’t conceive of the point of the media, which they simultaneously booted permanently from any meaningful access to players or coaches.
No one knows, anymore, what’s really happening. Perhaps Adam and his top advisors are incapable of publicly discussing tough issues like the societal impact of gambling, the mob’s ties to the NBA, or the coronavirus. The alternative, which worries me deeply, is that Adam and his leaders are fully capable, but don’t see value in it. The public might not be a key constituency in today’s NBA; they have all the power they need in the back room with the private equity guys, the bankers who are conduits for offshore money, and Adam’s friends like Jared Kushner. (One of Adam’s few recent public appearances was behind the paywall of the private-equity funded Puck media, which lauds Adam as a “$76 billion man” because that’s how much money he made the league in its most recent rights deal.)
A lot has been happening in the back room. Adam personally led the legalization of sports gambling in the U.S., and spent quality time promoting the idea that it would be good for everyone. (At the first NBA event I ever went to where the league promoted daily fantasy sports, years before real gambling was legal, an NBA GM predicted it would be hard to police players and coaches sharing information with friends about meaningless things like how many assists they get. How did he know that and the league did not?) The argument for legalized gambling was increased transparency. If it’s transparent, then please untangle for me who in the rat’s nest of Blackrock, Softbank, Raine Group, Robert Kraft et al calls the shots at Draft Kings. Are they in love with the game, or here to exploit it? Somehow the NBA has been at the vanguard of scammy things like NFTs and crypto, and has been a profound leader in building deep financial ties to the global hotbed of money laundering called the United Arab Emirates, whose logo is now on the NBA’s in-season tournament and every referee.
David Stern was most associated with a certain profile of billionaire like Jerry Colangelo or Peter Holt (whose money came from the tractor business). Adam’s billionaires seemed smarter and more digital. Steve Ballmer made his money at Microsoft, Vivek Ranadivé ran a software company, Josh Harris and Dave Blitzer invested in hundreds of companies, Joe Tsai ran Alibaba which seemed like an Asian Amazon.
Time has sullied the portfolio. Ballmer appears to have thumbed his nose at Adam’s rules, Harris’s money comes from the Jeffrey Epstein-tainted Apollo Global, Ranadivé is on video being the caricature of a bad owner (“STAUSKAS!!”) as his team’s players go elsewhere to become stars.
Rockets billionaire Tilman Fertitta comes with the messiest family history; Mavericks billionaire Miriam Adelson runs a gambling empire with deep ties to the Chinese Communist Party. Tsai took anti-free speech positions that experts and election officials said came from the Chinese Communist Party, as Tsai’s Alibaba co-founder has been through the ringer–exile to Japan, a reorganization, more we don’t know. It all speaks to the degree to which such executives are beholden to Beijing.
Silver has been betting on the league’s ability to hold its own in the great game among players like Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, Mohammed bin Salman, and the Gambino crime family. A little more than a decade in, fans, players, coaches, investors, gamblers, elected officials and the media all have concerns about the integrity of the game.
What is the league’s most pressing problem? You pick:
Injuries. The league goes to incredible lengths, and costs in the billions a year, to assemble the world’s most special athletes. Then it injects them into one of the world’s most dangerous workplaces, which chews up bodies as a matter of course. A huge percentage get horribly hurt. Right now, the Boston Celtics would be the favorites in the East, except Jayson Tatum tore his Achilles, so they traded away almost half of their rotation to save money. Absent Tatum, the East favorites would be the East champion Pacers, but their star, Tyrese Haliburton, tore his Achilles too, and is out all season. The Lakers like their chances in the West; if they can ever get LeBron James on the court. The Mavericks would be led by Kyrie Irving and Anthony Davis but they barely ever play together. Zion Williamson, Kawhi Leonard, and Joel Embiid are theoretically MVP candidates, but are in and out of street clothes. The Rockets are all in but their point guards are all out. The best team in the NBA is the only contender that hasn’t been torn apart by injuries. The NBA’s core product is the performance of stars; many nights a third are unavailable.
The mob and gambling corruption. A multi-year FBI sting, which caught well-known NBA players and coaches allegedly manipulating games, sharing non-public information with gamblers, and entrapping wealthy people into rigged poker games. In one case, the player doing a lot of the bad stuff was many months into being investigated by the NBA, who caught none of what mattered. All of the above is alleged to have happened in partnership with the mob, which appears to have little difficulty attending NBA games, and having private meetings and conversations with certain players and coaches. And it was not the first time.
Dirty money. The NBA has done meaningful business with many bad people–each of which creates its own vulnerability. Jeffrey Epstein was funded by the founder of Apollo Global which is also the source of many NBA fortunes and transactions. A real public accounting of Epstein’s operation appears more likely than ever, and could pose trouble for some of the deep pockets, and revenue channels, important to the NBA.
Tanking. NBA gambler Haralabos Voulgaris just told Pablo Torre “your league is so cooked.” It was part of a bigger conversation about gambling’s corrosive effects. But Voulgaris was explaining that the ideal way to catch players throwing games would be to build sophisticated computer models, and then investigate where the action looked odd. What makes that impossible, though, is tanking. It’s already normal in the NBA to lose games intentionally. Blazers’ coach Chauncey Billups allegedly notified gamblers that Portland would sit key players to improve draft position, and then they lost the next game, predictably, to the Bulls. A computer might flag that game as an odd loss. But how would you ever know if it was thrown for the illegal benefit of gamblers or draft position? Tanking is throwing games. It’s tough to get super righteous with players in a league where that’s normal.
The Clippers. Steve Ballmer and Kawhi Leonard appear to be making a mockery of the NBA’s most profound rules.
Audience in crisis. New research shows young American men have been devastated by sports gambling. New working papers suggest that in states where gambling has been legalized, bankruptcies and mental health issues have skyrocketed. Jonathan Cohen, author of the book Reckless, explains to Derek Thompson on the Plain English podcast that one reason young men today are so vulnerable to gambling apps is that they generally feel hopeless and disenfranchised. The demographic that has forever been the core of the NBA’s audience is in crisis.
Competition. For most of my time covering the NBA, the major pro sports leagues have been monopolies. But the wolves are at the door. In the NBA’s case, it has been a long time since normal people can afford to attend a game in person, this year it’s expensive just to watch on TV. Meanwhile, deep-pocketed investors are flocking to women’s sports, which are having a moment and the advantage of what’s sometimes called a “higher holy calling.” You take your kids to a women’s soccer game in part for entertainment but also to change their sense of what’s possible. But, you say, the NBA has a hand in the emergence of women’s sports, which is true. But what’s also true is that mostly the league supplies a commissioner, referees, and salaries–all of which, WNBA players seem to think, suck. A rival league is threatening. Whether it succeeds or not, the idea that only a few commissioners know how to run successful sports leagues is over. There should be and there will be new models, leagues that can be more responsive to data. One example: the best tanking fix–I researched it for years–is simply not to have a draft, but instead to have a salary cap, and to let incoming rookies sign wherever they want. Fans have long said that sounds too crazy to consider, but it’s happening right now in the NWSL. If it’s awesome, the NBA won’t be first to it.
Every time one of these stories emerges–the gambling, the corruption, the dirty deals–David Thorpe says it makes him sad. That’s because David is decades into spending long hours advising the best players in the world how to be better. He’s amazing at it, and gets astounding results.
But it’s a ton of work. He’s routinely talking to players who vastly improve on defense, through film study, dialogue, and lots of teaching. Then they guard Giannis or Luka, and wake up exhausted and bruised. David’s the guy who has to tell them to get up and start all over again because you have Donovan Mitchell tonight. Forget what you’ve heard about the partying ways of Allen Iverson or Michael Jordan. Today’s best NBA players work harder than you can believe, without much by way of weekends, family, parties, or friends.
It works, because the gas tanks are filled with the magic fuel of love of the game. It’s a very special sport, with its own kinetic energy. People fall in love with this game.
Where does that love rank in Adam’s priorities? Why not have shady mob-associated people around the game? Because we love it and would hate for anything bad to happen to it. Ideally, Adam would make the world safer for a clean, hardworking NBA player. But instead, there’s gambling on every phone, debts to bad people in many locker rooms, and little risk of dopers getting caught.
Adam has the job of protecting the integrity of the game, but instead that work is being done with the resolve of these clean hardworking players. I wonder how Tre Johnson and Alex Sarr feel knowing that if they persevere through all the muck—the medically insane schedule, the gamblers, the training, the diet, the dopers, the opponents who want to embarrass you, the billionaires’ backroom deals—and win a title, then Adam will be there to hand the trophy … to Ted Leonsis.
Thank you for reading TrueHoop!
After reading this piece (which was really good by the way) I am left with the feeling that you don't see a way out. Perhaps you could down your views on how to make the changes needed to change this league. It remains my favorite. I see the things you mentioned and recognize them as problems, but the very success of the owners seems to be the hindrance for any real change.
As always, brilliantly succinct synthesis. For those of us who love the game and hate all of this please keep up the good work.