Adam Silver: “People love scoring, the one thing I think maybe that the league over-calibrated in terms of offense at times, because what fans clearly love too, is defense… they wanna see physical defense.”

46 comments

  2. Fans want to be able to watch players play defense without jumping out of the way for fear of getting called for a foul if the attacker jumps into them.

  3. After listening to him for 10 years now I get the feeling that Adam Silver pretty much has no idea why anyone would like watching basketball

  5. The fascinating thing for me is that some fanbases have become in favor of fouls getting called and some against it because of their favorite players.

    Why does ANYONE think how fouls are called better in the NBA compared to how FIBA does it with far more non-calls on blatant attempts to get get to the line?

  6. Then make it so that offensive players jumping into people isn’t a foul on the defender lol. This mf can’t make up his mind, being a ref under the silver regime must suck a fart. ‘We want physical defense’ ‘we want 30+ points a game to be easier’ constantly conflicting narratives

  7. We want to see defense. We don’t want to see freethrows if someone breathes on you or if you jump into the defender. We want to see scoring when you have to actually try to score.

  9. Every time this thing speaks, it makes people wonder:

    “why do we have an indecisive, nebbishy, extremely strange, creepy, clearly neurotic, alien-human-hybrid, who never played basketball at any significant level, making all the crucial decisions for the leading basketball league on earth ?”

  10. This dude just needs to stop grandstanding and acting like a puppet master who influences the trends of the league.

  11. I really hate this mentality that scoring is what people want to see.

    I bet there’s not one basketball fan on the planet that says “I hate defense”.

  12. Teams have been trying real hard to emulate what they saw with Indiana and OKC last year but doing the whole super physical full court pressure with less talented defenders tend to actually make a lot of defenses look worse especially with the regular season whistle (Indy wasn’t actually that good defensively in the regular season either last year partly because someone like Nesmith was in foul trouble a lot)

  13. The idea of loving the entire game is just an alien fucking concept isn’t it

  15. I don’t know….

    I am ok with NBA players trying to do both. Strategies are built over entire seasons, not during one game.

    What I would like is to watch less degenerate advertising, and most importantly I would love for the NBA to completely disassociate from betting.

    Betting is basically one of the main reasons a lot of sports suck now, the suck so much more than before…. Everything eventually leads toward the big advertisers and while I am tired of watching insurance commercials, I straight up despise everything about betting and gambling.

    Bunch of degenerates taking criminal money and dressing it up as something that supposedly enhances the sport experience, when in reality it makes every single part of it worse.

    But yeah. Adam… I see that the entertainment value somehow always falls on athletes playing a certain way instead of production making sure we get to watch a great game of basketball without constant interruptions.

  17. Allow defensive strategies, regain back some of the dribbling rules, pull back on that gather step rule, voila you have organized basketball being played again. Organizations will be able to build teams the way they want it, and not have to follow one trend of playing. There will be different styles again and players won’t look like a carbon copy of each other out of the draft. It would look less like playground basketball and a 3 point contest, but you can still have athleticism as it is still the NBA.

  22. I’m sure some people like watching physical defense, but offense is clearly celebrated significantly more.

  24. He’s wrong, we’re here for the timeouts. Please give each team 10 of them and then mandate they save and use at least 5 in the 4th quarter when things are starting to get interesting

  25. “People love scoring” is such a idiotic assessment. People love *skill*, *athleticism*, *creativity, competitiveness,* and *fairness* in sports.

    Nobody loves the free throw fests that end tight games – even though those are scoring. Nobody loves flopping or foul baiting, even though it scores points. Nobody loves genuinely dangerous closeouts even though it is “good defense”. Nobody loves when both teams play 5-out and take turns swinging the ball around until someone shoots an open 3 for the entire game.

    People love to see variety, teams that scouted their opponents and came up with creative ways to use their strengths to exploit their opponents’ weaknesses. People love to see elite athletes scoring over difficult contests. People love to see forced turnovers, diabolical ball handling, and passes that thread through defenders to hit openings they didn’t even see.

    And while I’m on the subject of what a rancid scrotum Adam Silver is: people also don’t love when you let your favorite GM get away with blatant cap circumvention because you love his stadium so much.

  29. Inconsistency in the whistle bothers me the most. I’m a Cavs fan. If Donovan Mitchell drives he will get a better whistle than if Nae’qwan Tomlin drives. Why?

  35. No, fans are tired of the flopping and foul baiting. Not calling any individual player out bc theres a lot of players that are doing it and rightly so bc of how the game is officiated.

    But I think the general consensus is we’d prefer that the league cracked down on that.

  36. We also love superstars being forced out of small markets. And 20 ads every 5 minutes and 20 FTAs for one player alone. Adam Silver just understands the fans so well.

  37. It’s really not even physical defense it’s just the foul baiting and flopping that turn people off from the sport. The flopping has been better but the baiting has became worse post harden cp3 era where now every guard in the nba flinches as a pinky touches them and they get the call almost every time.

    There’s also no consistency at all. SGA can pump fake get a guy off his feet, jump into him and get a call. A big like Jokic can put up a fadeaway where the guy is pushing him on his back and he’ll never get the call even though he’s complained about it probably a hundred times a season. Or just any big can get clobbered in the paint and no call is made but a guard gets tapped on the waist going to the rim and gets a call.

  40. I just want a good game flow with consistency in officiating – which, admittedly, isn’t easy to do.

  41. Genuine question from a somewhat newer NBA fan: was there ever an era when people didn’t complain about the NBA product?

  42. lol people saying “we wanna see defense” in this thread but anytime two teams score less than 100 points in a game the top comments are always “worst game ever” “most boring game of all time” and nothing about defense. Same shit in the NFL

  45. Fans just want to watch basketball, Adam. Not constant foul calls, not an overabundance of ads. Basketball.

  46. Context matters. We like to see guys hitting threes and jumpers, and exciting dunks. We hate watching shooters throw themselves into defenders while they wildly along the ball towards the basket to draw the foul and get to the foul line. We love scoring, not inflated scores.

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