With the unfair and unprecedented fines against the Utah Jazz and Indiana Pacers last week, there has been a tipping point of frustration for fans and media over how poorly things have gone for the NBA under the leadership of Adam Silver.<\/p>\n
Adam Silver has done one thing right in his time as Commissioner: he has made money for the Owners, those with one of thirty memberships in the league.<\/p>\n
In terms of the product on the floor, he\u2019s done a terrible job. The actual on-court elements of the game have consistently gotten worse under his leadership.<\/p>\n
Problems with the product<\/p>\n
Instead of focusing on the two-thirds of the league vying for playoffs, Silver has made it important to punish and terrorize the small markets of the league, doing everything they can to try to be competitive. Steph Curry, over had a great quote over All-Star weekend about the state of the league and the \u201ctanking problem.\u201d<\/p>\n
Tanking, which has been done for forty years, is just now apparently ruining the \u201cintegrity of the league.\u201d Teams that are focusing on having their young players play, knowing that they won\u2019t win, are receiving threats from the commissioner to do things that aren\u2019t in their best interest. You\u2019d better play your vets, we\u2019re monitoring your substitution patterns! Win meaningless games, so you miss out on the talent in the draft, or else! That\u2019s the message from Adam Silver recently.<\/p>\n
In Silver\u2019s disastrous press conference over All-Star weekend, in which Silver had All-Star Friday, Saturday, and Sunday night during the day, he claimed that all things are on the table to punish teams for tanking, including losing draft picks. So, the one thing teams like the Utah Jazz have to bring top-tier talent on their team, the one thing that allows them to make trades to improve, Silver wants to remove.<\/p>\n
If you want to see the whole answer on tanking, you can see it here:<\/p>\n
There are so many things he says that show an absolute misunderstanding of fans. First, Silver mentions that fans don\u2019t want tanking. Maybe for the casual fan, but for the diehards, the ones paying for league pass and going to games in losing seasons, that\u2019s just not the case. Silver is treating fans like a tech company treats users of its apps, they\u2019re data points. Fans may not like tanking, nobody does, but they understand the necessity of it. I see that in our site\u2019s numbers and in my own YouTube and social media. Fans view the draft as hope, and tanking as the means of restoring it. They know that you can\u2019t get anywhere in the NBA other than drafting top-tier players on draft night. And for small market teams, tanking is the only way they\u2019ll get their own superstar. Silver throwing around threats about losing draft picks is the worst possible type of leadership. It\u2019s a tyrannical leader, unchecked, threatening the smaller markets to bend the knee to his beloved larger markets like LA and New York, as well as his beloved gambling companies (more on that later).<\/p>\n
Yes, there are season ticket holders who would like to see their teams win. And at some point, you have to make sure that NBA owners are actually making a profit, but the NBA taking draft picks away from a team like the Jazz would only hurt the fans, the ones that Silver claims he is worried about.<\/p>\n
For far too long, the NBA season has been too long. Players are still playing back-to-backs and three games in four nights that is leading to a wide variety of issues. Load management has been a problem that has plagued the league for all of Silver\u2019s tenure. We don\u2019t hear as much about it now because the commissioner wants you to think it\u2019s been solved. To his credit, Silver did add the rule that players must reach 65 games to be eligible for awards and all-star consideration, and that appears to have curbed some problems. But this rule alone should tell you about the need for a shortened season.<\/p>\n
Imagine the NBA reduced games to something in the 70-72 range. Teams would actually be able to practice (what a novel thought). It would literally improve the product on the floor with teams being prepared for each game. It would also make each game matter more, in a way that has given the NFL an advantage. Each NFL game matters more because every game counts towards the playoff picture. If the NBA had a shorter season, spread out, there would be less tanking in general because, when it would happen, it would be late in the season when people wouldn\u2019t care anyway. The playoff picture would hinge on every game that much more. As it currently stands, the season is more or less decided by February and March. Teams like the Utah Jazz have to make decisions for what\u2019s best for them earlier because the season is so long.<\/p>\n
In addition to improvements to the games themselves, we\u2019re seeing players sustain more and more injuries. The game is faster, harder, and requires more skill than ever before. Players have to be at an elite level, and they\u2019re pushing themselves to the absolute limit, and we\u2019re seeing more injuries, which is costing stars to play. And if there\u2019s one thing the NBA likes to boast about, it\u2019s its stars. It is not good to boast about those stars if they\u2019re always out with calf injuries, or worse.<\/p>\n
The decision to single out the Utah Jazz specifically was not for the integrity of the league, the lie that Adam Silver told. It was to protect the thing that he is most worried about, the revenue of the league. But not in the way you would think, with attendance or viewership, he is most worried about the integration of gambling. There are a lot of legacies that Adam Silver will leave whenever he stops being the commissioner (player injuries, bad officiating, a ruined all-star experience, a poor league-pass experience, tournaments no one asked for, the list could go on), but the one he will be most known for is the invasive implementation of gambling in every aspect of the game. Gambling companies need reliable information for games to remove issues with their lines. For the Utah Jazz to rest players puts those lines at risk and could cause bookkeepers to lose reliable data. That\u2019s the worry for Adam Silver.<\/p>\n
One of the most telling stories about Silver\u2019s interest in the gambling aspect of the league comes from this Ringer<\/a> article on pitch-counting scandals and their relationship to prop bets. Something that sounds very familiar to things we\u2019ve seen with Terry Rozier and Jontay Porter<\/a>. But what\u2019s interesting from that article<\/a> is what it revealed from Adam Silver talking to Rob Manfred, commissioner of the MLB.<\/p>\n With parlays, the house almost always wins. With prop bets<\/a>, the house almost always wins except when it\u2019s set up to lose by a duplicitous, unscrupulous player. In 2021, MLB commissioner Rob Manfred divulged<\/a> that NBA commissioner Adam Silver had advised him not to dwell on baseball\u2019s deliberate pace because all that time between its hundreds of thousands of pitches per season made the sport perfect for micro-betting<\/a>\u2014an in-game, real-time form of prop bet along the lines of the kind Clase is accused of abusing, which wasn\u2019t even feasible in sports betting\u2019s bookie-based era, before smartphones and apps. Micro-bets are made for problem gamblers\u2014both the kind that can\u2019t lose and the kind that can\u2019t win.<\/p>\n This bit of information is everything you need to know about what Adam Silver\u2019s focus is. It\u2019s not what\u2019s best for the game and the fans, it\u2019s not the integrity of the game, it\u2019s how much money he can squeeze from every opportunity he can. It\u2019s why every change for the league always entails some addition\/change that doesn\u2019t actually improve the actual product, it\u2019s just to manipulate things in a way that keeps revenue while also manufacturing interest. The integrity of the game is the last thing he\u2019s worried about.<\/p>\n