This wholesale enthusiasm for an NBA commissioner is something we haven't seen in some time. Stern had a relationship with everyone involved in working for or loving the NBA that can be summed up like this:
It's Silver's pragmatic-as-advertised style and openness to new ideas that has more progressive fans excited. David Stern, accomplished as he is, was known as an asshole. Silver's remodeled a commissioner's office that had grown out-of-touch (but never lacking in passion), and has instilled a new sense of drive and experimentation into its drapes. Find out what measures have actually been taken and what other advancements are currently underway within the NBA in Put in Work: What Adam Silver's Done Since Taking Over.
Donald Sterling is gone.
Donald Sterling has been a noted racist since 1983. It took him 31 years to finally, finally do something so juicy and so explicitly reprehensible in the public eye that a modern NBA commissioner could effectively take away his team against his will. Perhaps it was all of the different layers and facets to explore with Sterling's latest transgression that captured the public's will to see him toppled. His story was scandalous on so many levels: Racism, adultery, issues of gender, race, and class, the bizarre details of a sugar daddy relationship—so much was covered in that fateful TMZ tape.
Adam Silver did well to hit the kill switch on Sterling’s ownership, but it’s unfortunate that he didn’t aggressively attack Shelly Sterling as well. She sucks just as much as her husband does, and yet she’s legally the Clippers’ “No. 1 Fan.” Silver, being a lawyer by trade and having an army of even better lawyers around him, probably gathered that he would need to use Shelly’s legal powers over Donald to help push the sale to another person. A disappointing game of legal politics, but one that the NBA is better for on the whole.
The new behemoth of a media rights is done.
Nine years and $24 billion dollars. That's how much ESPN and TNT will combine to pay the NBA for continued media rights. It's three times the value of the existing deal. That's a lot of money that's going to go to a lot of places to grow the league, and in 2017, perhaps player's wallets will lap up the excess. The new deal will kick in after the 2015-2016 season, and according to ESPN NBA editor Adam Reisinger, the salary cap could rise to $88 million that year, allowing players to potentially sign max contracts that are worth up to $40 million for one year of play. There's more within the deal that we'll get to later, but in summary:
There's a clear moral code in today's NBA.
The Monday morning after an ESPN investigation revealed just how badly the Ravens and the NFL fucked up Ray Rice's domestic abuse case, Adam Silver called a press conference. It had been just over seven weeks since the NFL first announced a two-game suspension as punishment for Rice KO'ing and dragging his fiance's body through a now defunct casino elevator. Video of Rice carrying out the deed surfaced, and the NFL promptly did everything it could to cover its own ass by digging deeper holes. The public's trust in the most powerful sports league in the world had evaporated over a news cycle, and Silver, along with the rest of us, watched in horror and disappointment.
His words in that Monday morning press conference just seven weeks after a two-game suspension to punish one player’s caveman-like regard for a woman were direct:
“We learn from other league's experiences. We're studying everything that's been happening in the NFL. We're going to take a fresh look at everything we do,” said Silver.
Basically: We promise we won’t ever fuck up like Roger and the gang did.
Silver is intent on making good on his implicit promise too. A month after that press conference, Silver stated that the owners were making progress on examining new domestic violence policies for the league.
Although the NBA’s current policy allows for a punishment upon conviction by the legal system, Charlotte Hornets forward Jeff Taylor is on a paid leave of absence after his own domestic abuse charges surfaced last month. No further action will be taken against Taylor by the league until the NBA and the police finish their investigations into the allegations. It’s an encouraging step to see Taylor taken off the court and swept into the Hornets’ periphery while more info is gathered. No slap on the wrist suspensions or ultimate judgment calls. Taylor's status was a sensible and respectful retraction—a holding pattern for NBA knobheads, if you will.
With Silver’s We Won’t Fuck Up press conference, he’s established that in his NBA, there’s a certain moral code to uphold that goes beyond our steadfast over-reliance on the justice system. As seen in Ray Rice's own case, it's a system that can be manipulated if you’ve got money and power. “Innocent until proven guilty” isn’t good enough for a distrustful and admittedly bloodthirsty mob of media and folk. If the evidence is as clear as day, then swifter action is demanded to authority figures to calm our calls for punishment.
In the case of a professional athlete, those phone calls, tweets, messages, and emails will go right to the commissioner’s office. Where does the duty lay then? The loud judgments in the court of public opinion are essentially forcing business entities to make punishments based on their own morality and application of justice. Is that healthy for anyone? It's time to re-assign the blame game here. Adam Silver should consider lobbying Congress to create a "Ministry of Sport" (ok you come up with a cooler name) whose sole responsibility would be to hand down punishments as they see appropriate. Let's give the government something else for us to blame them over, and relieve the sports commissioner of these unnatural considerations of being an actual human for once.
Silver's a bit different though. He isn’t afraid or unabashed by the recognition of a more liberal moral public consensus, and he’s proven to answer the call when it feels like hero is needed. He's human. The NBA is fortunate for that.
Draft lottery reform is finally on the table.
Although the latest draft lottery reform bill didn't pass with the NBA Board of Governors this week, draft reform advocates shouldn't be too disappointed. The changes, submitted four months ago, would see the teams with the worst four records have an equal 12 percent chance of receiving the top pick (slicing the worst team’s odds in half compared to the current system), with the remaining 52 doled out in a manner to give the best lottery teams a higher chance of advancing into the top 6. Hee-Haw.
While it would discourage tanking from a calculator's perspective, and the NBA could be like, “Look, at least we changed the thing for the first time since 1993,” it's doubtful that any teams planning to tank in the future would somehow be THAT dissuaded by the changes. Under the current structure—odds be damned—bad teams will still want to be bad to draft the best players possible.
But as Zach Lowe warned us earlier this summer: NBA Lottery Reform Is Coming. Bring it to us, Mr. Silver. You’re getting somewhere.
Experimentation with shorter games.
Proof of Silver’s bureaucracy in action: After the league held a coaches meeting, it was suggested that the games we shorter. NBA’s Basketball Operations brought the idea to the Competition Committee, and the 44-minute game was birthed.
Atlanta Hawks coach Mike Budenholzer was quick to hail Silver for the NBA’s simple experimentation of a 44-minute game:
“I think it's a real testament to Adam Silver and the league that they're open [to change]. I think the positives could be substantial.”
There's been less enthusiasm for the idea elsewhere around the league. In particular, Miami Heat coach Erik Spoelstra and Mark Cuban weren’t too gassed about it. Spoelstra didn’t care about the length of games, but was troubled by the amount of games players have scheduled, especially the number of back-to-backs. Cuban, wearing the fan-owner hat like only he could, didn’t want to see less NBA, period.
Budenholzer sounds like a Silver Stan compared to the tempered and nearly dismissive reactions of Spoelstra and Cuban, but if anything, the 44-minute Nets-Mavericks preseason game can serve as a marker to hopefully propel more progressive ideas.
He drafted Isaiah Austin.
Silvers not only honored Austin on draft night, but offered him a part-time job with NBA Cares immediately and a full-time job there once he finishes school. For the NBA to still give Austin—who was a projected 2014 second round pick out of Baylor until a career-ending genetic heart condition was discovered—his NBA dream is a testament to Silver's kindness and morality. He felt a responsiblity to give Austin a chance as a member of the NBA after his body stole that chance away just days before the 2014 draft. That's an incredible leadership moment for Silver.
We're getting closer to being able to watch NBA games without needing cable.
RIP to FirstRowSports, VIPBox, and NBA League Pass. There's now an “established framework” with ESPN to deliver NBA broadcasts “over the top,” meaning you'll be able to stream games without needing a cable subscription. You'll still have to pay SOMETHING to subscribe to the service–which will be outside of the Watch ESPN app—but whatever: *cuts cord*
He's expressed a preference for a hard cap.
Right from the gift horse's mouth: “My preference would be to have a harder cap, where teams couldn't elect to spend so much more than other teams.” Silver said that while talking about the Brooklyn Nets and their $144 million in losses. Would a hard cap be good for the league though? A hard cap would likely mean a higher salary cap (and we know it's likely to get as high as $88 million in two years), so teams wouldn't be able to grossly outspend each other. That's good, right? Competitive balance and whatever.
But a hard cap also means that there's now a potential limit to how many big contracts teams would be willing to shell out. Does that mean less max contracts? Or would it mean that the Nets would theoretically not be able to make guys like Gerald Wallace as wealthy as he is today? There’s no way to know with certainty how a hard cap would affect roster and salary management without really seeing it in action.
Silver’s public openness to changing salary structures and the cap is positive though. With the NBA lapping up over $24 billion from media rights over the next decade, a there’s surely going to be massive changes to how much NBA players will be paid. Silver’s prepping for battle now.
He's already thinking about “Champions League Basketball.”
For Adam Silver, “going global” doesn't just mean sticking a billion-dollar outpost in China. It means bringing NBA basketball together with other international leagues. While at the Las Vegas summer league in July, he told reporters that the league was considering a mid-season, Champions League-style tournament. He didn't give any further details, but the idea of NBA teams competiting with other international teams for a trophy outside of the NBA is interesting. There aren't any current challengers to American basketball throne—would an NBA audience even care, knowing how dominant its players are? It's also been speculated that the tournament could pit NBA teams against each other in a regional competition. Whatever may be the case, Silver wants to see more NBA basketball reach more eyes.
He's made Mark Cuban (and any other NBA officials who get pissed at refs a lot) happier.
Just two weeks into the job, Adam Silver received high praise from Mark Cuban, who's been known for hating on David Stern and NBA referees since the beginning of time. Said Cuban: “There’s been more changes in 15 days, or whatever it is, than I saw in 14 years.” That's quite a fucking statement! What exactly did Silver do to make Mark purr like that?
Transparency. That’s it. One of the first things Silver did upon taking office was to start sending teams regular reports on blown calls from refs. A league willingly owning up to its mistakes instead of ignoring them and covering them up? You don’t say! It’s a novel idea that’s clearly been appreciated by even the league’s most ardent critics.
Expansion in China has expanded.
In one of my courses as a Sports Management major, professor once told our class about David Stern’s first transcendent trip to China. (My Googling could find no article, interview, or additional anecdote on record to fully collaborate this story. The professor, however, is a former commissioner of a North American professional sports league. I doubt this is a myth.)
My professor claimed that David Stern went to the Great Wall in one of his first trips to China. Looking out on China, he noticed a young Chinese boy wearing a Chicago Bulls shirt. Through his interpreter, Stern asked the boy if he knew what the logo on the shirt meant. The boy responded, “Yes. We all follow the Red Ox.”
After that mind-blowing moment, Stern returned to the United States, and in 1994 hired Heidi Ueberroth, daughter of comer MLB commissioner Peter Ueberroth, to go conquer China. She had first visited Hong Kong as an 11-year-old—Peter made his fortune through First Travel Corporation (when he sold it in 1980 to go run the 1984 Olympics, it was the second largest travel business in North America).
Heidi went on to launch NBA China, a $2.5 billion company with 140 employees across the country.
1994 was a funny year for basketball in China. Just seven years after Stern visited China to provide CCTV with videotapes of NBA games, CCTV broadcast its first NBA Finals live and in Chinese, a Los Angeles radio station broadcast the first NBA game in Chinese in the United States, and the Chinese Basketball Association launched. Heidi was diving in to China at the perfect time. Not a coincidence on Stern's part.
She stepped down in 2013 knowing that there are more people playing basketball in China than there are people in the United States.
Adam Silver is charging full-steam ahead with what Stern and Heidi Ueberroth accomplished over these past two decades. (Which was a-fucking-lot.) Just this week, the league announced a partnership with the Chinese Ministry of Sport to provide fitness and basketball training to 3 million Chinese students by 2017.
Silver also personally announced that the league is considering playing East Coast matches in the morning in order to broadcast them live in Chinese primetime.
They didn’t stop there. Nah, this is Adam Silver's NBA. They get mad shit done. The NBA also announced a marketing and merchandising deal with Anta, one of China’s largest sneaker brands. It’s believed that they bypassed Nike and Adidas—the two powerhouses of basketball sneakers—in order to side with a company that’s actually Chinese rather than a foreign company that just happens to make and sell its products there.
Silver may just be staying the course and getting credit for basically not fucking up any deals that were already in the works, but those are the spoils of inheriting an already powerful entity. Enjoy them, Adam.
Advertisements on jerseys (like in soccer) are “inevitable.”
In fact, the new big-ass media rights deal guarantees them. Silver's called ads on jerseys “inevitable” in the past, but let it be known: There's a $24 billion contract calling for them. They're coming.
You're getting an NBA Awards show on TNT soon.
Also within the new ABSURD media rights deal (there were so many little gifts in there) are plans for an end-of-season awards show on TNT. It that means 2-3 hours of the Inside the NBA crew fucking around with LeBron and all the other dope ass stars the NBA has collected, then THAT'S FINE BY ME.
The players believe in him.
Right now, Adam Silver has an extended Honeymoon period with the players. He's earned it too. Banning Sterling and then doing everything else on this list has gotten him noticed around the locker rooms. Silver's even stated that he'll ban the dreaded sleeved NBA jersey if LeBron keeps hitting him up about it. There's confidence in competence within the commissoner's office. The NBA universe is already staring down a lockout in 2017. Silver may have have the players on his side now, but come lockout time, he'll be working across the table. LeBron is his buddy now, but know that LeBron's making sure that all NBA players know about how that GARGANTUAN media rights deal can help their pockets too. Silver's proven that even attempting to make small, potentially pragmatic changes is truly appreciated in a league where the commissioner's office has long been booed and considered stale. His biggest tests and problems are coming, but given his all-action style these past eight months, Silver will be up for the fight.