The NBA has an Adam Silver Problem

Let's talk about the Commissioner.

NBA Commissioner Adam Silver came into power in 2014, over a decade ago when LeBron and Steph were battling each other for a title nearly every year and Kobe Bryant was in the final years of his career. The league was thriving in viewership (Game 7 of the 2016 NBA Finals drew an average of 30 million viewers!)

Streaming has changed the game and the sport has become more three-pointer reliant. Continuing to market Steph Curry and LeBron has left less room to market younger stars such as Wemby and Anthony Edwards. Realistically, the league should have been pushing Jayson Tatum as their bigtime future star after he took the Boston Celtics to Game 7 of the Eastern Conference Finals in 2018. Instead, the league continued to market what was familiar.

Adam Silver doesn't believe in the 48 minutes.

It's true. Silver was asked about the various streaming services that someone now needs to watch NBA games. His response? “There’s a huge amount of our content that people essentially consume for free. This is very much a highlights-based sport, so Instagram, TikTok, Twitter [now X]... YouTube, another example that is advertising based that consumers can consume." (NBC Sports). This entirely misses the mark with fans. People want to be able to watch their teams and at one point it was extremely easy to do so. Flip on your local station (NBC Sports Boston for example), and there you go, full NBA game and analysis. Now? Is it on NBC tonight or Amazon? Do we have that streaming service to be able to even watch it? What are we doing, Adam Silver?

Reducing the sport down to just 'highlights' does a disservice to the players, the fans and the product you're supposed to be selling people on. So not only is it difficult to watch a game on TV but going in person is even worse. Now this isn't Silvers fault, it's the individual teams and owners that set ticket prices. However, it's an issue the league should be looking at. Plenty of hardcore fans have been priced out in favor of influencers and others who are just there for the vibes. Going to a game can cost a family if four $1,000 (seriously!)

The Foul Baiting has made things worse.

Rewarding the Harden, SGA and other types of players who embellish has made the sport impossible to watch. Why reward these people in the regular season and then call it differently in the postseason? It's hard to get excited when you're watching free throws 75% of a game.

The small markets haven't been given enough love either and it makes the league as a whole suffer. LA, Boston, Chicago and NY. We get it, these are the places with the most eyes on them and the biggest media markets. If you can't figure out how to market your smaller teams in a productive way that is a huge failure. Make the call to the sports networks (ESPN, FOX Sports). Talk to them about the points you want them to push. Have them push the starts in smaller markets (and no, not just to talk about how the small market star will end up a Laker one day, it's a tired and awful talking point).

The NFL pushes teams and the NBA pushes stars, which is why you'll see people be excited about two small market NFL teams playing even if there aren't many stars on either side. It's about team identity. In the NBA, if you don't have a superstar people don't care to watch it as much because it's been marketed as such an individual star driven sport.

The league has lost it's luster, it's not as exciting as much as the offensive numbers might say otherwise. You still need stellar defensive play to combat the offense, make it challenging. People like challenges and seeing how one side will overcome it, not a heavily favored offense that you know will score just by faking that they got hit in the head.

Colin Cowherd said something very interesting on his show The Herd about the NBA vs. the NFL. He essentially stated that the NBA used to be viewed as the creative league and the NFL was viewed as very corporate because everyone played similarly and the game was the game. Colin then went on to state that he believes things have flipped, where the NBA is now corporate and the NFL is now creative. It definitely feels like that, especially when you watch the NBA Finals and just see 'YoutubeTV' slapped everywhere and a Finals logo that was only put there because fans complained enough.

Silver has stripped the NBA of what makes it special.

It feels very cold now. Corporate sponsors everywhere, lack of Finals marketing (including moving the 'Finals' patch from the front to the back), foul baiting, broadcasters and analysts who continually bash the product instead of lifting it up. What's fun about this?

Hopefully, things turn around. Basketball is a form of art and it deserves to keep shining as such.