Interesting article on the NBA, Adam Silver personality, and challenges the game faces. The Pistons with significant impact on the changes from defense to offense the league embraced.
Big discussion on gambling and impact on the league and how Silver does or doesn’t view it.
Now, however, with the 2026 playoffs under way—the capstone of the most turbulent regular season in modern NBA history—Silver for the first time faces real trouble. The quality of the product has diminished. Narratives surrounding the league are prevailingly negative. Things once taken for granted—commercial satisfaction, cultural prestige, national relevance—no longer seem guaranteed. Peacetime is a thing of the past; for the foreseeable future, the commissioner will be at war—with fans, with media critics, with players and coaches, with the game itself. I came to Nashville wanting to know: Does Adam Silver have the stomach for this fight?
…This was a troubling trend for the league. Teams such as Detroit and the workmanlike San Antonio Spurs, which won the 2003 Finals, had built a championship formula around slowing the pace and squeezing offenses. But nobody wanted to watch: The league’s two best teams were drawing some of its lowest ratings.
With the Pistons and Spurs on a collision course—they would meet in the 2005 Finals—the league was desperate for a remedy. Help arrived in serendipitous fashion. In November 2004, as Detroit began its title defense, an on-court altercation spilled over into the stands of our home arena. Scenes from the “Malice at the Palace” captured international attention: players decking fans, fans ganging up on players, coaches and referees and announcers frantically trying to end the melee. It was the ugliest episode in the history of modern professional basketball.
Embedded in this crisis was opportunity. Although the league had recently adopted new rules aimed at reducing physicality, officials were phasing them in gradually. But now the NBA had justification to crack down—and it did. No hands on a dribbler. No dislodging a player beneath the basket. No tugging on jerseys. Meanwhile, a sudden leniency was granted to ball handlers. Whistles for carrying, traveling, and double dribbling vanished as the league pushed for a faster, more exciting brand of hoops.
Scoreboards could barely keep up. Defense was out. Offense was in—and it was advancing. Teams began to fire three-point shots at a historic clip, season over season. There was a theory at work—namely, that an open three-point miss is often a better shot, analytically speaking, than a contested two-point make—but it struck many fans as a fad. And then along came Stephen Curry.
……In some sense, this was long overdue. “There was a crisis with scoring and spacing in the ’90s and early 2000s,” Rick Carlisle, the head coach of the Indiana Pacers, told me. “The game had to evolve.” It happened faster than anyone could have predicted: Practically overnight, traditional assessments of a player—athleticism, toughness, finishing ability—took a back seat to the question of whether he could make threes.
…He said that he stands by his push to make sports gambling universal but that he is sensitive to the societal scourge of “problematic” gambling. By way of answering the initial question, Silver finally told me: “I’m not at the point where I’m saying I regret being in favor of this, but I think we should be learning every day from the behavior we’re seeing.”
Perhaps sensing my skepticism, the commissioner added, “I don’t want to be Pollyannish. I don’t want to say, like, ‘Isn’t this wonderful that everybody’s betting on our games?’”
I found myself wishing that Silver would spare us the anguished ambivalence and speak candidly: Yes, gambling can ruin lives, and yes, it jeopardizes the legitimacy of our game, but it’s making our league and its stakeholders rich. Reports suggest that the NBA collects some $170 million annually from sportsbook partnerships. When I asked him about all of the money being made, Silver downplayed the revenue as relatively insignificant. “The greater value to us is the engagement,” he said. “If you’re able to bet on a game or some aspect of a game, you’re much more likely to watch it.”
For a man so preoccupied with how his league is perceived, Silver seemed oddly lacking in self-awareness about the threats that gambling poses to the league’s legitimacy. (The commissioner has shrugged off concerns that Giannis Antetokounmpo, one of his biggest stars, owns a small minority share in the prediction market Kalshi, currently valued at $22 billion.) From the outside, cause for suspicion is self-evident. No major sport has as many late-game outcomes shaped by officiating. And no American league, aside from the NBA, has in recent memory been tainted by a referee admitting to betting on the games he officiated.
==
Two seasons ago, members of the NBA competition committee—players, coaches, referees, team executives, governors—gathered for a meeting. The vibe was tense. Critics of the league’s offensive bonanza were emboldened; even Steve Kerr, the Warriors coach, had voiced exasperation with the “disgusting” trend of ball handlers crashing deliberately into defensive players with the guarantee of a whistle and foul shots. After league officials gave a presentation, sharing metrics to demonstrate the scoring binge and the dissatisfaction of NBA viewers, Mike Krzyzewski spoke up.
“You know,” said the legendary Duke coach, who’d recently joined the league as an adviser, “fans like defense too.”
Silver described this comment—and the meeting itself—as a sort of road-to-Damascus revelation.
“We weren’t, I think, appropriately responding to the perception that we had let it go too far,” Silver told me. He later added, “To the extent that we were overly limiting on players’ ability to be physical on defense, I think that led to the perception in many cases that they were not as passionate about winning as they were in the old days.”
