OAKLAND, Calif. -- In question after question at the NBA commissioner's annual Game 1 NBA Finals news conference on Thursday, Adam Silver conveyed two messages. The first, rather on the nose, was about the global exuberance for his league. Australia is giddy for the NBA once again! Golden State and Cleveland feature two rabid local fan bases, but fandom knows no borders anymore. National ratings in this country might be trending downward, but don’t worry because legions of youth across the world are streaming League Pass Broadband to watch Steph and LeBron!
Silver’s second message was more implicit, but more profound:
There’s a disparity in talent among NBA owners.
Whether he was declaring in his intro that “it truly takes a full organizational effort” to get to the Finals, or that “it all begins at the top in these organizations,” the most persistent theme running through Silver’s remarks was the notion that there is a broad talent spectrum among the 30 ownership groups.
How should we measure that talent? Silver said there were a number of metrics: wins and losses, attendance, season ticket base, ratings, corporate sponsors. More interesting, though, was Silver’s admission that “there is a more subjective side” to appraising the competence of ownership.
“We spend a lot of time in the league office talking to owners and talking to management and teams throughout the league to help them improve,” Silver said.
Clearly some phones around the league are ringing louder than others.
Even in response to questions that didn’t explicitly address ownership talent, there was plenty of innuendo. Wes Edens and Marc Lasry are doing a “tremendous job” in Milwaukee. Can we construe, then, that apart from his $100 million pledge to a new arena on his way out the door, Herb Kohl was an owner time passed by?
Silver praised the influence of analytics on the operations of successful teams. Information infrastructure costs a ton of dough, and some owners invest a lot more than others.
We probably won’t see lottery reform in the near future because Silver is anticipating that the explosion of the salary cap number in 2016-17 will compel teams to develop new ways to manipulate the financial calculus of team building. “What I've learned from this league, having been around a long time, is that our smart teams figure out angles, approaches, that we just can't possibly model,” Silver said.
Finally, Silver emphasized his belief that the league is experiencing a golden age: “My feeling is the league is doing incredibly well. The players are doing really well. Popularity is at an all-time high.” Yet there are franchises that are chronic failures by the very metrics Silver outlined as benchmarks for success.
So if the greatest success stories in the league are driven by organizational talent that starts at the top, as Silver maintains, the question for the next CBA negotiations is this:
To the extent the league has problems, issues that prevent owners from paying NBA players what they’re worth on the open market -- and we’ll hear plenty about them in due time -- why is it up to NBA players to solve those problems? If we all know some teams aren't well run, why does it fall to players, for instance in the last lockout, to give up salary to give all teams a chance at turning a profit? When is it the owners' duty to figure out a way to make it work?
Silver’s constant allusions to ownership quality as a measuring stick suggest he understands this, just as he understands that innovation is essential for the league to improve. He came to office last year as an agent of change, but so far he’s had only modest success at pushing through reform. There will be no lottery or reform or efforts to address conference imbalance. Hack-a-Shaq will remain. “Ultimately rule changes come from ownership,” he stipulated. See?
Rest, recovery and health science remains the most vital issue for modernizing the game, and Silver reiterated the league’s intention to cut down on back-to-backs. He reminded the media that the last CBA added a 13th roster spot, which gives the best talent in the league more opportunities to yield court time to players spectators aren’t that interested in watching. “I think what you're seeing with teams is they're going deeper into the benches than they did historically to give star players more rest.”
This line of thinking is always a bit amusing and each time the powers that be applaud the “sophisticated way” some teams are managing the minutes of the league’s players, it’s a tacit admission that the 82-game schedule is entirely unreasonable. The commissioner of the NBA essentially praised NBA teams for keeping the best talent off the floor more often!
If you want key players to log closer to 2,000 minutes than 3,000, reducing the number of games is the logical antidote, but the conversation is a non-starter.
Silver will continue to push innovation, but like most change agents who assume the role of executive, he’s learning that proposing change and activating change are entirely different projects.
In the meantime, he’ll continue to place those outgoing calls in an effort to encourage improvement among the league’s lemons. If and when those efforts fail, the players can always pick up the tab.