← Plain English with Derek Thompson
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- [00:01]
A
This message is brought to you by Apple Card. Hey, you could be earning 2% daily cash back on that purchase. And that one and even that one. That's because Apple card users earn 2% daily cash back on every purchase, including everyday items they buy online or in store when using their Apple Card. With Apple Pay, not an Apple Card customer, you can apply in the Wallet app on iPhone subject to credit approval. Apple Card issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA Salt Lake City Branch Terms and more at Apple Co Benefits. Today. What's the Matter with the NBA? Let's start here. The NBA is incredibly blessed. In the last 12 years, the average value of an NBA team has not doubled. It has not tripled. It's grown by a factor of about seven. In an age when entertainment analysts predicted the death of cable, the league still signed a TV deal worth nearly $80 billion. The NBA's talent pool is more international in football, its most popular players, including LeBron James and Steph Curry, are more famous than anybody in hockey or baseball. The NBA is richer and more talented than ever. So why are NBA fans so mad about the sport? The vibes around basketball in the last few years, the last few months in particular, have been unusually awful, even for a sport whose fans have always loved to complain. This year kicked off with Pablo Torre's Pulitzer Prize winning investigation into the Los Angeles Clippers alleged scheme to pay their best player, Kawhi Leonard, off the books. It continued with hand wringing about out of control, three point shooting, the homogenization of offenses and the league's notoriously weak regular season ratings. A so called tanking crisis saw about a third of the league purposely try to lose games in a race to secure the top draft pick in next year's draft. And a slew of gambling scandals took out a head coach and several players. Finally, in the playoffs, which are happening as I speak, we've seen relentless complaining from fans about foul baiting, flopping and other performative nonsense that's often rewarded by the referees. At the center of this vibes crisis, there is Commissioner Adam Silver. Ten years ago, Silver was arguably the most popular and celebrated commissioner in all of sports. Two months into his tenure, TMZ published an audio recording of Donald Sterling, the LA Clippers owner, unleashing a racist rant. Silver kicked Sterling out of the league and a nation cheered. For years he kept a low profile while business bloomed, but in the last few years, his reputation has soured. My ringer boss Bill Simmons said this on his podcast in it's the first time I've really wondered, like, do we have the right guy running the league? Because he doesn't seem interested in actually fixing real problems that everybody can see. End quote. Companies tend to take on the personality of their leader. The Atlantic's Tim Alberta wrote in a profile of Silver. For 30 years, the NBA was a reflection of David Stern. Feisty, colorful, unpredictable, entertaining. Silver's NBA has embodied his own best qualities. Competent, commercially successful, while also suffering from a certain dispassion. The type that suggests someone who has never fought to survive, only to maintain end quote. Today's guest is Tim Alberta. We talk about what's the matter with the NBA and whether Adam Silver is the man to fix them. Based on Tim's long conversations with Silver and his extensive reporting on a league that seems to have optimized the fun out of basketball and treated the NBA like a publicly traded corporation looking to raise earnings per share, rather than like a game that exists to remind people that there is more to life than work and money. I'm Derek Thompson. This is plain English. Tim Alberta. Welcome to the show.
- [04:31]
B
Derek. It's great to be with you.
- [04:32]
A
So before we talk about your mammoth profile of Adam Silver, I want to talk about the state of the NBA. You write this in your piece. Quote, there is ample reason to distrust, and it pains me to say, even dislike today's NBA. What are those ample reasons?
- [04:48]
B
So, Derek, I think you start with the fact that the season, the regular season of the NBA is essentially meaningless. It's way too long. And I think that's essentially a point of consensus now among fans and even more privately among players and league officials. But you don't have any single point in the regular season that is determinative in any way towards crowning a champion, towards seeding the playoffs. I think, you know, you might have on a random Wednesday night in February, on paper, a collision between two elite teams. But when you tune in to watch that game, a couple of the best players might not even be playing. The regular season in the NBA is, I think, sort of an empty husk. And then you get to the post season and it's a completely different game governed by, it would seem, a completely different set of rules and players who play with an. With a completely different level of intensity. There's no other sport in which the regular season and the post season bear zero resemblance to one another. And yet in the NBA, that is very much the case. It's almost as though the 82 game regular season is sort of an elaborate preseason and exhibition season, for lack of a better way of putting it. And so I think many of the league's kind of foundational issues that it's dealing with right now do stem from the fact that for many casual viewers, never mind the devoted fans, but even the casual viewers who might want to find their way into becoming a more devoted fan, it's really hard for them because the regular season product is just watered down and it's really not terribly compelling. It's good for social media clips, it's good for sort of being optimized to hit your algorithms with dunks and buzzer beaters and the like. But when it comes down to the day by day grind of a season and the standings and the MVP race, it's just not a terribly compelling.
- [06:56]
A
It's funny because a couple years ago I told Bill Simmons that my relationship with basketball was a very, very strange thing, where throughout the regular season I basically watched zero minutes of zero games, but listened to hundreds of hours of podcast commentary about these games that I wasn't watching. And my relationship to basketball was essentially that of gossip. I wasn't treating it as a sport. I was listening to people gossip about a sport that I wasn't watching. But then in April and May, it transformed into a sport that I did watch and had a very, very intimate relationship with. I mean, playoff basketball, I think we can both agree, as fans, can be completely extraordinary, but it is, to your point, something that follows a regular season that acts essentially as an exhibition period. I was not prepared for you to start off with this point, but I was just writing down my own notes for the many cases for shortening the season. I mean, injuries determine the course of almost every playoffs these days. That's a piece of evidence that the regular season is too long. Ratings worries about the regular season, another indication that people aren't tuning in in February because they know they're going to tune in in April and May, no matter what. Tanking is a phenomenon whereby teams are literally telling you, their fans, the entire league themselves, that the upcoming draft is worth more to them than any particular win. That's another announcement at the regular season doesn't matter. And then finally, I think this is an underrated but important point. Home court advantage in the playoffs has declined significantly in the last few years. The road team has won many more game sevens than is historically normal. That means that seeding does not matter nearly as much as it used to. That means the outcome of the regular season, one outcome of which is that you get the seeding of the teams. That doesn't matter as Much as it used to, which is yet another piece of weight on the side of the regular season not mattering. And so I do think that basketball, for all of its advantages, many of which I enumerated in my open, does have this really interesting particular phenomenon whereby the actual regular season of the sport is broadly seen by the fans as not being particularly significant. But I want to put this in the context of other sports. You're a sports fan. You know that part of being a fan is complaining, like bitching and moaning about your team, your rival, your league. You know, you have that in baseball, you've got it in football and soccer. To what extent do you think basketball is relatively unique in terms of the negative vibes that prevail in terms of the narratives about the sport among fans?
- [09:33]
B
It's a really interesting question, and it's a good question. Derek, I would say this. The thing that feels somewhat unique about the wailing and gnashing of teeth surrounding the NBA in this moment is that I think it's accompanied by, and to some degree even informed by almost this feeling of, like, existential angst around the identity of the game and the identity of the league. And I think it's both that go hand in hand. In other words, you know, at a given moment with Major League Baseball, you might have these really profound questions around, you know, how analytics are reshaping the game, how shifts, how different teams have been sort of optimized to only hit for power or walk, but nothing between. You might. You might have some of those debates. And of course, we've had those debates in baseball, the NFL, you know, do we go to 13 personnel league wide? And does that sort of phase out some of the spread offense that had taken football by storm? And over the past decade, you might have those sort of particular questions or even concerns, certainly debates around kind of X's and O's in the game. But then I think there's a separate question with the NBA business model. And the NBA's business model has been historically really, really reliant, heavily reliant on superstars, on homegrown domestic products. You know, some of the biggest superstars on the planet, some of the most recognizable people on the planet, have been NBA players over the last 50 years. And I think we are now approaching the end of the, potentially the end of that era. And it is a source of real anxiety for basketball fans. I think that, like, that was something really surprising to me as I was beginning to research and do a lot of reading and talking to people for this Pie. Over a year ago, one of the things that would just come up time and time again was this idea of, you know, the international takeover of the NBA. Now it's about one third to two thirds, one third international players to about 2/3American players. Like there are so many positives that have come out of that and we can all, we can enumerate, you know, those positives. But I do think that there's a question of does it come at a certain cost? And one of the costs, it would seem, is the sort of the confidence that, that NBA fans here in the US have in a league carried by international superstars. What happens when Steph and LeBron and KD exit stage left and if, and if there's not someone, whether it's, you know, Anthony Edwards, Cade Cunningham, Jason Tatum, if there's not one of these guys who's truly prepared to step forward and shoulder the load and not just on the court, right. It's not just a question of can you win a champions, it's being the face of the league. It's being this ultra marketable asset for this huge international conglomerate. And it's weird that that would seep into sort of the conscious or maybe the subconscious of fans, Derek, but it has. I think I really do sense that there are questions about whether or not the NBA as a brand will be strong enough to sustain the exit of this past generation of superstars who have really sort of carried the torch for the last 15 years.
- [13:00]
A
The money statistic that I think you're referencing is that I believe the last eight seasons have had a foreign born mvp. We're talking about Giannis Anantokounmpo, Nikola Jokic, Shay Gilders, Alexander, Victor Wembanyama is probably going to win the next nine to 13 MVPs consecutively. So that's even more decades of foreign born domination of mvp. And I do think you're right that there's a shift away from LeBron James and Michael Jordan and Steph Curry and Magic Johnson and Larry Bird being the faces of the league, American born faces. And I think this sets up a theme that I want to return to at the end of the conversation, which is the NBA being a victim of its own success. The globalization of the league is a success. The fact that there's more scoring than there was in the early 2000s is its own success. But this theme I think we're going to return to is the idea that the NBA solution to the problems of 20 years ago have created their own diseases, created their own problems. And so the best way, I think, into this story is to tell the history of the commissioner of the NBA, Adam Silver, who's the subject of your profile. Let's start here. In his 20s, Adam Silver was the son of a prominent New York lawyer. He graduated law school from the University of Chicago, federal clerkship, white shoe law firm. I mean, this is your typical career path to becoming a partner at Cravath. Twenty years later, he's leading the NBA. How did he get a toehold in the NBA? How did he suddenly become the face of this league?
- [14:31]
B
Yeah, Derek, the short answer to this is that he was, despite all of these successes he'd had in his JD path, he was miserable. And he was a guy who just wasn't having fun at work. And it's interesting because you listen to Adam Silver, you observe him a bit, and you don't come away thinking, wow, this is a guy who really prioritizes fun in his personal or professional life, right? He's, he's like a pretty serious, sober guy. And yet that was the thing he was watching. He was watching the NBA specifically because he was a sport. He grew up a sports fan, he grew up a Knicks fan. And he, he, during this period in the early 90s, is watching the NBA taking off and thinking, gosh, those guys look like they're having fun. And it just so happens that his father had once been a colleague of David Stern's. So he had this sort of family in, he reached out, wound up coming out to meet with David Stern. And initially he thought he was just getting some career advice when they had first made contact. But Stern needed an assistant. And this, I think is title was special assistant to the commissioner or something like that. But as Silver joked with me, you know, it really wasn't even that glamorous. Like basically, he became Stern's shadow. He did everything and anything that the commissioner needed him to do and basically sat in his office all day doing, you know, receptionist work, clerical work, paperwork, faxing, running to the library for him, running errands for him, like whatever the commissioner needed done. Silver was his basically right hand man. And, you know, it was a very odd pairing between these two because again, as Silver joked with me, like, you know, David Stern is this very flamboyant, boisterous, colorful, profane, short guy who had this larger than life personality and would dominate the room. And Silver, it just looks like he'd be knocked over by a light breeze. He's just, he's a very delicate person when you spend time around him. Despite being 6 foot 3, he's not a small guy, but he has a very slight presence about him. And he's very mannered, he's very gentle, the way he speaks. And so the two of them just could not have been more different. And yet I think in some way, maybe that's why it worked so well.
- [17:04]
A
You have this lovely observation in the article that companies, organizations can sometimes be a reflection of their leaders. David Stern, you describe him, and I remember him as this WWE style impresario, someone who was seducing audiences with gripping storylines and larger than life characters, who was pitching his product to casual viewers, as I think you call it, a soap opera on the hardwood. Someone who understood the value of narrative and was an actor, a character in the narratives that he was trying to bring to life with the NBA. And then here, by contrast, you have Adam Silver, who has the, to me, I haven't met him like you have, has the vibe of a McKinsey partner, a Cravath partner. He has the presentation of precisely the person he seemed like he was going to be when he was in his twenties. How would you say that the regimes of, of Adam Silver versus David Stern have been a reflection of their personalities?
- [18:04]
B
Yeah, Silver has not made any apology for the fact that he is a sort of a corporate manager type. He is someone who does view many of these big decisions through the prism of dollars and cents and profits and losses. And that's just who he is. And that's why the governors, AKA the team owners, love him. Right, because he has made them fabulously wealthy and the league is just printing money in ways that would have, would have been unbelievable to David Stern. I mean, thinking about when David Stern joined the NBA back in the 1970s, when the league was airing its games on a tape delay to come onto the air after local newscasts. I mean, the NBA was really in, in dire straits, financially and otherwise. And it was not clear that the product was even sustainable, that there was not even a real business model there. And then of course, with the assistance of these two budding young superstars, Larry Bird and Magic Johnson, and then of course, later, Michael Jordan and the Bad Boy Pistons, David Stern had this, this great raw material to work with. But, but we have to recognize his genius, his brilliant mind for marketing and the way in which he brought those superstars to the mass market, and he helped to craft some of this grand narrative around certainly in the case of Jordan versus the bad boys, almost good versus evil, and the way in which the Bird versus Magic rivalry had begun in college And Stern was able to sort of manipulate it and grow it and allow it to almost become a subculture of the NBA unto itself. And this is when the NBA really began to take off. But this was. I think it's easy, Derek. We might look back on it now and think that, well, anyone could have done this because, you know, Stern happened to be commissioner during this three decade run when you had all of these generational talents coming into the league. But it's hard to overstate just how effective he was as sort of, I mean, master choreographer in getting those stars to sort of play their role in this great drama of NBA basketball. And I certainly don't mean on the court with like fixing outcomes or manufacturing results. I just mean that like, so much of this is optics, so much of this is narrative. And Stern was brilliant at it. I think Silver never needed to be brilliant at it because he inherited a league that to your earlier point, had been so wildly successful. And also he inherited a league that in 2014, when Silver became commissioner, LeBron James and Steph Curry were sort of ascending to the height of their powers. And of course, they would then have their own showdown, most notably in the 2016 finals, which were so memorable and featured some of the most incredible high level basketball drama that we've seen in 50 years. So silver didn't necessarily need to tinker with the recipe or do much to build onto what Stern had done in that regard. I think the one thing Silver did feel he needed to do was to strengthen the business model. And he did that. He's done it in ways that are incredibly impressive. I mean, the NBA is now at least four times more profitable, probably five or maybe even six times more profitable. It's hard to really get your head around the numbers than it had been when he took over just 12 years ago. And so by any measure, that's really remarkable. At the same time, that emphasis on making money and that quote unquote, corporate NBA mentality, and that's a quote that I heard from quite a few people around the league as I was doing this reporting, this corporate NBA mentality that Silver has, it does come with some real negatives. And I think that we're beginning to see now with some of that angst among fans that we were discussing earlier, what those negatives are.
- [22:22]
A
Just to stress test this idea of the commissioners being as powerful as we're representing them, someone could say it would take a real idiot to mess up 1980s, 1990s basketball. When you have Magic Bird and Michael freaking Jordan. It would Take an incredibly incompetent commissioner to mess up that 15, 20 year period. And someone could similarly say, if you look at Roger Goodell and the NFL and you look at other leagues, sports rights have gone astronomical across the board outside of basketball because with the advent of cord cutting and the need for these cable networks to pay more and more for live programming, of which sports is clearly the most valuable thing out there, well, it would similarly take someone rather incompetent to not be able to increase the value of the NBA or individual NBA teams by whatever, 5, 6, 7x over the last 12 years. To what extent should we also think about the success of, and maybe even the controversies of Adam Silver in this broader sort of macroeconomic context that he comes into the league in this era of cord cutting when companies, channels, networks are so desperate for sports content they pay through the nose, no matter who was the head of the NBA.
- [23:51]
B
It's a fair counterpoint. I'll give a counterpoint to your counterpoint and I don't want to be dismissive of what you said there because it's a real thing. And there's no doubt that this era has offered opportunities to Silver that were not offered to Stern. That's true. What's also true is coming back to the point you raised a little while back about globalization. You know, every sports league has tried, certainly the NFL is trying so hard to the degree that it's almost absurd. I mean, I'm a season ticket holder to the Detroit Lions. Our premier game on the home schedule this year was going to be the New England Patriots. And instead it's being played in Munich, which is, I actually know some people who were going to. And it's like, you know, you pay many thousands of dollars for season tickets so that you can drive into Detroit one fall afternoon and watch your team play. And instead those same people who have already shelled out those thousands of dollars for those tickets, they're going to pay six or seven grand to go to Munich for a few days to watch the Lions play the Patriots there? Some people are just that into the product where they'll do it. I'm not personally one, I kind of draw a line there. But the NFL I think is demonstrating the degree of, to which it is really hard to internationalize your game. Right. We've seen this with baseball as well. Like the WBC is a smash hit, but then that, but, but it's very short lived. And really what we've seen over the past decade plus is that there's very little carryover from the international enthusiasm around the WBC into Major League Baseball, hockey, bit of a different story, but I think the NBA has become really the poster child for how to not only reach into the international market, but to have the international market reach back and to build these lasting, very lucrative partnerships. I'll give you an example. So I was at the NBA Finals last year, Game 6 in Indianapolis between the Thunder and the Pacers, and I was walking around the court the day before the game during the media sessions. So there are hundreds of reporters there that are just sort of turned loose. And you can go to different stations where players are giving little press conferences. You can try to talk to some staff members, assistants, league people, whatever. And one of the most striking things to me, and again, I'm not an NBA beat reporter, so I there's no reason I would have ever understood this otherwise. I would say roughly half of all the media on hand that day inside the Pacers arena and walking around that court were Chinese reporters. And it was really striking, not only the quantity but the quality of their access because there were all of these prearranged like pull asides where some of the star players from both teams and the head coaches of both teams would be kind of whisked away to one corner of the court and they would sit down for these lengthy one on ones with reporters. And most of those one on ones that I was watching over the course of this hour or so were with Chinese reporters. And in fact, Rick Carlisle, the coach of the Indiana Pacers, was charming a group of of these Chinese reporters by speaking to them in Mandarin. It was really, really striking and it was, I think, a vivid display for me of how a decade or so of this really concerted effort by the NBA and by Silver, I think to his credit, of not just making a sort of token attempt, oh, we're going to play a game overseas or we're going to hold a camp overseas. But no, like actually, actually immersing your league into the culture and into the social fabric and into the places of other countries has yielded results that continue to be the envy of these other leagues. And so I think to that extent, Silver has been really, really successful.
- [27:49]
A
That's really interesting. I didn't know that detail. Your piece is chockablock with all these details that are really, really cool of your time spent with Adam Silver, including some reporting that you did on his media habits. Here's a quote from the piece. Adam Silver begins and ends his day with media briefings, but he also spends plenty of the intervening Hours sc, NBA, Twitter, studying complaints and critiques, the way a stockbroker monitors movement in the S&P 500. It's an unhealthy habit. End quote. Two part question one, how did you get this detail? Did you just look over his shoulder while he got on his little burner account and scrolled on his iPhone through the Twitter app? Number one. And number two, you say it's an unhealthy habit. Why do you think it's unhealthy?
- [28:35]
B
Yeah. So Silver was really forthcoming with me about a few things, including his own neuroses. I, I remember saying to him at one point, I said, I forget exactly, verbatim. But I said something to the effect of, you know, like, so what is it about all this that makes you nervous? And he just sort of like, shrugged it at me and said, everything makes me nervous. And, and, and we talked a little bit. I said, well, where does that come from? And he said, well, I think it's mostly genetic. He talked a little bit about his family, but then didn't want to get too personal. But he made it clear to me as we were talking through of different interviews that he is, he's like, There are times where he's really hanging by a thread. Like you, you just get the sense when you spend time with this man that he is almost permanently unnerved and that, that he's like that, that he doesn't sleep well, that he doesn't, that he doesn't have necessarily a great ability to regulate his response to criticism. I, I think he, he's, he's high strung. And he is probably the best and most concise way I could put it. And that's not just from my reporting around the league and talking to people who know him well. That's from my own conversations with him where it just came through. And again, I would say to his credit, he sort of owned that. He didn't try to puff out his chest and sort of present himself as some swaggering, domineering titan of industry. I mean, he talked to me about some of his insecurities and about how he is sort of. I think his one quote to me was like, keeping a state of mind. Mild paranoia is necessary to do this job. And I think embedded in that remark from him is this sense that at times it's not mild paranoia, it's actual paranoia. And I could tell you all kinds of stories about even the process of getting him to the table to do this interview. This was one of the harder fish I have ever had. To reel in. In about 20 years of doing this, he and his team were incredibly squirrely and at times pretty difficult to deal with. And I think a lot of that comes from they weren't like just playing hardball for the sake of playing hardball. I think it's a reflection of him and his kind of neurotic management style. I had actually reported it at one point in the piece, talking to someone who knows Silver very well. They described to me how when Silver's daughters were born, which is relatively recent, he was married in his 50s, became a father pretty late, but then when his two daughters were born, that league employees breathed this like collective sigh of relief that their kind of very high strung, thin skinned, neurotic boss would be taking a bit of a step back, at least for some period of time. And I think that that was a really interesting window into sort of his management style and also his relationship and the perception of him.
- [31:43]
A
Just because I'm so interested in how leaders lead and the way that something as relatable as a media diet influences leadership styles. I wonder if you think Adam Silver's obsession with NBA Twitter isn't just unhealthy for him. It's also, do you think, unhealthy for the NBA to have a commissioner who's this paranoid or this desperate to change and optimize the sport around online sentiment metrics. Is there a way that we can connect his media diet, his paranoia, his thin skin ness to decisions that he's making? One just top of mind example might be I don't know how you feel, or I don't know the actual financial outcomes of the in season tournament, but maybe this is someone who likes, listens to the Bill Simmons show and reads the Bill Simmons subreddit and was like, oh man, people are desperate for an in season tournament, I gotta give it to them. And then just boom, there it is, an in season tournament. Just because this is someone who was so deep into Reddit and Twitter that he couldn't not give the loudest fans whatever their online sentiment metrics were suggesting.
- [33:01]
B
I could give you another example. When I was with him last summer during the NBA Finals, or I'm trying to remember if it was, I think it was right after the Finals. We were, we were talking about this and then I was talking about it with several other league sources and it was very apparent to me, it was made quite plain to me that Silver had seen all of the whining and complaining online about how plain the courts looked during the NBA Finals last year. If you recall, this was a big deal. A lot of people were mad that there was nothing, some imagery of the Larry o' Brien trophy embossed upon the courts in either Oklahoma City or Indiana, I think, for like the first three games or something of the series, if I'm remembering this right, and forgive me if I'm not. Cause it was last summer, but. And then suddenly it appeared. And people were wondering, like, wait a second, why did it suddenly appear? Did we actually do this? And the answer is, yes, you did. It was made very apparent to me that Adam Silver was watching NBA Twitter, saw that the discontent had reached a fever pitch over something that I think now, with the benefit of hindsight, we could agree is kind of relatively trivial. And yet he was very responsive to it. And so I would answer that question, I guess, by saying that I can understand what your posing there. And I agree that to a certain point it could become a little bit knee jerk and you could wind up with some bad outcomes here. If someone who is prone to sort of emotional decision making is seeing something that is attacking them or attacking their product and they decide right then and there that they want to try to do something about. On the other hand, one of my chief complaints about the modern NBA is that I think that there's a certain complacency and a certain arrogance with regard to the relationship to fans. I really do think that, and I picked this up time and again during my reporting that, you know, I don't want to just deal in caricatures here and say, oh, the NBA is just a bunch of soulless bean counters who don't care about the. Cultivating the passion of the next generation of fans. But I do think that there is a kernel of truth in those sentiments when you hear them. I do think that the corporate NBA mentality has, and the amount of money that they're making and the. And the. The degree to which they're achieving world domination with their international programming. I do think that it has left the league a little bit blind to some of the very valid criticisms from its domestic fan base. And so that being the case, I'm. I find myself kind of glad that the commissioner would be so attuned to the voices of the everyday fan as expressed on NBA Twitter, even if there is a potential real downside to it.
- [36:12]
A
This episode is brought to you by Uber. Did you know that Uber has a range of safety features, including in app audio recording, you can turn it on in your safety settings with the option to record all your rides or just some of them. But the safety doesn't stop there. Uber requires every driver to pass a thorough background check before they can start driving. This consists of a multi step screening process that checks for impaired driving or criminal offenses, followed by annual background checks each and every year. Moving forward in app audio recording and driver screenings are just a few of Uber's many safety features that put safety at every turn. Learn more@uber.com safety annual driving history reruns do not apply in New York City.
- [36:58]
C
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- [39:59]
A
the more interesting conversations that you had with Silver in the piece is about gambling. Adam Silver famously came out in 20142015 with an op ed the new York Times essentially welcoming legalized gambling for the NBA and other sports leagues. The NBA in this way, was a front runner for a trend that is now clearly taking over sports. You asked Adam Silver how he feels about the fact that you've had several scandals now, with players and coaches, including head coach of the Portland Trail Blazers, being caught up in gambling scandals. What was his reaction when you asked him about whether he had regrets about opening the door to gambling in the NBA?
- [40:43]
B
It was an incredibly awkward exchange, and I have to say there were a lot of awkward exchanges in my time with Silver over the course of two long on the record interviews. But this one really stood out because it almost sounded as though he were like negotiating the answers with himself. He seemed to be conflicted, almost tortured in the way that he was trying to stake out both sides of an answer to a specific question that I might ask him. And it was hard for me to discern whether or not that was performative or whether it was authentic in either event. It was not terribly satisfying because he was really the pioneer in terms of advocating for the mass legalization of gambling and bringing it into your living rooms and forging these partnerships between the NBA and the big gambling industry. And it was sort of odd then to hear him say, well, we know that there's problematic gambling, and we know that it can essentially, you know, we've seen how it can be kind of a scourge on society, but at the same time, you know, we see greater regulation of it. We believe that, you know, bringing it above ground and having some transparency and having watchdogs involved are actually going to result in fewer of these scandals. But I think at the core of it, when I was pressing him, saying, like, are you sure we're not gonna regret this? Like, right. Do we already regret this, knowing what we know now? And he ultimately said, you know, I'm not at a point of saying that I regret this, but we're gonna keep on monitoring it. And then he sort of paused and he says, but I'm also not gonna say, like, wow, isn't it so great that everybody's gambling on our games? And you, you. And you're like, well, which is it, man? Like, what? Like, how do you. And you've. You felt as though listening to him, that actually, this is someone who. I think Silver is, to his core, like, a good and decent person. I mean, I did not have a single conversation with anyone in all of my reporting that would suggest otherwise. Like, you can scrutinize decision making or management style or whatever, but he does seem like he is a good human being. And I think most good human beings can objectively survey the landscape of this gambling situation in America today and conclude that it is a disaster and that it's going to be very, very bad for us as a society, that it's going to be bad for families, it's going to be bad for communities, it's going to be particularly bad for young men of a certain demographic and socioeconomic track. It's just not great. And. And it almost seemed as though he were trying to wink and nod at me a little bit to get me to understand that in his heart of hearts, as Adam Silver, the family man, the citizen, that he recognizes the hazards here, financial and moral and otherwise, but that as commissioner of the NBA, this is making them billions and billions of dollars, and that his job is to make the governors of the NBA rich. And he's doing that. So how could he possibly climb down from it and apply it?
- [44:19]
A
Sounds to me like he doesn't regret the decision on behalf of the NBA and its finances. But he did know that he was talking to a reporter of the Atlantic magazine, the same Atlantic magazine that had very recently or was about to run a cover story about the dangers of nationalized gambling. I suppose that cover story hadn't run when you had had that conversation, but maybe he could make some educated guess as to the gambling politics of the Atlantic that might have turned out to be Prussian. And it's interesting because this actually brings to mind another quote that I believe Stern gave not to you because he was passed, but to someone else he reported, which was that one of Adam Silver's greatest weaknesses was his need to make everybody like him. Isn't that quote from your piece that Stern said warns Adam Silver before he gives him the job? I'm worried about your ability to do this job because I think that fundamentally you want everybody to like you in a way. Not to psychoanalyze someone who I've never met. Adam Silver, it sounds like that's what he was doing. On the one hand, he wanted to protect the NBA's position on this business that was making the money directly and also theoretically increasing ratings because people who gamble on games are more likely to watch through the fourth quarter, but also give a quote to the Atlantic that wouldn't get him blown up on the same Twitter that he seems to check every afternoon. So maybe that is the negotiation that was going on in his head.
- [45:36]
B
Well, look, if you don't want to psychoanalyze him, I will. Although I think your analysis is pretty darn close. Like, look, you know, I ended the piece by saying this. Ultimately, I found myself during the fleeting moments in which Silver really asserted himself unapologetically. I found myself respecting him because, agree or disagree, you do want some of that David Stern in Adam Silver. You do want a commissioner who's willing to sort of go double birds to the world and say, look, look, I'm in charge. You're not. I know what's best for this league. Shut up, buy your ticket, and enjoy the show. Right?
- [46:17]
A
And just there, this is exactly where I was going. Tell me the context in which the Stern within Adam Silver sort of came out. You guys were talking about, was it Shea Gildas Alexander and fans screaming at flopping Jalen Brunson, Shay Gildas Alexander? Just give me the context of that, because this is a really, really interesting moment in your piece.
- [46:37]
B
Yeah, so this is during the playoffs last year when both SGA and Jalen Brunson were driving NBA Twitter Crazy, because they were spending half the game on the floor, right? And now, of course, we're on a collision course between those two in the NBA Finals, potentially, where, you know, I hope the kids with the sweat rag sitting on the sideline are rested up and iced up, because they're going to spend a lot of time wiping down the hardwood in OKC in New York. But. So this is last year during the playoffs, I'm having this conversation with Silver, and I say to him at one point, I say, you know, I had told him that I had been at one of the Knicks Pistons games in Detroit where the fans were chanting Fu Brunson. And it was not because Brunson is their best player or their leading scorer. He's a. He's a marvelous basketball player. He's so fun to watch. It was because during the previous two games in New York, Brunson had sold about a dozen foul calls that were just absurd. And I remember the night before, actually going in to sit with Silver, I was talking with a league employee who was complaining to me about it, who was saying, the head. He was talking about the very unnatural motion of Brunson whipping his head back anytime someone was making contact on the dribble. And he said, it's just so comical and it's so farcical to see, and yet we keep calling it. This was a league person saying this to me. So I raised it with Silver, kind of for two reasons. Number one, to vent my own frustrations, because how often is a fan given an audience with the commissioner of the league? So I was saying to him, yeah, it really does drive a lot of fans nuts, and especially Pistons fans. And I'm at this game the other night where everybody's chanting f U Brunson, and Silver's kind of, like, smiling. He's kind of amused by it. And then I turned it on him and I said, said, you gotta shoot me straight. You're a fan. Doesn't this annoy you when you see him and SGA flopping all the time? Like, doesn't this annoy you? And Silver was like, yeah, yeah, yeah, it does. And then he kind of, like, as he is wont to do, he sort of began to meander down an adjacent rhetorical rabbit hole about something that wasn't totally unrelated. And I'm not sure whether he was doing that strategically or not. He does tend to be a little bit asymmetrical with his responses at times, which is something I've noticed in other media venues. I've seen him in but then he comes back to me and he says something really interesting. I thought I had lost him. But then he kind of snaps back to the point and he says to me, basically, you know, I give you a quote.
- [49:12]
A
Can I give you the quote from the piece just to set you up? Yeah, yeah.
- [49:14]
B
Cause I got it.
- [49:15]
A
I think it's part of the theater of the game to a certain extent. He told me with a shrug, quote, even those chants at Pistons games, fuck you, Brunson. I think that's what fans come there for. End quote.
- [49:29]
B
Yeah. And I have to say, like, honestly, Derek, I was sort of stunned when he said that, because this is someone who. Not just on the issue of gambling, but on so many things that I had pressed him on and was really hoping to get him off of this rhetorical ledge that he likes to sit on where he's constantly negotiating these answers with himself and trying to sort of check different boxes and, you know, weights and measures. This was one of the only times where he seemed to let it hang a little bit. And he just sort of. He did shrug, and he kind of looked at me and said, like, he was almost saying, like, dude, what do you want me to tell you? Like, you bought a ticket, you went to the show. Sounds like you had a hell of a good time. You had 20,000 people standing and chanting with, like, what more do you want? Right? And I found myself thinking in that moment, what if he was just like this all the time? What if instead of governing by consensus and being such a bridge builder and a partnership guy, he's very famously a collaborator who wants buy in from the players and from the owners. And it drives people nuts to some extent. Around the league, there are people who really like Adam Silver who told me, like, I just wish sometimes he would be a little bit more of an authoritarian. Like, it would probably be good for the league, and it would be good for him. Like, he would command more respect from people. And that was a moment for me, just sitting across the table from him where I could. I could feel that. And I could see how even as a skeptical NBA fan who's had some serious grievances with the league, with the game, with the product, and with the commissioner in recent years, that was a moment where I really had to. This newfound respect for the guy talking to me in these sort of assertive and not uncertain terms.
- [51:23]
A
Let me offer this gloss on your piece as we reach conclusion to our conversation. I think one thing that Silver is saying there that's quite acute is that villains are good for sports, villains are good. You think Celtics fans liked Magic Johnson? You think Lakers fans liked Larry Bird? No. They were villains to each respective coast, and that was good. Villains are good. Even David Stern making himself a kind of meta villain for the sport was good for the sport. Injecting himself into the sport the same way Vince McMahon would walk into the ring, the WWE, you don't want the sport itself to be villainized. That's a distinction I think I would make about your piece and about Silver's tenure is that that the league is in danger of becoming villainized as a sport in a way that is eclipsing the positive villains that are created inside the sport. But the obsession with flopping, the fears of tanking, the frustrations with load management where people spend $100 to buy a ticket to see Jokic, but he's sitting for the 15th time that season or whatever else, God forbid, you want to see Kawhi Leonard play in Los Angeles. Those are the things that villainize the sport rather than create artful, compelling villains within it. And that I see as the danger moment that Silver's trying to navigate within basketball right now. Do you agree with that distinction between villains in the sport and the villainization of the sport writ large?
- [52:49]
B
I do. I think it's a really smart observation. And I would add this coming full circle to where we began about some of the kind of existential dread around the game itself. You need villains and you need rivalries. That's what gets people to buy in. There is a real consequence of having this narrative connective tissue. Season over season, game over game, series over series. You need it. I know for a fact that the NBA was not thrilled at the fact that Joe Dumars, who at the time, when he was talking to me, was still working for the league, but he is not now back, you know, running a front office, working at the head of the New Orleans Pelicans organization. But Joe Dumars, who was kind of a childhood hero of mine on the Bad Boy Pistons, I took him out to lunch and he's. And he gave me this remarkable quote where he basically said, like, you know, the NBA was at its best when the players got off the airplane in a certain city and they were ready for a fight, like right then in the airplane, you knew that you had this chill going through you when you landed to play in Boston or landed to play in Chicago or landed to play in la. And you knew that those fans hated you, right? And that you were the ultimate villain stepping into that arena. And you knew that it was just gonna be psychological warfare for 48 minutes as much as it was going to be a game of X's and O's on the hardwood. And Dumar said to me, after kind of painting that so vividly, he said, that's what the game is missing today. He said that' fans are missing out on today. We don't have those real rivalries anymore. And I thought that that was an incredibly damning thing for him to say. And I know that it did not land well inside the NBA, but it's the absolute truth. Derek, you do need the villains. You need the heroes, too. And we touched on earlier how I think it's hard. You know, people may take issue with my saying this, but it's just how I feel as a homegrown sports fan. I think it's hard for American fans to truly fall in love with and lionize and hold up as an exemplar, an international player. I think it's really, really hard. It's not to say it's impossible, but I think it's hard. And the fact is, with LeBron, with Steph, with KD, with even Harden, if you want to throw him in that group, although I wouldn't in terms of achievement. But with those guys preparing to ride into the sunset here, the question isn't just about villains, but it's about heroes. And in the absence of both, and in the absence of great rivalries that can elevate the game, I think people do look for a villain. And so to some extent, Adam Silver has become that villain, and the game itself is sort of being villainized.
- [55:40]
A
Very last question. I think you and I agree that whether the issue is tanking or load management, the fundamental problem, the fundamental issue that the NBA season most fans recognize is too long and too many games don't matter. Surely you asked Adam Silver if he has allowed himself to contemplate reducing the regular season to 72 games, 62 games, God forbid, despite the hit to advertising and ticket revenue that that would incur. What was his response to the suggestion that maybe the thing that ails the NBA is that there's simply too many meaningless games?
- [56:17]
B
Games? I don't think, I, I don't think he even entertains it. I mean, I, I, I, I really don't. I, I, I think because to, to his mind and to the mind of the owners and, and others who have reason to not entertain it, they say, well, we've always played 82 games. I mean, these, these athletes today are in better shape. They've got better nutrition, they've got better travel plans. They're catered to in ways that players never were in the 80s and 90s. So, so why could they possibly not withstand the rigors of the same regular season? Now, they'll say that in one breath and then in the next talk about how the game is so much more exciting than it used to be because the players are up and down the court 30 or 40% faster than they ever were before and they're shooting more and they're stretching more and they're spreading more. And so those two things are very obviously in conflict. And there's been a lot of work done over the past year or so, a lot of reporting done on this plague of soft tissue injuries and seemingly this epidemic of star players who are going down at critical moments in the season for their teams and for the league as a whole. And so there would seem to be an obvious contradiction here, Derek, but to answer your question, I truly, I don't think the commissioner for a moment entertains the idea that the season is too long and needs to be cut short. I just don't think it's even. I don't think it's even a conversation within the league, within which, to my point earlier about the disconnect from fans and some of the arrogance that I picked up on from the league office, I really think that that's where it could come to a head. Because if something's gotta give here and maybe it doesn't like, right, maybe the criticisms from you, from me, from Simmons, from others, maybe ultimately they just don't matter because the NBA is so commercially successful at this point, they're making so much money they've got millions of people watching in China and more online every day throughout Asia and even parts of Africa, Europe. So they're fine. They don't need us. Right. They don't care about our complaints. Maybe that's the case. But if they do, your point earlier is really the one that I think is going to be most salient about showing up and paying your hard earned money to watch a regular season game. And I've had this experience several times with my own young sons who I take down to Detroit to watch the Pistons play on a Thursday night against the warriors or against the Lakers or the Knicks. And inevitably, I mean, almost every single time there is a star player sitting. I mean, almost every single time. And, and I just don't know how sustainable that is for your kind of core domestic demographic. I do think that it is a growing, it I do think that it is fueling a sense of resentment against the league, which is then kind of furthering this villainizing that you were destroyed describing earlier.
- [59:15]
A
Tim, Alberta, the Atlantic. Thank you very, very.