In February, Adam Silver made his way to a podium inside the Intuit Dome, sporting a jet-black suit and a stoic look. Generally, the NBA commissioner’s All-Star weekend press conferences are largely anticlimactic. A few factoids about the league’s growth, updates on big-picture ventures, a midseason reminder that the NBA, if you didn’t know, is a truly global league. Silver then usually bats around a few benign topics—expansion, broadcast rights agreements and the latest with NBA Europe are old chestnuts—before ducking out to enjoy the rest of the festivities. Yet as Silver walked across the room, he likely knew this session would go a little different.
The commissioner is in crisis, or at least these days he is facing crises, more than any Silver has confronted during his dozen years running the NBA. There’s the cap circumvention scandal that has put him at odds with one of the NBA’s most popular owners (Steve Ballmer), who also happens to be one of the world’s richest men. There’s the tanking epidemic, a problem significant enough for the NBA to slap two teams (the Jazz and the Pacers) with six-figure fines before the All-Star break for sitting healthy players. There’s a federal investigation into illegal sports gambling that has ensnared a current coach and a player (Portland’s Chauncey Billups and former Miami guard Terry Rozier, both of whom have pleaded not guilty). There’s the rise in injuries, apathy toward the in-season tournament, accusations that a team owner’s business is producing critical hardware that has been used by the Russian military … you get the idea.
