On Friday, Adam Silver stood solemnly in the bowels of Madison Square Garden to address what has become an all-too-familiar issue. The success of the NBA’s first week—a thrilling opener on NBC, brilliant performances from Victor Wembanyama, the debut of basketball on Amazon Prime Video—had been overshadowed by federal indictments that ensnared an NBA head coach (Trail Blazers coach Chauncey Billups), an active player (Heat guard Terry Rozier) and a former player (Damon Jones) in a scandal FBI director Kash Patel called “the insider trading saga for the NBA.”
“My initial reaction was I was deeply disturbed,” Silver told Prime Video. “There’s nothing more important to the league and its fans than the integrity of the competition. And so I had a pit in my stomach. It was very upsetting.”
