Booming team valuations, feelgood social justice and anti-racism initiatives, and repudiation of anyone standing in the way of the league’s expansion into markets across the globe: values, in both senses of the word, have been at the core of Adam Silver’s 10-year tenure at the head of the NBA, and it’s never been entirely clear whether those of the ethical variety matter more to the league’s commissioner than numerical ones.
On the one hand, Silver has won plaudits for setting up the NBA’s social justice coalition, the group established in the wake of the George Floyd protests to advocate on behalf of the league for criminal justice reform and an end to racial inequality, and forging a path for professional basketball as a socially conscious sport amid the culture wars and toxicity of the Trump era. On the other, he’s put distance between the NBA and franchise figures with outspoken views on foreign policy – none more so than Daryl Morey, the former general manager of the Houston Rockets who almost got the NBA kicked out of China after tweeting his support for Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protesters in 2019 – and cultivated an institutional image of geopolitical neutrality to repair the league’s post-Morey reputation in China. Liberal pieties and accommodations with illiberalism have mingled seamlessly in Silver’s NBA. For every Donald Sterling, forced to sell the Los Angeles Clippers in 2014 after he was caught on tape being racist, there’s an Enes Freedom, the former New York Knicks star who was pushed to the sport’s fringes a few years ago for being a little too vocal in his support of China’s Uyghur minority.
