The NBA is in trouble, and commissioner Adam Silver must be fired before he kills the entire league.
When David Stern’s time as commissioner of the NBA was up, not many knew what to expect when Adam Silver took over in 2014. For the first few years, he did a pretty good job with the NBA and was widely viewed as the best commissioner in all sports, thanks to his handling of the Donald Sterling incident. Over the last few years, however, Silver has seemingly made the wrong call at every turn.
He’s a huge reason the NBA has struggled as of late, and it’s time to realize that the NBA is at a crossroads. They can either get rid of Adam Silver and save the NBA, or watch as he kills the league.
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Adam Silver is Killing the NBA
NBA All-Star Weekend is a Joke
It may seem dramatic to say that the NBA is going through a dark period in the sport, but that’s sadly a truth that’s becoming more evident every year. If you had any doubts, just look at how far the NBA All-Star Weekend has fallen. The All-Star break used to be a huge celebration, one that saw friends get together and watch the Slam Dunk Contest, Skills Challenge and Three-Point Contest.
All of the biggest stars were at the events, and it was all anyone would talk about for the next week. Now, it’s become a complete joke. Not only do the top players and former stars not even bother showing up, but neither do the fans.
The NBA All-Star Game has been the bridesmaid for quite some time. All-Star Saturday was always the bigger night, with the better events. Now, it’s at a point where even in Los Angeles this year, the NBA can’t even get close to a filled arena for the best night of All-Star Weekend. No stars have wanted to compete in the Dunk Contest for years now, and the only dunks of note came from Mac McClung, who has never been anything more than a G-League player in his career. While the dunks are really all that matters, it’s a far cry from the years when Nate Robinson, Dwight Howard, Jason Richardson and other stars would put on a show.
If Saturday wasn’t bad enough, the NBA has continued to try to retool and rewrite the NBA All-Star Game to a point where nobody knows and/or cares about it anymore. It went from an East vs West showdown to a round-robin tournament between multiple teams for no reason. As with All-Star Saturday, if the players don’t care in the slightest, how can the fans be expected to care either?
Nothing But Tournaments
All-Star Weekend being broken is an issue, but it alone wouldn’t kill the NBA. Unfortunately, all of Adam Silver’s decisions over the past few years have caused cataclysmic issues with the regular season as well. Let’s start with the In-Season NBA Tournament. This was Silver’s doing, and after three years of running it, nobody still cares about it. Not only does the In-Season Tournament start basically just one week into the season, but it also has the knockout rounds in Las Vegas, where there is very little, if any, interest from local fans. In addition, because the games aren’t scheduled until just days before the knockout rounds start, it’s incredibly hard for any fans to schedule a trip around their team in such a short time. If that wasn’t enough, all other NBA games for teams that have been eliminated aren’t decided until the last possible second, and the Championship game doesn’t count towards individual records, nor does it provide anything other than a hollow trophy.
Unfortunately, that’s not the only tournament Silver has decided to add, and the other one is just as bad. I’m of course talking about the Play-In Tournament. For a long time, the NBA playoff format was that the best eight teams in each conference were put into a bracket, and the winners of each conference faced each other in the NBA Finals. Now, teams that are ranked seventh through 10th are put into a mini tournament to decide who goes to the NBA Playoffs. Not only does this basically screw over the seventh and eighth seeds who earned their right to make the playoffs, but it renders the regular season useless. Now, any team can just tread water for the entire 82-game season, finish 10th in their conference, and still make the playoffs as long as they win two games in a row. If the regular season doesn’t mean anything, how can you expect fans to care about it at all?
NBA Game Quality Has Plummeted
Part of the reason everyone remembers the early 2000s to the mid-2010s NBA so fondly is that it was simply better. It was a physical league, and big-time performances were rare and celebrated. It’s hard to be impressed with a performance when seemingly every star gets 30 points a night thanks to 15-20 free throw attempts. It’s pretty easy for someone to even drop 40 when you can’t even be within three yards of a player without putting yourself at risk of picking up a foul, thanks to the rampant flopping in the league. When the whistle is seemingly blowing every time down the court, flopping is rewarded, and the NBA is tweaking rules to make games higher scoring, you lose plenty of interest from fans. While Silver is certainly not to be blamed for the league moving towards what feels like a three-point contest every game, he is to be blamed for allowing it to happen and not tweaking the rules so the game can still be physical and fun to watch.
As if the games weren’t tough enough to watch, now it’s hard to get too excited for your specific team, as the latest collective bargaining agreements have destroyed the fabric of the league. In the past, teams were rewarded for identifying and drafting talent and being able to build around them. Now, even teams like the Milwaukee Bucks and Boston Celtics are having some issues because the newly implemented aprons and super maxes have made it impossible to keep an elite corps long term, even if they were drafted and developed in-house. This only leads to more turnover within teams, which leads to more volatile performances, which in turn leads to teams tanking harder and longer since windows are much smaller now.
More Damage For Adam Silver to Do
Adam Silver took over his role as commissioner in 2014. In about 10 years, he dismantled the best parts of the NBA and changed it into something that most long-term NBA fans can’t even recognize anymore. Unfortunately, in 2024, his contract was extended through the end of the decade. That is three more years of Adam Silver at the helm. While that may not seem like much, look at the damage he has done to the beautiful game already. He clearly does not understand what fans want, and now has at least three more years where he will be making more and more of those decisions.
With leagues like the NHL and MLB constantly changing and improving for the better, it serves as a stark reminder that the NBA is currently on the complete other end of the spectrum. While it’s unlikely that the NHL will ever pass the popularity of the NBA, it’s clear that interest in the NBA continues to plummet while all other leagues rise. If nothing is done, the trend will continue, and the NBA will continue to dig itself into a hole bigger and bigger until it’s too little too late.
Adam Silver deserves some grace, as I truly believe he is doing what he thinks is in the best interest of the NBA. Unfortunately, it is abundantly clear that he has no read at all about the fans he is supposed to serve. For the sake of the future of the game, and fans like myself who have now become completely apathetic to the league they once loved, it’s pivotal that Adam Silver is relieved of his duties so the NBA can start to move back in the right direction.
