NEW YORK — NBA Commissioner Adam Silver couldn’t help but mention the NFL’s success, or rather the illusion, that every team enters a season with a chance to thrive if things go well.
“This isn’t necessarily artificial equality,” Silver said at a Manhattan news conference Tuesday afternoon after the NBA Board of Governors meeting. “We’re swinging the ante every season saying we want to make sure every team has an equal opportunity. This is equal opportunity, and we want each team to be in a position to compete if managed well.”
The league’s salary cap system certainly feels like an artificial equilibrium — he brought up the term “hard cap,” which the NFL has adopted and the NBA isn’t there yet — but the gains of previous eras are fading.
However, player salaries are rising at an astronomical rate, so there’s no room for compromise on that front. Players’ options seem more and more limited, and as a result, the league is filled with average teams and teams that never seem likely to become that good.
“We believe what we’ve put in place now in the collective bargaining agreement and subsequent agreements will help even out the competition to some degree,” Silver said, “but we also have other key programs, such as the revenue sharing plan, that we believe are necessary to get 30 teams in a position to compete again.”
It’s not to blame Silver for pointing out that competitiveness and revenue should be determined by meritocracy. The vast majority of new owners who have joined the league in the past 15 years have been the kind of old-school juggernauts that the late David Stern wrangled with and ultimately brought under his control.
Silver is more focused on business than games, and at times it feels like the games, or the future history of the games’ stories, take a back seat.
The Boston Celtics could win back-to-back championships. Their history is as expensive as their record-breaking payroll, which would be affected by cap and tax penalties if the current core of the team stays on the team. They could also be the first team to return to the Finals since Stephen Curry and Kevin Durant’s Golden State Warriors’ bid for a third straight title in 2018-19 was derailed by Durant’s Achilles injury.
Since then, a league built largely on connective tissue has continued to splinter, with history being overturned each spring. Not only has no team reached the Finals again since then, but no champion has made it past the second round in the year they won. The three champions before the Celtics — the Milwaukee Bucks, Warriors and Denver Nuggets — all lost in the second round in their bid to repeat as champions.
And they all did it in similar fashion, worn down from the fatigue of defending their titles and unable to add more motivated veterans and young players to their veteran squads to fend off their rivals.
The NBA’s old way of life is over, and it’s a shocker. This was made clear by NBA vice president Joe Dumars during an earlier meeting with the competition committee in Chicago. Dumars, who won two championships as a player and was the architect of another as a team president, recalled walking into a room where all the teams were represented and knowing exactly which teams he had to worry about on their journey through June.
And the list wasn’t long.
Now, not only is the list longer, but it’s also becoming harder to discern who is worthy of attention as a title contender and who isn’t.
Meanwhile, the NBA will have a ton of TV inventory to sell after its next media rights deal: more media partners, more mouths to feed and more viewers to tune in to nationally televised games.
And unfortunately, we only get to see LeBron vs. Steph on our big screens four times a year, the league isn’t going to mess around with the schedule to add more high-profile matchups, and these stars are much closer to retirement than they are at the peak of their box office.
In a way, this is a stroke of genius from Silver, who had the foresight to create competitive balance in the last two rounds of collective bargaining. More championship contenders means fans can fool themselves into thinking the better teams are worth it. Everyone knows May will distinguish between the real and the fake, the proven teams and those that need more experience and adult oversight.
But it won’t be as clear to the general audience in January and February, because it will be harder to pinpoint the big teams. It’s not impossible, but you’ll have to be near-perfect at building, drafting and developing your team to beat the destructive system that is the NBA tax system.
Silver’s lifelong dream is to walk into a room full of billionaires and face a board of directors that isn’t unhappy with him, because they all feel they have a chance to win and a guaranteed profit.
With 11 years of media rights deals locked up and a steady flow of money into the league, the latter seems like a sure thing. It would be very hard to squander a rapid head start revenue-wise, but creating a competitive advantage by siphoning talent from well-run teams and transferring it to less-talented franchises doesn’t seem like the way to do it.
This was meant to help a team like the Oklahoma City Thunder, which is not a franchise with a huge revenue base, television rights or a national audience, and is still very young, only 15 years old.
But when the luxury tax was first implemented after the 2011 lockout, the Thunder weren’t the biggest beneficiaries of the new economic policies; Oklahoma City was actually the biggest loser. The team was unable to retain rising star James Harden due to the tightening cap rules, and was forced to ship him to Houston on the eve of the 2012-13 season, where he went on to become an All-Star, MVP and franchise player.
That may have been the case with Oklahoma City, with Durant and Russell Westbrook: The team had a great draft, paid players according to market value, then lost their third-best player (or second-best, depending on how you look at it) because of restrictions meant to keep the rich from getting richer.
Except the Thunder built their empire in Oklahoma City, not Los Angeles or New York. Those teams were better equipped to deal with luxury tax penalties dollar for dollar at the time. Teams today — teams that are properly constructed — wouldn’t mind moving to that system as much as the potential loss of cap exceptions and future draft picks. It’s the only way successful teams can refill their empty cupboards.
It may happen again for the Thunder, albeit in a few years. Sam Presti not only took control of the draft for the next few years, but also acquired picks that, of course, they can’t use, but can use as sweet terms in trades for veterans. Furthermore, they have been good with their picks in recent years. It’s true that a few years ago they traded for Paul George to acquire MVP finalist Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, but Jalen Williams is also a star in the making, and Chet Holmgren is a future genius as many expected.
With three players on max contracts and even young players on max contracts, it limits a well-run team’s ability to remain in contention: For the time being, they’re either playing with half the players a contender would have or selling them to less fortunate players.
Denver has gone from being the team of the present and future, with the game’s best player at the peak of his power and a fantastic supporting cast, to a team that some feel is in the pack rather than leading the way.
The Nuggets just agreed to a contract extension with Jamal Murray, but now they have to deal with key player Aaron Gordon and have already lost key contributors Kentavious Caldwell-Pope, Bruce Brown and Jeff Green over the offseason due to looming tax penalties.
According to the League’s history, the king remains king until a challenger gains the experience and momentum to knock Mufasa off Pride Rock.
Player transfers may generate interest in the summer, but fans who have invested heavily in players and watched them develop from young talent into adults may not be satisfied as the numbers make it more likely that they will move on to other teams.
“I think there’s a real incentive for players to stay in that market,” Silver said. “I mean, you look at Giannis and other players and they’re doing well in that market. I think in the past there was more incentive to leave, not just with a new player contract, but the idea that you were going to get more commercial contracts in other markets.”
But this isn’t just about the headliners. Sure, Giannis will stay in Milwaukee and get paid big money for as long as he wants, but the league’s structure isn’t just about the headliners. The Temptations weren’t just about David Ruffin, and Destiny’s Child weren’t just about Beyoncé.
It’s about a whole cast of sustainable, interchangeable characters that connects the players to the league, and the league to the fans.
Silver’s grand gamble is following the NFL’s model and so far it’s worked, but will it lead to the NFL’s big success?
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