NEW YORK — NBA commissioner Adam Silver couldn’t help himself, referencing the NFL’s success — or rather the illusion — of having every team walk into a season with a chance at prosperity if things break right.
“It’s not necessarily artificial parity,” Silver said Tuesday afternoon in a news conference in Manhattan following the NBA’s Board of Governors meeting, “where we keep moving the chips around, saying you want to go in every season and make sure every team has an equal chance. It is parity of opportunity in that we want each team to be in a position where, if well managed, they’re in a position to compete.”
With the salary cap structure of the league, it certainly feels like artificial parity. He brought up the phrase “hard cap,” which the NFL has, and although the NBA isn’t quite there, the gains of previous eras have dissipated.
That’s said with the caveat of player salaries escalating at an astronomical rate, so there are no tears in that space. It’s the players’ options that seem more and more limited, and thus, a league full of teams that are average and less potentially great ones.
“Now, there’s things we put in place in the collective bargaining agreement and successive agreements, we think that helps level the competition to a certain degree,” Silver said. “But also, there’s other lead programs, for example, our revenue sharing plan, which we also think are necessary for 30 teams to be in a position to compete again.”
It’s not bashing on Silver to point out meritocracy should determine competitiveness and revenue — the overwhelming amount of new owners who’ve come into the league over the last 15 years are the old bulls the late David Stern could wrangle with and, ultimately, keep under his thumb.
Silver is dealing with business more than the game to that effect, and sometimes, it feels like the game — or future history of the game’s storytelling — takes a backseat.
The Boston Celtics could repeat. Their history is as exorbitant as their payroll, which stands to break records if the current core stays together when one considers the cap and tax penalties. They could very well be the first team to get back to the Finals since the Steph Curry-Kevin Durant Golden State Warriors aimed for three straight titles in 2018-19, only to be derailed by Durant’s Achilles injury.
Since then, a league that’s largely been built on connective tissue continues to fragment, history is bucked every spring. Not only has there not been a repeat finalist since that time, but no champion has gotten out of the second round the year after winning it all. The three champions preceding the Celtics — the Milwaukee Bucks, Warriors and Denver Nuggets — all went out in the second round in their bid to repeat.
And they all did so in similar fashions, worn down by the fatigue of defending a title, unable to augment a veteran squad with either more hungry vets or youth to ward off contenders.
The old way of life in the NBA is over, and it’s jarring. It was illustrated by NBA Executive Vice President Joe Dumars in an earlier meeting with the competition committee in Chicago. Dumars, a two-time champion as a player and architect of another as a team president, recalled walking into rooms where every team was represented and knew exactly which teams he would have to worry about on his team’s journey to June.
And the list wasn’t long.
Now, not only is the list longer, it’s getting harder to pick out who’s worth attention as a title contender and who isn’t.
On one hand, the NBA will have plenty of TV inventory to sell starting with the next media rights deal — more media partners, more proverbial mouths to feed, more eyeballs watching nationally televised games.
And you can only put LeBron vs. Steph on a screen four times a year, unfortunately, and the league won’t unbalance its schedule to make more of these marquee matchups. And, those stars are far closer to retirement than their box-office prime.
In some ways, it’s a master stroke of genius by Silver, a visionary in the creation of competitive balance over the last two collective bargaining agreements. More perceived contenders means fans can fool themselves into believing a good team is worth a damn when we all know May will separate the real from the fake, the stamped from those who need more seasoning and adult supervision.
But it won’t be so clear to the average viewer in January and February, because juggernauts will be harder to point out. It won’t be impossible, but it’ll take a near-perfect job of team building, drafting and developing to beat the wrecking ball that is the NBA’s tax system.
Silver’s longstanding dream is to walk into a room full of billionaires and face a board of governors who aren’t unhappy with him, because they all feel they can have a chance to win, and are guaranteed to be profitable.
With the 11-year media rights deal locked in and cash steadily coming into the league, the latter seems like a certainty — it feels very difficult to squander a fast-break head start on revenue. But manufacturing competitiveness by siphoning talent away from well-run teams and having them shift to franchises that aren’t as competent doesn’t seem like the way.
It was supposed to help a team like the Oklahoma City Thunder. It’s not a franchise with a huge revenue base, TV deal or national audience — in fact, the Thunder are still very young, barely 15 years old.
But when the luxury-tax system was first implemented following the 2011 lockout, the biggest recipient of the new economics wasn’t the Thunder — Oklahoma City was actually the biggest loser. The franchise couldn’t hold on to budding star James Harden due to tightening cap rules and was forced to send him to Houston on the eve of the 2012-13 season. Harden subsequently blew up, becoming an All-Star, MVP and franchise player.
That could’ve been with Oklahoma City, with Durant and Russell Westbrook. The franchise drafted masterfully and rewarded those players to market value, only to lose their third-best player (or even second, depending on how one was to view it) based on constraints put in place to prevent the rich from being richer.
Except the Thunder built a kingdom in Oklahoma City, and not Los Angeles or New York City — teams better-equipped at that time to handle the dollar-for-dollar luxury tax penalties. Best believe teams of today — the properly built ones — wouldn’t mind going to that system compared to the prospect of losing cap exceptions and the possibility of losing future draft picks, the only way successful teams can replenish a bare cupboard.
It could happen to the Thunder again, albeit in a few years. Not only has Sam Presti wrested control of the draft for multiple years to come — picks he assuredly can’t use but can put as sweeteners in trades for veteran players — but he’s nailed his picks in the last few years. Yes, he traded for MVP finalist Shai Gilgeous-Alexander in the Paul George deal a few years ago, but Jalen Williams is a star in the making, along with Chet Holmgren being every bit the future phenom so many believed he would be.
Three players on max deals, even younger max contracts, restricts the ability of well-run teams to stay in contention. You either play for now, with half the tools of the competition, or you sell them off to some of the less fortunate.
Denver went from the team of the present and future, with the game’s best player at the peak of his powers and an excellently built supporting cast, to a team some feel will be among the pack instead of leading it.
They just agreed to terms with Jamal Murray on an extension, but they’ll have integral piece Aaron Gordon to deal with next, and they’ve already lost critical contributors like Kentavious Caldwell-Pope, Bruce Brown and Jeff Green in successive offseasons, because of the looming tax penalties.
The history of the league says the king stays the king until a challenger picks up experience and steam, then knocks Mufasa off Pride Rock.
Player movement may gin up interest in the summer, but it can be unsatisfying for fans who’ve invested sweat equity into players, watching them grow from pups to grown men, because the numbers make it advantageous for them to go elsewhere.
“I think there’s real incentive for players to stay in markets,” Silver said. “I mean, look at Giannis, or, you know, others, that if they’re doing well in that market. I think in the old days, there may be more incentive to leave, not just because of your new player contract, but this notion you’re going to get a lot more commercial deals in different markets.”
But it’s not just about the headliners. Yes, Giannis will stay in Milwaukee as long as he wants and will be paid handsomely. But the texture of the league was not just about the front liners, just like the Temptations weren’t just about David Ruffin, just like Destiny’s Child wasn’t only about Beyoncé.
It’s about an entire cast of characters, some sustainable, some interchangeable, that tied the players to the league, and the league to the fans.
Silver’s grand gambit has paid off for the moment, following the NFL’s model. But will it produce the NFL’s grand success?
