SO MUCH FOR EMPOWERMENT OF PLAYERS: NBA DEMANDING ZEAL EVERY GAME
Using Joe Dumars as his servant of culture, Adam Silver is demanding a laborious 82-game regular season, which means he’s eyeing fat broadcast contracts urging the steadiness of star performers
We watch the NBA to treasure a balletic appeal of showmen, not for some self-authored grime called load management. Anyone aware of Adam Silver, finishing his 10th season as commissioner, knows he looks at his smartphone every day and wants to triple his broadcast earnings via youthful fare. He’s the one man who can see culture and say he wants $75 billion in rights fees through the next decade.
He can view Amazon and Apple with new joy while knowing ESPN and Warner Bros. Discovery will take smaller percentages. Thus, Silver executed a substantial U-turn this year and decided against players strategically resting — tanking is the watchword — through regular seasons that must mean something more. Starting when the campaign opens Tuesday evening, he wants fans to appreciate Victor Wembanyama, who is 19, and LeBron James, double his age at 38, with a view suggesting they totally care about the 82 games before the playoffs.
“I’m not a 21-year-old, that’s for sure,” said James, suddenly the league’s oldest player. “Feels a little bit different getting out of bed every day.”
Then abandon a mode where sitting and resting becomes an attractive ploy, never mind the fans who want to watch great ones and have a date circled on a calendar. Leave it to Silver to attach the revised health patterns to Joe Dumars, who always gave Michael Jordan his most difficult challenge on the court. As the NBA’s executive vice president of basketball operations, he’s demanding players get off their hind-ends and stop treating October 24 to April 14 as hooky days.
“What we’re talking about is the culture of this league,” said Dumars, a Hall of Famer and a fine ambassador for welfare. “We are really emphasizing that this is an 82-game season, an 82-game league. It’s not a 50-game or 60-game league. ... Slowly, over time, you see all this slippage in missing games in the regular season and the All-Star Game devolving into what it did. None of that happened in one year. At some point, you have to stop the slide. You have to address it.”
That quickly, the league abandoned Silver’s previous opinion that players need time to sit. Again, Jordan accomplished more than anyone in the league and still managed to play an 82-game regular season nine times, including his final year at age 39. Why let 38 of the league’s leading 50 scorers play fewer than 70 games? Why let the Golden State Warriors, who have won four championships, routinely rest en masse in January? Why let Kawhi Leonard become known for leisure wear on the bench than his title four years ago? What started with Gregg Popovich, thumbing his nose at the league office, had better not continue when he has a tender teenager like Wembanyama, who has spent his preseason dabbling in the unprecedented and deserves to be seen at all times.
“Before, it was a given conclusion that the data showed you had to rest players a certain amount and that justified guys sitting out,” Dumars said. “We’ve gotten more data, and it just doesn’t show that resting and sitting guys out correlates with a lack of injuries or fatigue or anything like that. What it does show is that guys may not be as efficient on the second night of a back-to-back.”
Or, lazy. “I think people expect to see some competition,” he said. "There's a happy medium somewhere between a heartfelt playoff game and what you saw last year. The culture should be that every player should want to play 82 games. That's the culture that we are trying to reestablish right now. We have discussed this with everybody over the last several months, and everybody agrees that we have to embrace who we are.”
This way, the league can remind broadcast partners that they’re not buying six months of trash. How interesting that Silver, on the hot seat as a purveyor of varying mass-media forms, lets Dumars become his load-management spokesman. When pressed on ESPN, the commish acknowledged, “What we’re seeing now is a transition where people first look at their phones, rather than on televisions. So the question becomes how we do a better job of presenting games. People are disappointed. We expect people to care about the regular season. Everyone has to understand this is a fan-first business. In order to keep our business going, we have to constantly put our best foot forward. We’re looking for guys who are focused on fans. Load management doesn’t work. It doesn’t work in regard to injury prevention.”
So here comes an approach where star players must be available for national TV and the inaugural in-season tournament, the NBA Cup, which starts Nov. 3. Does Silver actually think we’re putting aside football remotes to watch autumn prime action? That won’t happen, but it does create an early vantage point to show who’s playing well. Might we see the Boston Celtics, with Jrue Holiday running the show and Jaylen Brown as a $300 million player, prove they’re worthier than the Milwaukee Bucks, who have an all-time tandem in Giannis Antetokounmpo and Damian Lillard? Or will the Memphis Grizzlies continue to be swallowed whole by Ja Morant’s alcohol issues? “Keep LIVIN the dream OG,” Ja said last week of his father, Tee, who has been criticized for Morant’s handgun problems. “This hoopin shii started with you, i just continued it.”
Whoa. What about holdout James Harden, who creates acid indigestion among those tired of his act in Philadelphia? Why would the Los Angeles Clippers, who have no interest in signing Leonard or Paul George as free agents next offseason, want any part of this madness? “I think I’ve been preparing for it all this week, for sure,” new 76ers coach Nick Nurse said. “Lots of thought has gone into him not playing and preparing the team that way.”
Isn’t the West, with apologies to James and Steph Curry, a struggle between defending champion Denver and a Phoenix team that can expect 125 points from Kevin Durant, Devin Booker and Bradley Beal but might allow 130 to opponents? As for entertainment, how about the 7-4 Wembanyama? Is he ready to show, from this week on, that he’s the phenom we’ve never seen in our lives? Right now, he’s trying to prove himself as a San Antonio teammate.
“They know I don't care about it,” Wembanyama said. “I’m here to make sacrifices for them and I think when it's needed, they're also going to make sacrifices for me. And they know it's different. They know it's going to happen. Of course, there's going to be a lot of attention, but it's at the end of the day when everything is done and we're at practice and I'm like, ‘Yeah, OK, what do we do to get this thing better?’ So it's really stuff we don't care about. It's basketball first.”
Until they watch him. “It doesn't make sense that he can do stuff like that,” guard Malaki Branham said. “Like, it's mind-blowing. You just shake your head.’’
“I mean, it’s incredible to watch,” forward Doug McDermott said. “He just does some things that you can’t really explain, that fans would be surprised by. He’s so coordinated for how tall he is, just a very unselfish player, can make any play and he’s very comfortable shooting from anywhere.”
“He's obviously a gifted player who was very humbly trying to find his place,” Popovich said. "I called one play for him all night and I think he got over 20. He just did that because he's a good basketball player and he understands how to play, so we have to make sure that we blend that with everything else that we have.”
Said Miami coach Erik Spoelstra, who can’t believe his eyes: “We’ve seen the footage, we’ve read about him, we’ve heard what everybody said about him. But until you actually see it, live, in person, there’s no real way to describe it.”
Welcome to a league of intense transformation. “I don’t know what the end is going to look like. I have no idea,” James said. As LeBron and Durant see the twilight, Silver must sell his product to media corporations who meant so much to his predecessor, David Stern. For too long, he was into the entitlement of players, before the brood got out of hand with personal empowerment. Now, he wants them to play for their considerable money.
Every night.
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Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.