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PORTSIDE CULTURE

ADAM SILVER IS ON A ONE-MAN MISSION TO RUIN THE NBA  
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Jack Bedrosian
October 21, 2025
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_ Adam Silver became the NBA commissioner in 2014. Since then, he has
wholeheartedly embraced sports gambling while making games harder for
ordinary people to watch. _

When it comes to fans, it seems clear the type of community Adam
Silver prefers is a gated one; the games are for the rich to watch and
attend. , (Christian Petersen / Getty Images)

 

At the National Basketball Association’s (NBA) annual board of
governors meeting, the_ New York Times_’ Tania Ganguli asked the
NBA’s commissioner, Adam Silver, about the rising costs of fandom.

To anyone who enjoys attending games, his response was deeply
disappointing. “There’s a huge amount of our content that people
can essentially consume for free. I mean, this is very much a
highlights-based sport,” he told Ganguli.

Silver made his comments in the context of a massive eleven-year, $76
billion media rights deal set to come into effect this upcoming
season. The deal expands the league’s number of partnerships — now
including the likes of NBCUniversal and Amazon Prime Video — and
spreads more games across multiple subscription services.

This move will make it hard for many to watch the teams they support.
Already, local TV blackouts, which prevent certain regions from
televising games, mean that fans in areas with restrictions often must
pay twice as much as those without them. As commentator Joon
Lee recently lamented
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“For most of my life, sports was one of the most accessible forms of
entertainment in America. You turned on the TV, flipped to the game
and cheered or booed — with your family, your neighborhood, your
city. Being a fan was simple. It was community.”

When it comes to fans, it seems clear the type of community Silver
prefers is a gated one. The games are for the rich to watch and
attend, and the rest of us should be happy with YouTube compilations.

Coinciding with the NBA’s shift to a viral clip highlight league has
been its embrace of sports gambling, spearheaded by Silver. During the
commissioner’s tenure, multiple gambling scandals involving players
and officials have broken out — ironic, given Silver himself was
instrumental in bringing sports betting into the mainstream. In 2014,
he wrote an op-ed
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the _New York Times_ arguing in favor of the legalization of sports
betting, the only active major US sports league commissioner to do so
at the time.

Sports gambling was effectively legalized less than four years after
Silver’s op-ed. The league has since partnered with online betting
platforms FanDuel and DraftKings. These two industry titans account
for roughly two-thirds
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the US betting market and were previously blocked from a planned
merger by the Federal Trade Commission on grounds of potential
monopoly status.

The widespread acceptance and promotion of these betting platforms by
the NBA has unsurprisingly compromised the positions of players,
coaches, executives, and even stadium staff. In 2024, Toronto Raptors
forward Jontay Porter was banned from the league for life after he was
found to be actively manipulating prop bets with his on-court play.
Another investigation remains open involving suspicious betting action
from Miami Heat guard Terry Rozier.

Gambling has been bad for fans too. Recent studies
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that in states where gambling has been legalized, household savings
and aggregate credit scores have decreased, while the amount of credit
card debt, overdraft fees, and bankruptcies has increased. It isn’t
a stretch to say that legalized gambling may in fact function as
simply an indirect regressive tax on the poor.

A recent poll
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by the _Athletic_ found that a clear plurality of NBA players felt
gambling was bad for the league. To quote one anonymous player:
“It’s a little unsettling to me. . . . I get 10 messages, DMs a
game, ‘F*ck you, I’m gonna f*ck your family up.’”

This general culture of corruption has extended to the way that
executives manage players, coming to a head in a recent controversy
that has shocked the league. According to reporting
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the podcast _Pablo Torre Finds Out,_ the Los Angeles Clippers may
have attempted to pull off the largest salary cap circumvention scheme
in the history of American professional sports — led by, perhaps not
coincidentally, the richest owner in the history of American
professional sports: former Microsoft executive Steve Ballmer.

The salary cap exists in most professional sports in the United States
as a mechanism meant to ensure a requisite amount of parity between
both bigger- and smaller-market franchises, and their wealthy and
less-wealthy ownership groups. Ballmer is alleged to have signed star
forward Kawhi Leonard to a no-show endorsement deal with the
fraudulent green fintech Aspiration — a now-bankrupt shell entity
the franchise used to pay Leonard more than was legally permitted
under league rules.

Silver’s actions violate the most basic tenets of what sports are
meant to undergird. A societal staple representing leisure,
meritocracy, and community is increasingly becoming one of our most
explicit examples of exploitation, corruption, and isolation. Silver
is selling out the sport, and its fanbase, in order to prioritize a
short-term profit maximization model. His blinkered notions of what
make sports compelling and what fosters true fan connection damages
both the sport and fan alike — whether it be through the slow
degradation of one of our greatest forms of live entertainment or the
vampiric posture assumed toward its most dedicated and loyal
supporters.

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Contributors

Jack Bedrosian is a writer and performer based in Los Angeles. He has
an MA in global politics from Loyola University Chicago.

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