Parity works for the NFL, will it work for Adam Silver’s NBA?

NBA commissioner Adam Silver hands majority owner Wyc Grousbeck of the Boston Celtics the Larry O’Brien trophy at TD Garden on June 17, 2024, in Boston, Massachusetts. (Photo by Elsa/Getty Images)

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…

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Author : Yahoo Sports

Publish date : 2024-09-11 00:14:16

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