Adam Silver forgot his audience

Last week, the commissioner called basketball a "highlights-based sport" in response to a question about rising costs for fans. Then he got defensive when called out about it. His biggest problem with all this? He forgot who he was talking to. Good morning. Let's basketball.

During his post-Board of Governors meeting press conference in New York last week, Adam Silver answered a great question from Tania Ganguli of the New York Times regarding the rising cost of sports fandom. As we pointed out here at Good Morning It's Basketball earlier this month, it's going to be pretty costly for most American fans to piece together the streaming services needed to watch everything a fan might want to watch this season.

The inimitable ChazNBA pulled the complete question and answer on this topic so you can see the full context under which Silver shoved his loafer down his own throat. If you've only heard reactions to the moment, I encourage you to watch the whole three minutes. There's some nuance.

The key nuance is that the first part of Silver's answer is actually perfect. One of my biggest takeaways from the broadcast schedule release is that there is actually a whole lot of basketball available "over-the-air" this season compared to years passed. Disney used ABC – which with the right equipment can be available for free to most U.S. residents legally – in very limited ways in recent years: Christmas Day, Saturday nights or Sunday afternoons once the NFL season waned, the NBA Finals. That was basically it. Disney will still use ABC in this way.

But Peacock will leverage NBC a whole lot more. Silver nods to this by indicating that 75 games will be on broadcast TV this season, up from 15 last year. And this is a big deal for discovery and access in an old-school. Just think about why people of certain ages are so enthralled with NBC's nostalgia play around the NBA: it's because that's where we experienced the sport most broadly, unless you grew going to a lot of games or with a particularly accessible local team.

If there's any quibble with the first part of Silver's answer, it's that he doesn't make the point strongly enough. Hell, the NBA's regular season opening doubleheader is going to be on broadcast television for the first time in ... I don't know, decades? Ever? That'd be an awesome data point for Silver to offer up to reiterate his point that free access to full games is expanding. And that is an important if inadequate counterpoint to the true point that it's expensive as hell to get access to all these other games.

Where Silver waded into the rip current is where he suggested that the best bits of the game are already available freely on the internet via clips ...

... which is also true. But that's information for a different audience: not the media, not hardcore fans. That's an argument for corporations you'd like to squeeze money out of in exchange for logos on the floor (real or digitally placed) and on the jersey and wrapped around official dunk videos and all over the arena and on top of the backboard. What an absurd answer to tack on here after adequately answering the question! "It's now like $600 a season to get just the 'national TV' games. Are you concerned this means limiting the potential audience?" "We have a lot more games available free than last year and if you want more, watch highlights."

Silver offering that up in response to this question is an insult to the game itself. There's a way to frame the relevance and accessibility of highlights as a huge positive to the growth of the game. It belongs nowhere near the response to a question about how expensive fandom is getting. And in this setting, where all the reporters are lined up to hear what you have to say about an apparent $50 million cap circumvention scheme by the richest owner in the league, after years of hand-wringing from all corners about the lack of interest in the regular season and how to make the games matter with the player participation policy and 65-game minimums for awards and everything else ... this is the last thing you want to say.

If corporate money were real (it's not), how would Disney (pitching its ESPN Unlimited deal to consumers and hanging on to the vestiges of cable and post-cable streaming for dear life) and Amazon feel about Silver's comments? They don't care, because corporate money isn't real. This is all just paper s--t to them. If Amazon loses money on its NBA rights deal, no one will suffer for it at Amazon HQ: it's all just numbers on a page for a company whose main goal is consumer dependency. No one at Disney HQ will suffer if ESPN loses money on its new NBA deal; they'll just fire some more writers or talented on-air or behind-the-scenes staff, not any decision-makers. Silver isn't at risk of offending Bob Iger or Jeff Bezos.

He is at risk of offending actual NBA fans who actually care about this stuff and watch this stuff. (In news that should surprise no one, hardcore sports fans are the ones propping up cable and satellite services right now, according to a new AP poll.) He is at risk of offending players who feel (correctly, in many cases) that the league office is pushing them to sometimes play injured during a bloated regular season that even the league office doesn't really care about. He is at risk of offending the NBA media who has been scolded for years about claiming the league doesn't care about the regular season.

Highlights are an entryway into fandom. There's no question about that. Where Silver erred is in suggesting highlights as a substitute for actual basketball. It doesn't particularly matter if that's he meant, because in the context of the question asked, that's what he said and that's everyone who watched it interpreted him to say. Adam Silver is a well-paid individual, and a big part of his job is being an ambassador of the league to all of its many audiences. He just forgot which one was listening this time around, and as a result this gaffe will follow him.

What's On The Newsletter This Week

No highlights here, just newsletter available to paid subscribers since the last freebie.

• A little bit of background how the Blazers' new owner made his fortune in addition to a take on a(nother) Steve Ballmer moneybomb on Aspiration
• Dennis Schroder conquers Europe
• In a hard cap environment, the NBA can either punish the Clippers harshly or open the door to rampant cap circumvention

Plus the subscriber-only GMIB Discord has been chock full of great discourse. Get in!

Pablo's Back

Somehow, Mark Cuban made things worse for Steve Ballmer. I'm not familiar with the idea of Mark Cuban making things worse for people. Weird.

As usual, watch the whole thing. My key takeaway here as someone who already believed that Ballmer's actions appear incredibly shady is that ... Ballmer's actions appear incredible shady. I maintain my position that if the NBA doesn't harshly punish the Clippers then the salary cap is essentially dead.

I am quite amused that Mark Cuban, after tweeting through it for a week, basically wrote an If He Did It about Ballmer's business deal with Aspiration ... and then Pablo showed that's exactly how Ballmer did it.

(Is it because Cuban also did it? Hmm.)

Back on Friday! Be excellent to each other.