Adam Silver
speaker
760 appearances
15 recordings
7 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard 26 Jun
Adam Silver’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 12 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 10.
Appearances
There's constantly things happening with teams, business decisions they're making that if you want to make sure everything's unified as a league, that you have to coordinate among the many teams. We have what I was mentioning before about people coming together in the Bay Area.
We have literally hundreds of business partners, licensees who produce our products, broadcast partners, media partners who distribute our games.
know more traditional sponsors like pepsi and amex and gatorade and companies like that and so a lot of it's in the relationship side continuing to build those relationships with our partners negotiating deals with them helping to plan for the future it's also we're a huge enterprise in terms of our budgets and so i think more that's the part where it's more like a standard job like we have thousands of employees and you know we have an hr department a legal department a marketing department
So also just bringing all those people together and doing my best I can, along with other colleagues, just try to lead this enterprise.
You know, I don't need to search because people seek me out. And so it comes through emails. It comes through people forwarding me things that other people are saying. We have our own communications department here who's sending me things. And in all seriousness, I actually find it very helpful because if you work
in an industry where you're so closely covered and you have fans and a section of the newspaper devoted to you that you get a lot of unsolicited ideas. And so, one, I think when you look at things we've done over the last several years, the play-in tournament, the in-season tournament now known as the NBA Cup, all those ideas came from initially outside of the league.
And that's sort of, it's a question of processing those ideas. And also there's understandably fans want changes. Some, you know, you get criticism, you get, you know, people are, feel good about certain things we're doing, but I think it's my job to do the best I can to incorporate a lot of that feedback. And incidentally, when you have, 30 teams, 450 players on the NBA side.
I mean, part of my job is hearing directly from players. You know, I've been at the league for a long time. So when players are coming through New York and playing the Knicks or the Nets, often they'll stop by the office. And in those one-on-one conversations, I can get a better sense from them. how they see the league. Also, our players are also the age, in many cases, of our core demographics.
So I'm always interested in how a 26-year-old player is consuming the NBA. Are you watching games on your phone? What social media sites are you on? What podcasts like yours are they watching? So that's very helpful. And again, and it's not just
owners of 30 teams you have team presidents and gms and coaches so lots of different constituent groups that are constantly you know providing feedback to the to to the league office and sharing information with and and that adage has never been more true that two heads are better than one and i just find that like part of my job is to be a good listener and get advice from others and then then somehow filter that advice and figure out what's in the best interest of the league
You know, last time I got that question on a show like this, it was a question that came from Dan Patrick. It was, what's the wildest idea you've gotten? And I said, 10 minute quarters. And I've been responding to questions at 10 minute quarters ever since. I'm going to be really careful how I answer this question. I mean, I'd say, you know, people have raised
The issue around the size of the court and the height of the basket. That's one. I think there have been various times along the way. I mean, it's interesting now that there's so much discussion about three-point shooting. You guys probably remember, you know, it was a while ago, but maybe time flies. So more sort of in the mid-90s and later.
where there was a lot of criticism around the game because people thought it had become too physical and the game, there was too much activity under the basket and that the players weren't as skilled as they used to be and that they'd lost the art of shooting. And at that time, where there seemed to be a prevalence of dunking, the thought was, it's too easy to dunk.
yeah and so it's quite remarkable then jump ahead till now where there's a lot of discussion around whether the players are frankly too skilled that three-point shooting has become so dominant and that it's the level of difficulty in essence isn't high enough on some of those shots so i you know i don't i can't say we ever seriously considered either you know raising the height of the basket or widening the court but those are issues that have come that have come up over the years i i also think
you know i'm trying to think of a particular example i know that a lot of marketing ideas i got one you know that i remember when teams first brought to the league the idea that we would put a brand on the uniform itself you know and i remember at the time when we first discussed that people said and i wasn't commissioner yet when we first did that david stern was commissioner but i was running the business side and people said i can't believe you're going to make our players look like nascar
cars, et cetera, whatever. And I think that's become very accepted. I think we did it in a fairly classy way. It's a relatively small logo on the team jerseys. But that not only has added a lot of value to the league, but for those companies that choose to put their logos on,
team uniforms they become that much more engaged in the league they're that much more incentivized to promote the league and so it sort of becomes you know a virtuous circle of sort of promotion around it so a few of those things i think you know even looking at i remember back in the day in the 90s early 90s now, when the continuous score clock was first proposed.
I mean, Dick Eversol, still a close friend, was the executive producer of the president of NBC Sports. He opposed that idea, you know, both for football and basketball. I mean, it's almost unimaginable to watch a sporting event now and think you got to wait, you know, for however many minutes till the director decides, you know, to show you the score again. But
remember in those days i mean the initial idea was no we don't want to show a continuous score because if people tune in they see it's a 10-point game or whatever they'll tune out yeah and and and it took a long time and again that's one of those conventions it's almost unimaginable now to watch a game where you can't see the score at any moment and in my sense is there's i think a lot about to change on the production side i mean as as games are shifting from what i would call traditional television call that broadcaster cable to streaming
it creates all these new opportunities all these new capabilities of the streamers because of interactivity to do new things on the screens and i think you know we're like like for example i i understand the criticism now from people who don't like to see sport sports betting information during games whether it's because they don't want to personally or they don't want their kids to be able to see it i think we're not that far away we're just going to go click and if you don't want any information about sports betting
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