Q&A: Adam Silver

Courtesy of GQ

I'm not going to ask you a hundred questions about [NFL commissioner] Roger Goodell's handling of the Ray Rice scandal, because I realize you're not in a position to comment on someone else's problem. But I do want to ask you one: If placed in a position to advise Goodell, what would your advice be?

If Roger was to come to me—and he hasn't—my advice would remain confidential. And I'm not comfortable talking about what I would tell another league. We've had our share of issues, and—even before I was commissioner—I appreciated that other leagues didn't feel a need to pile on when we were having problems.

I'm certainly not pushing you to pile on. But when you see this happening to another commissioner, you must imagine yourself in that position.

That I do. I think about that all the time. But that's different than offering advice to the NFL. That's the NBA offering advice to itself. What can we learn from how this was handled? If we have a player arrested for domestic violence, how will we handle it pre-adjudication, when it's still an allegation? How do we balance the player's due process against the public clamoring for instant justice? While I don't want to offer advice to the NFL, there is a lot that can be learned here. We view ourselves as a learning organization.

Here's a simpler version of what I'm really asking: How do you approach the crisis management, when a mistake has already been made? When a problem happens and something goes wrong—how do you respond to the public relations nightmare?

Just as a general matter, we've learned that honesty, transparency, and directness with the fans and the owners is critically important. It's always important to seek advice from other people … when we were handling the situation with Donald Sterling, in those few days before we had to make our decision, I received some fantastic advice from other owners. And it wasn't a matter of what the fine should be or what the suspension should be. It was more from a process standpoint: How I should approach it, how I should view it personally. One of the benefits we have as a high-profile sports league is that virtually anyone will answer our calls. My advice is to get advice, and to get it quickly … And frankly, this is especially true with issues involving race. I bring my own perspective to those issues, but there are different perspectives: The perspective an African-American brings, or the perspective of an African-American of a specific generation, or the perspective of someone holding public office.

Does the NBA's racial inversion—the fact that the league is around 77 percent black, while American society is roughly 13 percent black—inevitably complicate every issue you face?

I don't try to put it aside. I try to deal with reality on its own terms. To act as if our league wasn't 77 percent African-American—or to ignore the predominantly white-male ownership—those variables become factors in what we do.

Give me an example of an issue that becomes more complicated because of that reality.

I'm not sure it complicates it, necessarily. Sometimes it simplifies things. In other industries, they might have to weigh these issues differently. Going back to Donald Sterling, here was a situation where nearly 80 percent of his employees were African-American. The fan base was also heavily African-American. So in that case, the racial component actually clarified my response.

But that raises a different issue: Let's assume that Donald Sterling had made the same kind of offensive comments, but not about African-Americans. What if he'd made similarly offensive comments, but not about race?

I'm not sure if it ultimately would have led to a different outcome. But here again, I'm just trying to deal with reality: Race is the third rail in this country, in my view. And while we may have ultimately done the same thing, prejudicial statements against other minority groups may not have the same media outcry, or the same reactions from sponsors, or the same reactions from fans. I'd like to think we'd protect those other groups as much as any other group. But the outcome also might have been different if you didn't have the president of the union, Chris Paul, playing for that team. Or if you didn't have someone as thoughtful as Doc Rivers as the coach. Or if you didn't have social media sharing that audio 10 million times in the first twenty-four hours. All of those things have a direct impact on the facts that are then presented to me.

What if Sterling had made those comments about Asian-Americans? Asians represent less than 1 percent of the league's players. Would that prompt you to consider the problem differently?

I think I would not be being honest if I said that if the comments had been directed toward another minority group in society, the response would have been the same. Again, it's hard to deal in those kinds of hypotheticals. But in this situation, there is no doubt that the racial composition of our league and the historical track record of the NBA were things we considered. I would like to think that if the league is tested in a similar situation—but that the target of the animus was some other ethnic group—that we would also react in the right way.

Your handling of the Sterling problem was almost universally supported. But I'm curious: How much discomfort did you have with the idea of stripping an owner of his franchise for having problematic social views? Were you worried about the precedent this decision would set?

Number one, it all happened so quickly. I heard the tape on Saturday morning, and Donald Sterling had been banned by Tuesday. And I was traveling at the time—I had a pre-planned trip to three NBA cities over that weekend. So in a way, I benefited from not having time to dwell on the greater societal implications of that decision. But thinking about it now, I am less concerned—precedentially—with the fact that an owner can be removed for his beliefs. I am more concerned with it from a privacy standpoint. I am mindful that this began as a private conversation between Mr. Sterling and a girlfriend. In some ways, this case was made easy for us, because that private conversation—completely unrelated to any acts of the NBA—was made public and widely distributed. So from the NBA's perspective, I was dealing with a public statement. But that is something I've thought about quite a bit. This did not originate as a business conversation. It was not intended for public dissemination. And in fairness to everyone in the NBA, we have to consider the appropriate lines. We're all entitled to our private thoughts, and even an occasional misstep or misstatement should not be career-ending.

Let's say the recording of Sterling and his girlfriend had been brought directly to the league office and was never disseminated to the public. The lack of attention would obviously not alter his internal belief system. How would that have impacted the response? You're essentially saying that his private statements matter more because someone else made them public.

That's a very good question. We still would have acted on it, even if it had not gone public. But it would have been a different circumstance. Again, in the case of Donald Sterling, we had the potential for immediate damage to our business. I was acting to protect the best interest of our business, in addition to doing what we believed to be right. Now, you raise a separate issue: What if there was a secret recording that only I was aware of, as we had in a situation with another team [comments made by Atlanta Hawks general manager Danny Ferry about a player, Luol Deng]—if there was an email that only a small group of people knew about? What is the response? … I think it's my job to handle the full complexity of every situation, as opposed to establishing bright lines that define how a league should respond. Every situation is going to be different. And the one thing we're all learning is that if something is supposedly private, but it has been recorded or videotaped, it's highly unlikely that it won't become public. So that's something else that must be considered. That's why leagues have commissioners' offices. I've had people tell me the league under-reacted to Danny Ferry's clearly inappropriate statement about Luol Deng. But at the same time, when I've asked them about how they felt about Paul George's clearly inappropriate tweet about domestic abuse, they say, "Well, I'm not sure if his contract should be terminated just because he put out a stupid tweet that he quickly apologized for." So I ask them, should there be a different standard for a GM who says something he immediately regrets?

You've said that nationalized gambling is now inevitable in this country, and that you have no moral problem with it, and that you want the NBA to be involved. All of that said, do certain aspects of this notion still worry you?

Absolutely. I have lots of fears, and a lot of them come from what's already happening now, which is widespread illegal sports betting on the NBA. That has existed forever, but now it's been mainstreamed. You can go to any search engine and put in "Bet NBA," and then spend your entire day looking at those sites with up-to-date point spreads and up-to-date information on who is officiating those games. If you enter your credit card, you can start making bets. Now, that might be illegal in the United States, outside of Nevada. But millions of people are doing it. So my view is that—if this is going to exist anyway—we're better off partnering in some way with the government, and the gaming companies, in order to regulate it. Both for the league and for the bettors. We need to insure that the information about injuries are properly reported and we need to make sure there is no inside betting from people who should not be allowed to make bets.

Do you have any thoughts about tweaking the game itself? Have you considered changing the dimensions of the court — perhaps slightly widening the width of the floor and the width of the foul lane? Or have those debates evaporated?

There are certain physical constraints with that, at least in the short-term, because of the construction of the arenas. But over time, those adjustments could be done. It's interesting you should ask about this, because I was just in Spain, watching the Basketball World Cup with Patrick Baumann, the head of FIBA. And we actually talked a little bit about this, as we were watching the championship game. We were looking out on the court and looking at the size and speed of the the players. I don't know if this is something that anyone in the NBA is currently pushing for, but it might be something we should continue to look at.

If you could instantly change anything about the NBA, without having to negotiate the terms or compromise your position, what change would you make?

I would have a harder salary cap. I still think it's unhealthy for the league when a team like Brooklyn goes out and pays an exorbitant luxury tax in order to give themselves a better chance to win. From a league-office standpoint, the ideal league would be for all thirty teams to compete based on the skill of their management and players, as opposed to one team paying more to get better talent. So creating a more even system would be at the top of my list. And I'll give you one more: I think it would benefit the league to raise the minimum age from 19 to 20.

Why can't you do that now? If it's possible to dictate that players can't sign until they're 19, why is making that age 20 any more complicated?

The reason we can't unilaterally do it is because it must be collectively bargained. We bargained with the union many years ago in order to move it from 18 to 19. Going to 20 was on the table during the last bargaining cycle [in 2011], but it was an issue we parked, having already lost several weeks of the season [due to the lockout], and we were anxious to get the season going. But it's something I hope to address in the near future.

What is the union's principal argument against raising the age limit? It seems like it would be good for everyone—the NBA, the college game, the physical development of the players.

Their principal argument is that it's a restriction on players. And as a philosophical argument, I totally understand that. Of course it's a restriction, in the same way a draft is a restriction. But our view is that it would make for a better league. You'd have more skilled players, more mature players. The draft would be better. It would be better for basketball in general. Strong college basketball is great for the NBA. And we know those players are eventually going to come to the NBA, whether they are 19 or 20 or 21.

Marijuana is legal in Colorado. A player from the Denver Nuggets can legally smoke weed but would be penalized by the NBA for doing so. What will you do if these drug laws continue to erode, state by state?

It doesn't force us to change our policy. Plenty of employers have rules against employees drinking, which is perfectly legal. This is a policy matter, and it's our strong preference that our players do not consume marijuana. We believe it will affect their performance on the court. That said, marijuana testing is something that's collectively bargained with the players' association, and we adjust to the times. But we're much more concerned about HGH testing and designer performance-enhancing drugs. Among our many priorities going forward, marijuana is not at the top of our list.