In Adam Silver’s fever dream, the NBA is a wondrous world of wish fulfillment, a hooper’s utopia where everyone has an equal chance for success, a personal pathway to basketball nirvana.
Or, as Silver often said in 2011—when the NBA was wrangling with its players over a new labor deal—he envisioned a “system where all 30 teams could compete for a championship and create hope in every one of their communities.”
Depending on one’s vantage point, that mantra sounded either hopelessly idealistic or obnoxiously cynical—a contrived talking point to justify a financial battle that shut down the NBA for five months and nearly killed the season.
