Adam Silver talks mid-market NBA Finals, new All-Star game format and the Mavs lottery

Fox Sports

3 days ago

The Oklahoma City Thunder and Indiana Pacers will square off in the 2025 NBA Finals starting on Thursday night at the Paycom Center.
It's a matchup of two teams who play in mid-level markets, which always creates the conversation about how the sport's ratings will fare outside of NBA diehards.
On Wednesday's edition of "Breakfast Ball," NBA Commissioner Adam Silver offered up his take on why the matchup is great for the NBA.
"At the end of the day, we are a league of relatively small markets. The goal is to have a league where every team is in position to compete," Silver said. "It's been intentional, from our standpoint, to create a system, a collective bargaining agreement [CBA], that allows more teams to compete. We're going to have to go through a process of getting to the point where people are accustomed to tuning into the finals because the two teams deserve to be there, and it's the best basketball.
"If I asked somebody if they were going to watch the Super Bowl, they wouldn't say 'who's playing?' It's a national holiday. That's nirvana. If the Knicks are in the finals, there's a segment of our fan base that's going to watch that may not watch if it's other teams, but my job is to get people to love and follow this game, so that if you're a huge basketball fan, you should want to tune in to the finals because that's the best basketball."
It's the first time that the Thunder have appeared in the NBA Finals since 2012 and the Pacers' first trip to the championship round since 2000.
Here are some other notable tidbits from Silver's appearance: The Cooper Flagg lottery
The 2025 NBA Draft Lottery had plenty of fireworks, as the Dallas Mavericks — who were 11th in the lottery seeding with a 1.8 percent chance of getting the No. 1 pick — won the lottery.
Meanwhile, the Utah Jazz, who had the worst record in the NBA, fell from first to fifth, and the Washington Wizards fell from second to sixth. Dallas is expected to take Duke star and 2024-25 AP Player of the Year Cooper Flagg with the No. 1 pick.
The Mavericks, shooting up from No. 11 to No. 1 in the draft order after trading Luka Doncic to the Los Angeles Lakers in February, drew criticism from the basketball world about the authenticity of the NBA Draft lottery. Silver provided his perspective on that narrative.
"The worst-performing team had a 14 percent chance of winning [the lottery], which means there was an 86 percent chance they wouldn't get it," Silver said. "Dallas had roughly a two percent chance [to win it]. The team that lost the most had a seven times better chance. Two percent is two percent. It's going to happen. When people say 'and therefore the lottery was broken,' I have a different view.
"The purpose of the lottery is to disincentive teams from tanking. Here, you had a team — regardless of whatever people think of that [Dončić] trade — that was trying to win. Then, Kyrie [Irving] got injured. Then, Anthony Davis got injured, and so, then they found themselves in the lottery. Odds are odds, and that's how it turned out." New All-Star Game format
The NBA has dabbled in several All-Star game formats in recent memory, the most recent one seeing four teams playing against each other in a tournament. Those teams were made up of two NBA All-Star teams, a Rising Stars team and a "World Team."
While Silver said that he wasn't "exactly sure what the format will be" for the 2026 All-Star Game, the commissioner expressed that he felt this year's "4-Nations Face-off" was a "huge success" and could serve as a potential model for the NBA. The "4-Nations Face-off" saw the United States, Canada, Finland and Sweden compete in a round-robin event earlier this year, with Canada defeating the United States in overtime of the title game. The NHL has several players who grew up outside the United States, primarily in Canada, while the NBA has several superstars who played internationally before coming to the NBA (e.g. three-time MVP Nikola Jokic, two-time MVP Giannis Antetokounmpo and Doncic). Future of youth basketball
On that note, each of the last two No. 1 picks in the NBA Draft (Victor Wembanyama and Zaccharie Risacher) were players who competed professionally in France, with each of the first two selections in the 2024 NBA Draft (Alex Sarr, who played in Australia prior to being selected, was the No. 2 pick) being international selections. Is the United States losing its luster as the basketball empire of the globe?
"I think there are things that Europe is doing better than we are in terms of training. I feel a bit defensive about the American players because it's not for a lack of a work ethic," Silver said. "In Little League, you have pitch counts for young pitchers. If you look at what's happening in AAU, in many cases, you have young players playing 6-8 games for two-to-three days at these tournaments. And I get it, if you're a young player and that's the game that Rick Pitino's coming to or whatever else, and you and the people around you feel he needs to see you play and your knee's throbbing because you're 15 years old, you're still going to play.
"And I think it's another area that the NBA needs to get more involved in, and we've had these discussions with the NCAA just to have more oversight over youth basketball, because there's nothing more important to us than making sure that those elite players grow up to be team basketball players and not just have great skills but understand how to win games."
Silver has been the NBA Commissioner since succeeding David Stern in February 2014.
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