Adam Silver is the winner in the battle for the NBA's future rights

Ten years ago, Adam Silver faced his first critical test. On April 29, 2014, the media waited for the young NBA commissioner to respond to Clippers owner Donald Sterling's racist comments about black players that had sparked a national scandal. NBA players threatened a boycott, and LeBron James warned, “There is no place for that in our game.” Still, many thought Silver could only fine or suspend the despicable Sterling, who had been a stain on the league's image for decades.

Wrong. Silver, who had officially succeeded the late David Stern less than three months earlier, gave the billionaire the NBA equivalent of the death penalty, banned Sterling for life, fined him $2.5 million and forced him to sell the franchise he had owned for 33 years. The bespectacled, mild-mannered former lawyer became an instant hero to NBA players and the adoring sports media.

Lesson learned: Never underestimate Adam Silver.

“[Silver] did what had to be done for an owner who seemed to be completely at odds with what the NBA represents,” recalls Harvey Araton, the longtime basketball columnist for The New York Times and author of When the Garden of Eden was“But he also made the right start with the players in terms of recognizing their dissatisfaction with the situation.”

Ten years later, Silver is at the forefront of another turning point in league history: the NBA's multi-billion-dollar media rights negotiations. We don't know which TV networks and streaming giants will sign which packages. As of Memorial Day weekend, we still don't know exactly when. But one thing is clear: The winners of this high-stakes poker game were and are Silver and the NBA.

The league began negotiations at a time when the sports rights market was tight, economic headwinds were mounting and ratings were stagnant. Before negotiations began, some thought the NBA would struggle to secure a significant increase in its current nine-year, $24 billion contract. Instead, as Front Office Sports The league has learned that it could double its royalties to over $50 billion within 10 years, putting its long-term rights value behind only the NFL's $110 billion. Silver's position in the commissioners' hierarchy would be cemented alongside the NFL's Roger Goodell and above all others.

The NBA declined to comment for this article. But Mark Cuban, the Mavericks' former majority owner, told the Associated Press earlier this year: “(Silver) was a great leader who built on David's legacy and really transformed us into a great multinational organization.”

The NBA is on the verge of filling its coffers at a time when its biggest stars of the last two decades – James, Steph Curry and Kevin Durant – can no longer play on the court due to their age.

Television viewership for the 2023-24 regular season increased 1% to 1.09 million viewers for games on ABC, ESPN, TNT and NBA TV, according to Sports media monitoring. But viewership across the NBA's three main TV partners (ABC, ESPN and TNT) fell 1% to 1.56 million, the lowest in three years. In 2023, All-Star Game viewership fell to a record low of 4.6 million viewers. Although viewership rose 14% this year to 5.5 million, even Silver fears the game is broken.

But the 62-year-old commissioner is close to breaking the bank thanks to his savvy planning. Silver has consistently made efforts to increase the media value of each property, for example by breaking events like the All-Star Game and early playoff games into individual, sellable pieces and sparking bidding wars wherever possible. It also helps that he has the nerve of a burglar to experiment with brand-new concepts for a 77-year-old league.

Knowing the NBA needed more major events to attract potential partners, he launched the first In-Season Tournament this season. The group games on ESPN and TNT averaged 1.5 million viewers, up 26% from comparable television windows the previous season. During current negotiations, the NBA has pitched the in-season event as a standalone offering and as an incentive.

Silver has also continued what his mentor Stern started: growing the NBA into a global company with a young, international fan base. (Approximately 1 billion people around the world watch part of an NBA game each year – more than ever before.)

Silver used the global strategy to make giant streamers like Amazon Prime Video, Apple and Netflix – all with hundreds of millions of customers around the world – the envy of the NBA just as they were expanding into live sports. In 2022, the NBA signed a deal with Prime to live stream games in Brazil. The partners expanded into Mexico in early 2024. Now Prime is on the verge of snagging its first exclusive NBA streaming package in the U.S., modeled after its Football on Thursday evening Deal with the NFL.

And then there is Silver's cool, disciplined media negotiation strategy. The simplest step would be to extend the NBA's existing contracts with TNT and ESPN. But Silver, who joined the league in 1992, had to watch as the cable television package around his two TV partners slowly disintegrated, while deep-pocketed streamers became more and more interested in live sports. The NBA follows the NFL's negotiating pattern, whereby there are always more bidders than packages.

Silver is no braggart. But as with media rights, he is relentlessly looking for new revenue streams to increase the value of the teams and the league at every turn.

In November 2014 – just seven years after the betting scandal involving Tim Donaghy – he shocked the sporting world with his New York Times editorial stating, “Sports betting should be brought out of the underground and into the light of day.” Silver was the only commissioner to support legalized sports betting. A decade later, virtually all professional sports leagues have embraced gambling.

Under his leadership, the NBA became the first major North American league to sell jersey patch sponsorships. Silver also got ahead of everyone and allowed private equity funds to invest in NBA franchises, and in 2022, NBA owners voted to allow sovereign wealth funds, pension funds and foundations to buy team shares. At the same time, Silver must juggle the demands of a more demanding, profit-focused ownership group than Stern, Araton notes.

The result? Over the past decade, Silver, whom the owners recently rewarded with a long-term contract extension, has more than doubled the NBA's annual revenue from $4.8 billion to $12 billion. The league set an all-time regular-season record with 22,538,518 fans at games this year, and the average NBA franchise is Forbesan increase of 75% compared to 2019.

In 2014, Silver led negotiations for the current nine-year contracts with ESPN and TNT, which run through the 2024-25 season. He and chief rights coordinator Bill Koenig have been preparing for this moment for years.

This year, there was little doubt what the NBA would do: It would wait until the incumbents' exclusive negotiating periods expired and then begin negotiations with third-party bidders. Now the NBA is on the verge of a “Roundball Rock” reunion with NBC, which held the rights during the golden era from 1990 to 2002. Prime is ready to write another huge check. And TNT is on the hook for its NBA rights.

Yes, it would take courage for the NBA to drop TNT after 40 years. Charles Barkley's Insights into the NBA is the gold standard for sports studio broadcasts. The network has done an incredible job covering the NBA. But David Zaslav, CEO of TNT parent Warner Bros. Discovery, shot himself in the foot when he told Wall Street in 2002, “We don't need the NBA.”

That comment “probably made Adam mad,” Barkley told Dan Patrick on Thursday. “When we merged, that was the first thing our boss said: 'We don't need the NBA.' Well, he doesn't need it. But I, Kenny [Smith]Shaq [Shaquille O’Neal]and Ernie [Johnson]and the people who work there, we need it. Right now it just sucks.”

Like Sterling, Zaslav has to learn the hard way not to underestimate Silver. Somewhere, David Stern is smiling down on his protégé.