Adam Silver says the quiet part out loud

This originally appeared in Friday’s edition of The A Block, Awful Announcing’s daily newsletter with the latest sports media news, commentary, and analysis. Sign up here and be the first to know everything going on in the sports media world.

You’d think on the precipice of beginning an 11-year, $76 billion set of media rights deals, NBA commissioner Adam Silver would be breathing easy. He’s already accomplished the hard part, providing financial security to the league for the next decade-plus. He even met his lofty goal of tripling the media revenue the NBA earned under its previous set of deals.

Well, if Silver enjoyed a nice little victory lap last season knowing his league’s financial future was in the bag, the last week has brought him straight back down to earth.

The commish spent some time this week fielding questions from reporters, and they had plenty of touchy subjects to ask about. Chief among those were allegations that the Los Angeles Clippers circumvented the salary cap to retain Kawhi Leonard, which was the impetus for the press conference. But, as us pesky journalists like to do, there were some other topics Silver was asked about, and the one that caught my eye centered around the rising cost of watching NBA games under the league’s new broadcast arrangements.

Starting next month, both Peacock and Prime Video will have major national packages of NBA games. Those two services will combine for just under $30 per month. Then, of course, fans will still need access to ABC/ESPN, which runs another $30 per month if bought direct-to-consumer. Not to mention, if you’d like to follow your local team, you’ll likely need either a cable subscription or yet another streaming subscription for your regional sports network that will tack on another $20-30 per month.

It’s not going to be cheap to be a die-hard NBA fan for the next decade. (Although it wasn’t necessarily cheap to be an NBA fan under the old deals either. And there will be more free games than ever before. More on that in a minute.)

When Silver was confronted with this premise, that it is getting more expensive for fans to follow the league, he didn’t exactly deny it. In fact, part of his answer was actually pretty shocking.

“There’s a huge amount of our content that people can essentially consume for free. And this is very much a highlights-based sport. So, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, you name it, any service … there’s an enormous amount of content out there, YouTube is another example that is advertising-based that consumers can consume,” Silver told reporters.

Rather than addressing the issue head-on, Silver suggested fans should just go watch highlights on their phones. In doing so, Silver is saying the quiet part out loud. Our full-game product isn’t worth watching.

Need I mention again that the league just secured $76 billion by selling its full-game product?

Now, another part of Silver’s answer has gotten pretty lost in the media coverage of all of this. He mentioned that the league was going from having 15 games on free, over-the-air broadcast networks to having 75 such games. That’s a five-fold increase. Anyone with an antenna can watch five times more games this season than they could last season, no subscriptions required.

So the suggestion that the NBA is getting more expensive to watch is actually a pretty murky one. In prior seasons, fans almost certainly had to have a pay TV subscription if they wanted to keep up with the league. Now, there will often be two or three games on free-to-air broadcast networks each week.

In reality, the price you pay for the NBA will depend on how much you value the product. If a couple of games each week is sufficient, you won’t need to pay much at all. If you need your local team, plus you want the games on Peacock and Prime Video, well, you’ll have to pay.

But no matter the particulars about how affordable the NBA will or will not be under the new deals, Silver’s rhetoric should be alarming. If the NBA is gearing up to be a “highlights-based league,” who is going to come by and pay another $76 billion a decade from now when the league needs to strike new media deals? Will fans have already been trained by that point to simply consume highlights without watching full games?

There needs to be a serious rethink in the league office if they believe that’s a sustainable attitude going forward. A league can’t stay financially viable off of highlights alone. There needs to be interest in the games. In the wins and losses. Not just dunks and half-court heaves.

Surely Adam Silver can’t be so shortsighted. His full answer would indicate he is not. But if I were him, I’d stay away from the talking points about highlights and focus on what really matters for your core fans and your business: the games.