ESPN New York’s Michael Kay wishes Adam Silver was acting a bit more like David Stern

Michael Kay might be the TV voice of Major League Baseball’s New York Yankees, but that doesn’t mean he can’t have opinions about other pro sports leagues.

The ESPN New York radio host joined the chorus of sports media figures calling out the NBA over its ongoing “load management” issues, saying that the way it affects the product’s competitiveness directly affects the billions of dollars paid to broadcast its games.

“It’s gotten so bad now that it’s affecting partners,” Kay said on a recent episode of The Michael Kay Show. He added that whenever marquee players are announced as out of the lineup for nationally broadcast games, it will invariably lead to lower ratings, frustrating broadcasters like NBC and Prime Video, who just paid billions for NBA rights.

“They’re not going to get the same audience. Same thing with Amazon. Same thing with NBC,” said Kay. “When those guys go to Adam Silver and go, ‘This is nonsense. We paid for your product, not for people sitting on the bench.'”

Kay also joined the chorus of those criticizing commissioner Adam Silver for not emulating his predecessor and figuring out what needs to be done to fix the issue for the betterment of the product.

“When you see what other teams are doing, keeping healthy players on the bench or not playing them at all, not even dressing them, it’s a bad look for the sport,” Kay said. “Adam Silver has to get a little bit of a David Stern transfusion. He has to. Because Stern would not allow this. He would get in their grill and say, this cannot go on.”

Earlier in the week, Bill Simmons questioned whether Silver was the right person to lead the NBA through this situation.

Silver is currently focused on preventing NBA teams from “tanking,” though those efforts, much like those around load management, seem tied to the same issues that keep the product from being the best it can be day in and day out.