Adam Silver got the parity he wanted. The problem is what came with it.
On June 13, Jalen Brunson poured in 45 points in San Antonio, the Knicks finished off a 53-year championship drought, and the NBA logged its eighth straight different champion - the longest run like that in league history. For a commissioner obsessed with balance, it looked like the payoff.
It didn’t take long for the shine to wear off.
Within weeks, the league was staring at the same ugly issues again. Boston shipped out franchise icon Jaylen Brown for pennies on the dollar because the current CBA made the financial math miserable.
The Kawhi Leonard-Aspiration situation kept twisting. And for all the league’s talent, the NBA still doesn’t feel like it’s in a healthy place.
That’s the core problem: the league’s leadership has chased parity so hard that it’s squeezed out the things that made the NBA special in the first place. Rivalries.
Star continuity. The ability to keep a team together long enough for it to matter.
Silver has built a system that makes all of that harder to sustain.
When Silver took over in 2014, the league seemed to borrow the worst habits from other sports. Baseball gave it sameness - every team leaning into the same style, the same shot profile, the same math-heavy approach. Football offered the other cautionary tale: a cap system that makes it hard to keep star players, especially the non-quarterback kind.
The NBA has absorbed both.
Every team now seems to fire away from deep, spread the floor, and run the same drive-and-kick offense in a different uniform. That trend wasn’t entirely Silver’s doing, but he had plenty of chances to push back with changes to the court, the rules or the officiating. Instead, the league drifted into a version of basketball where one style dominates.
Then the 2023 CBA tightened the screws. The second apron has made free agency harder to navigate and made it brutal to pay multiple stars. In practice, it punishes the teams that draft well and develop elite talent.
Boston is the latest example. Brown gave the Celtics 10 seasons and a 2024 Finals MVP, and his jersey will hang in the rafters someday. But he was still salary-dumped in the middle of his prime because Boston couldn’t handle the apron penalties tied to paying both Brown and Jayson Tatum on supermax deals.
Los Angeles just went through its own version of the same thing. The Luka Doncic-LeBron James-Austin Reaves era ended because the Lakers didn’t want to pay all three supermax deals.
Around the league, top players like Jalen Brunson, Victor Wembanyama and Reaves are taking less than the max or supermax to give their teams flexibility. The stars are giving up money so the owners can save it.
That’s how the system is built to work. But it’s starting to chew up the product.
Oklahoma City may eventually have to split up Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Jalen Williams and Chet Holmgren. San Antonio could face the same issue with Victor Wembanyama, Stephon Castle and Dylan Harper. Under the current CBA, you can’t realistically build out a full roster around multiple supermax players unless the owner is willing to go deep into the red.
That’s the choice Silver has left the league with: a Thunder-Spurs rivalry that could last a decade, or one that burns out after a couple of years because the cap rules force the breakup. The answer should be obvious.
And then there’s the Kawhi Leonard mess. The NBA opened its investigation into the Clippers, Leonard and the $28M Aspiration endorsement deal back in September.
Nearly a year later, the probe is still open, but Silver allowed the Clippers and Raptors to agree to a blockbuster trade that would have sent Leonard back to Toronto for Brandon Ingram, Gradey Dick and draft picks. Only after that did the league tell the Raptors they’d be taking on whatever risk comes from the investigation.
Now the trade is on hold indefinitely.
Basketball has always worked best when it feels alive - when the stars drive the story and the league has some rhythm to it. Magic vs.
Bird. MJ vs. the Bad Boys.
Kobe and Shaq feuding their way to three-peats. LeBron vs.
Steph. That’s the NBA’s sweet spot.
What Silver has built instead is a league where almost nothing lasts. Not rosters.
Not rivalries. Not even trades that have already been agreed to.
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