Adam Silver Goes to War

Photographs by Paola Chapdelaine Adam Silver is one of America’s most powerful men. Part businessman and part diplomat, he leads a multibillion-dollar international conglomerate and exercises soft power across continents. But on the day we met, the commissioner of the National Basketball Association appeared aimless, drifting awkwardly through the roped-off VIP area of a sports-business conference in Nashville. Silver had just concluded a keynote session. Unlike other headliners, such as Major League Baseball’s Rob Manfred and the Southeastern Conference’s Greg Sankey, who’d been interviewed onstage by journalists, Silver had been joined in conversation by his friend Bob Myers, a former Golden State Warriors executive, who opened by congratulating Silver on his decency, integrity, and “moral compass.” The commissioner is carefully stage-managed. Media engagements are rare; rarer still are the probing questions that might be asked of someone leading a business valued at roughly $200 billion. Early last year, I’d approached the NBA about a profile—not just of Silver but of the game itself, a holistic look at the evolution of professional basketball. The answer: a hard no. Hence the trip to Nashville. I had been warned, when talking with his contemporaries, that Silver is kept in bubble wrap. Now I witnessed it up close. Silver’s longtime flack, Mike Bass, was refusing to answer my texts—we stood 50 feet apart, separated by the VIP rope, as he stared at his phone—asking for an introduction. Meanwhile, officials from three separate teams, whom I’d planned to meet in Nashville, had all canceled. It seemed like a coordinated snubbing. Which left me no choice: When Silver wandered within reach, I slipped the rope and thrust an open hand in his direction. The commissioner, who is six-foot-three and wears a clean-shaven head, studied my name tag—The Atlantic—and then spun toward Bass, who looked exasperated. Silver’s complexion turned colorless, almost ethereal, as he shook my hand. I assured him that there was nothing to fear, that I’d tracked him to Tennessee because I wanted a proper interview. “That’s up to Mike,” Silver said, glancing at his spokesman. “C’mon,” I replied with a grin. “You’re the commissioner.” Silver was expressionless. “Sorry, it’s not my call,” he said. Then Bass hustled him away. The whole thing felt a bit pathetic. As a sports junkie, I’d always imagined commissioners as party bosses: indomitable, shank-wielding enforcers who win by any means necessary. Silver is not that guy. He is warm and dignified, a people pleaser who thinks in terms of negotiations and partners, not arguments and adversaries. He’s also an anxiety case, a born worrier who lives with constant apprehension about dangers to his league and its legitimacy. Silver is right to worry. Professional basketball has entered a moment of institutional crisis. The commissioner is confronting urgent, headline-grabbing allegations of corrupt ownership and betting scandals and teams intentionally losing games. He is also confronting broader critiques of the sport’s very soul: a lack of rivalries, a lack of competition, and, just over the horizon, a lack of homegrown superstars. This would be daunting for any commissioner—much less one who dreads confrontation. Standing in that Nashville hotel, I thought of Silver’s predecessor, David Stern. He might have agreed to do the interview then and there; he also might’ve cussed me out and had security escort me from the premises. What he wouldn’t have done was shrink at the sight of a reporter wearing a laminated name tag. Every basketball fan is acquainted with Stern’s legend. An attorney who joined the NBA as general counsel in the late 1970s—when the league was flirting with extinction, its playoff games tape-delayed to air after local newscasts—Stern engineered an extraordinary comeback. It was Stern who brought blood feuds and first-name-basis players to the mass market. It was Stern who turned basketball into a global sensation. And it was Stern, toward the end of his 30-year run as commissioner, who groomed Silver as his successor. Silver’s mandate was to do no harm, yet his tenure began with controversy. He’d been on the job two months when, in the middle of the 2014 playoffs, TMZ published audio of Donald Sterling, the Los Angeles Clippers’ owner, unleashing a racist rant. The response from Silver—he essentially forced Sterling to sell the club and banned him from the NBA for life—earned him so much goodwill that his first decade as commissioner felt like a honeymoon that would never end. After that early intervention, Silver kept a low profile. He kept out of the way. He kept the superstars happy. And, most important, he kept the team owners rich. When the NBA announced a massive new $76 billion media-rights deal two years ago, the commissioner was celebrated for taking the league to new financial heights. Now, however, with the 2026 playoffs under way—the capstone of the most turbulent regular season in modern NBA history—Silver for the first time faces real trouble. The quality of the product has diminished. Narratives surrounding the league are prevailingly negative. Things once taken for granted—commercial satisfaction, cultural prestige, national relevance—no longer seem guaranteed. Peacetime is a thing of the past; for the foreseeable future, the commissioner will be at war—with fans, with media critics, with players and coaches, with the game itself. I came to Nashville wanting to know: Does Adam Silver have the stomach for this fight? Soon after he was elected president of the National Basketball Players Association, Fred VanVleet, the stocky point guard of the Houston Rockets, walked to the front of a Las Vegas ballroom. It was July 2025, a few weeks removed from the Oklahoma City Thunder winning the NBA Finals, yet the ensuing season was already under way. Rookies had been drafted. Developmental prospects had come to Vegas for exhibition games. And with them had arrived a basketball establishment—coaches, executives, team owners—accustomed to flying high. Revenues were up. A collective-bargaining agreement was in place. The new media deal was kicking in. Nothing, it seemed, could stop the juggernaut inspired by James Naismith and his peach baskets back in 1891. Yet when VanVleet addressed the room in Las Vegas, his first words were a warning. “Don’t fuck up the game,” he said. Laughter filled the ballroom. Except VanVleet wasn’t joking. The 10-year veteran is a throwback: an unheralded recruit who grinded his way to All-American status at Wichita State, an undrafted rookie who willed his way to becoming a world champion. To him, basketball is not merely a business. It is a source of identity, the ticket he claimed to escape a troubled life. Anything that taints its beauty constitutes a threat. This season has demonstrated that the threats are real—and they are multiplying. Teams lost countless games on purpose in the pursuit of better draft positioning. Players—and, even more troubling, a head coach—were caught up in gambling-related scandals. The NBA’s wealthiest owner, former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, who bought the Clippers after the Sterling fiasco, was accused of funneling payments to his franchise player via a third party to circumvent the salary cap, an allegation that continues to shake the foundations of the league. (Ballmer has denied any wrongdoing; the investigative journalist Pablo Torre’s podcast, which exposed the alleged cheating, was recently awarded a Pulitzer Prize.) Exigencies related to the game itself—some shaded by nostalgia, others by angst about the future—are no less dire. The leading men who have carried the NBA for a generation (LeBron James, Steph Curry, Kevin Durant) are nearing their curtain call, while a number of would-be American successors (Jayson Tatum, Anthony Edwards, Cade Cunningham) have yet to fully emerge from the wings. Meanwhile, all three of the NBA’s best players (Sha…