ADAM SILVER

Commissioner, National Basketball Association

“Having gone to law school, learning those skills, has been very beneficial. A large part of my job is being a professional negotiator, whether it’s collective bargaining or relationships that we enter into.”

Adam Silver has a job that seems ideal for anyone who really likes professional basketball: commissioner of the NBA. The NBA is extraordinarily successful these days—four decades ago, the league was struggling—and it has made its players and owners quite wealthy and its fans quite pleased. What was once a U.S.-centered league is now really a global multimedia business.

Indeed, professional basketball has become a great sport that is now part of the fabric of American society. Its recent and current stars—Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, LeBron James, Stephen Curry, the late Kobe Bryant—have become the role models for many of the country’s youth and adults. They have become what the country’s best-known baseball players were in the 1950s and ’60s, but they are more than that: they are global stars and “influencers.”

How did this turnaround and current success come about?

Adam Silver would no doubt give much of the credit to the late David Stern, who was the commissioner for thirty years, and who first hired Adam as a special assistant. But Adam has actually taken the NBA to financial and popularity heights that even David Stern might not have thought possible.

The commissioner’s job is multifold: ensure the integrity of the sport, negotiate the collective bargaining agreement with the players, negotiate the national media contracts, represent the league in public and with government agencies, and help the sport to grow and be increasingly profitable and popular.

Adam got the position that led to his working for the NBA for twenty-two-plus years (before becoming commissioner in February 2014) an old-fashioned way. He was a young lawyer who wrote a letter to Stern seeking career advice. He impressed the commissioner so much in their one meeting that Adam was hired shortly thereafter.

I have known Adam for a few years. He joined the Duke board while I was its chair, and we may have bonded over our shared interest in Duke basketball, and our having also both attended the University of Chicago Law School. But I had not interviewed him until our session at the Economic Club of Washington, D.C., in May 2019.

In our exchange, he is too modest to talk about the skill set that enabled him to rise and to succeed so well. But he is clearly intelligent, with a passion for his job and the ability to get along with and please high-powered owners and maintain a strong relationship with the players and the players’ union—not an easy task for anyone.

And he clearly showed, at the outset of his becoming commissioner, the leadership that convinced the public that the owners had indeed selected the right person to succeed his legendary predecessor: he responded to the racist comments of an owner by effectively stripping that owner of the ability to operate his team and forcing a prompt sale of the franchise (at a record price)—unprecedented steps for any sports commissioner.

After this interview occurred, Adam and the NBA found themselves in other uncharted waters. He has since navigated tense relationships with China that have tested sports diplomacy as an essential tool for global engagement, and the NBA played an integral role in protecting public health when it suspended its season in March 2020 to help contain and mitigate the coronavirus pandemic. A number of sports, entertainment, and cultural institutions followed suit.

What can be better than being an avid basketball fan and the commissioner of the NBA, and also having everyone say you are doing a great job? Nothing, except not letting it go to your head. And that is never a problem for Adam Silver.