Today, what's the matter with the NBA?

Let's start here. The NBA is incredibly blessed. In the last 12 years, the average value of an NBA

team has not doubled. It has not tripled. It's grown by a factor of about seven. In an age when

entertainment analysts predicted the death of cable, the league still signed a TV deal worth nearly

$80 billion. The NBA's talent pool is more international in football. Its most popular players,

including LeBron James and Steph Curry, are more famous than anybody in hockey or baseball.

The NBA is richer and more talented than ever.

So why are NBA fans so mad about the sport?

The vibes around basketball in the last few years, the last few months in particular,

have been unusually awful, even for a sport whose fans have

always loved to complain. This year kicked off with Pablo Torres' Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation

into the Los Angeles Clippers' alleged scheme to pay their best player, Kawhi Leonard, off the books.

It continued with hand-wringing about out-of-control three-point shooting, the homogenization of offenses,

and the league's notoriously weak regular season ratings. A so-called tanking crisis saw about a third

of the league purposely tried to lose games in a race to secure the top draft pick in next year's

draft, and a slew of gambling scandals took out a head coach and several players. Finally, in the playoffs, which are

happening as I speak, we've seen relentless complaining from fans about foulbating, flopping,

and other performative nonsense that's often gone rewarded by the referees. At the center of this

vibes crisis, there is Commissioner Adam Silver.

Ten years ago, Silver was arguably the most popular and celebrated commissioner in all of sports.

Two months into his tenure, TMZ published an audio recording of Donald Sterling, the LA Clippers owner,

unleashing a racist rant. Silver kicked Sterling out of the league, and a nation cheered.

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