Adam Silver Not A Fan of 'Super Teams' in NBA


NBA Commissioner Adam Silver appeared on New York's WFAN radio Friday, and covered a lot of important topics being discussed around the league these days. One of the subjects he touched on was the recent proliferation of "super teams" in the NBA, where players team up to form a "big 3" or more of superstars on one team. And it doesn't sound like Silver is a fan.  

I'm not crazy about it.... 450 players in the league all want to win a championship. And while they want the ability to become free agents, and go to a team of their choice, they also have an interest in parity around the league, and ensuring that top players are distributed in a fair way. So you have to find that right balance.

Whether it's the players coming together themselves or smart GMs bringing them together, you don't want to see too much talent aggregate in one place.

Silver also shared his thoughts on the "play-in" tournament the league used this past season to determine the final two playoff spots in each conference. Despite some pushback in some quarters (LeBron James had said "whoever came up with that needs to be fired"), the commissioner thought it went even better than expected. 

“Because you had seven, eight, nine and 10 in the play-in, another thing we didn’t anticipate was a race to get to the sixth seed so you were locked in. To LeBron’s point, it’s fair, and there are reasons we hadn’t done things historically – maybe you shouldn’t lose a playoff spot on a single game – but the most compelling point at the end of the day was keeping more teams in contention. We knew it would keep more teams in contention, but it turned out better than we could’ve hoped.”

 The NBA's head honcho also touched on the possibility of a mid-season "tournament", similar to what European soccer leagues do, and a number of other issues. You can listen to the entire interview on WFAN here

Photo Credit: Dennis Wierzbicki-USA TODAY Sports