It may seem hard to believe, but Adam Silver has been NBA commissioner for a year.
It is hard to believe mostly because it does not seem like he has accomplished enough to account for 12 months in office.
Silver took the reins from David Stern with the reputation as a creative thinker and bold actor ready to reshape the NBA with a lot of progressive ideas.
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One year in, though and, well, the NBA looks pretty much the same.
To be fair, a proposal to alter the draft lottery was defeated by owners in a vote, and Silver cannot control that.
But the proposal was really not much more than a reshuffling of some lottery odds.
Hardly the bold, landscape-shifting restructuring many were calling for to deter teams from giving up on a season, in hopes of getting a high draft choice.
The all-star game still looks like the same old stale all-star game, this despite a more polarised quality in the East and West than ever before.
Not much talk of restructuring the play-offs, either.
Most of Silver’s successes can be traced back to the business of the game — sky-high team valuations, a giant new television deal, and cleaning up the Los Angeles Clippers mess.
Great for the owners, but for fans and observers?
Not so much.
If Adam Silver’s mission is to beef up the value of basketball, then he is definitely doing a world-class job.
If the mission is, rather, to alter the dynamics of the game, to make its structures more sensible and to globalise its appeal — well, then he has not really got to work yet.
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