The NBA Board of Governors unanimously passed new measures last week to help the league better enforce its longstanding anti-tampering policies, but Adam Silver has admitted that there’s no single thing the league can do to completely ensure universal compliance.
Discussing the issue during a Q&A this week with Sam Amick of The Athletic, the NBA commissioner explained how eliminating tampering will require the efforts of team front offices to protect the integrity of the league when it comes to such issues.
“There are no silver bullets here. There isn’t any one aspect of the package where we came in to say, ‘This will fix the problem.’ This is something that will change over time,” Silver told Amick. “It’s going to change by teams seeing that it’s not just that the league office means business, but the people at the top in these organizations, these governors, when they’re putting their names on a contract, they really want to believe that what they’re signing is accurate and there has been nothing inappropriate that is done in order to sign that player.
“So I believe in it, and I think — again — now we’ve gotten the sign-off but now there’s a lot of work to do in terms of the implementation of these procedures. Beginning this past weekend, we’re hard at work on it.”
The new policies enacted last week significantly raise the maximum fines the league can levy on teams who violate tampering rules — both the policies already on the books and those added last week — although the numbers have yet to be officially set.
Amid the beefing up the NBA’s anti-tampering rules was NBPA executive director Michele Roberts calling out a “double standard” when it comes to the perception that players currently wield far too much power.
While the issues of anti-tampering and player power seemingly are disparate, they do arguably meet in the middle when it comes to the perception that the NBA is losing control of league oversight, something highlighted by how Kawhi Leonard and Anthony Davis both forced their way off teams in recent seasons despite being under contract.
