Adam Silver Told 30 GMs to Stop Tanking. Someone in That Room Immediately Leaked It.

Silver called that out explicitly. Benchings and healthy scratches create a "perception of manipulated outcomes" — his words — that threaten the league's gambling relationships [1]. That's not a philosophical concern about competitive spirit. That's a business problem with a dollar figure attached to it. When the commissioner of a professional sports league starts describing tanking in the language of match-fixing perception, you know the conversation has changed.

What the Reforms Actually Look Like

The NBA is reportedly weighing a package of changes for 2026-27. Flattening lottery odds so the worst team doesn't have a dramatically better shot than the fifth-worst team. Using two-year record averages instead of single-season records to determine lottery positioning — so teams can't crater in year two of a rebuild after being decent in year one. And gutting most draft pick protections, which currently let teams trade future picks with safety nets that enable multi-year rebuilds while staying in perpetual purgatory [2].

Here's the uncomfortable reality Silver isn't saying out loud: most of these reforms hurt small-market teams more than large-market ones. The whole logic of tanking — the entire reason rational front offices do it — is that if you're the Oklahoma City Thunder or the Memphis Grizzlies, you cannot compete for elite free agents. Guys like LeBron, Kevin Durant, and Kawhi Leonard do not choose Memphis in free agency. They never have and they never will. So what do those franchises do? They draft stars. They gut the roster, lose a lot, get the pick, pray the ping-pong balls bounce right, and build around a franchise player they drafted in the top three.

Take that pathway away and you haven't fixed tanking — you've just made small-market poverty permanent. The Thunder were willing to be terrible for multiple years because it got them a generational core. Under Silver's proposed rules, that rebuild path gets significantly harder. The question nobody in the league office seems to want to answer is: what's the alternative for a team in a non-destination city with no cap space and a mid-lottery pick? [2]

And Then There's the Kawhi Problem

I'd be doing you a disservice if I wrote about NBA competitive integrity without at least acknowledging the other story currently sitting on Silver's desk. The NBA is investigating whether Steve Ballmer, the Clippers' owner, structured a $28 million endorsement deal between Kawhi Leonard and a Clippers sponsor — an environmental fintech company called Aspiration — as a way to circumvent the salary cap [3]. In other words: paying a player money that should count against the cap through a side deal that doesn't.

If that's what happened — and I want to be clear this is still an investigation, nothing has been proven — Kawhi's contract could be voided. Mid-season. Potentially making him an unrestricted free agent worth around $100 million in lost salary. The Lakers and Warriors are already reportedly interested [4] [5]. Let that sink in: the same week the commissioner is telling GMs they need to prioritize competitive integrity, the league is potentially dealing with an owner who may have literally cheated to circumvent the rules designed to make competition fair.

Silver's Actual Problem

Here's what I keep coming back to. Tanking and the Kawhi investigation are not separate stories. They're the same story, told from opposite ends of the standings. Both happen because the NBA's current structure creates strong incentives to game the rules — whether that's deliberately losing to improve your lottery odds, or a billionaire owner funneling money to a star player through a sponsorship shell game to get around the cap. The rules as written make both of these things rational responses to the system [1] [3].

Silver can issue ultimatums on video calls and reform the lottery and punish teams for benchings. But if the underlying incentive structures still reward clever rule-circumvention — and they do — the specific flavor of the problem just changes. Close the tanking door and teams find another door. The Kawhi investigation suggests the other door already exists and has been in use.

The NBA is the most watchable league in American sports on most nights. The talent level is extraordinary, the stars are global brands, and the postseason is as good as anything in professional athletics. But Silver has an integrity problem that goes deeper than which teams are resting their starters in January. He needs the league's actual rules — not just the stated rules, but the incentive architecture underneath them — to reward winning. Right now, they don't always. And 30 general managers know it, which is probably why one of them leaked the call the moment it ended [1].