(Illustration by SportTechie, Photo by Allen Berezovsky/Getty Images)
The SportTechie Awards highlight the teams, executives, sports technologies, venues, investors and leaders that most deserve recognition for their work in pushing our industry forward. To view all the 2018 categories and nominees, click here.
Lead by commissioner Adam Silver, the NBA has been at the forefront of the world of sports technology for the last four years. Under Silver, the league has embraced data, social media, esports, and now sports betting.
Over just the last 12 months, the league formed a partnership with Intel’s venture capital arm called the “NBA + Intel Capital Emerging Technology Initiative” and expanded options through its League Pass service to include nightly virtual reality content and the ability to watch just the fourth quarter of NBA games. The NBA has entered into sports betting data partnerships with MGM Resorts in the U.S., and with Genius Sports and Sportradar globally.
The NBA also launched its fourth U.S. league, an esports affiliate. The NBA 2K League joins the NBA (1946), WNBA (1996), and G League (2001), and Silver has promised to support its growth. “We view this in the same way as those other leagues as something that we’re going to develop over a very long time,” Silver said at the NBA 2K’s inaugural draft in April.
Adam Silver graduated from Duke University in 1984, and received his law degree from the University of Chicago in 1988. Four years later, he joined the NBA as a special assistant to commissioner David Stern. By 2006, he had risen to the position of deputy commissioner, working just below Stern. In February 2014, Stern retired after exactly 30 years leading the league, and Silver was promoted to the top job.
Silver was tested almost immediately. In April 2014, recordings of Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling making racist comments were made public. In response, Silver banned Sterling from the NBA for life and urged the other 29 team owners to force Sterling to sell the team. By August, Steve Ballmer, the former CEO of Microsoft, had taken control of the Clippers. In December 2014, less than 12 months into his tenure, Sports Illustrated named Silver its Executive of the Year.
That November, Silver had published an Op-Ed in the New York Times calling for the legalization and regulation of Sports Betting. He argued that the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act of 1992 was out of date, and that a federal solution that reversed that law while protecting the integrity of sports was needed. “I believe that sports betting should be brought out of the underground and into the sunlight where it can be appropriately monitored and regulated,” he wrote.
In May 2018, Silver’s early advocacy for the legalization of sports betting proved to be prescient. The U.S. Supreme Court struck down PASPA, opening up the possibility for individual states to permit the operation of sportsbooks. So far eight states—Nevada, Delaware, New Jersey, Mississippi, West Virginia, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island—allow sports betting, and many others are expected to join them soon.
Initiatives in streaming, social media, and data collection and sharing all hold value as standalone projects that can provide a deeper connection for the league’s global fan base. “We recognize that we can’t scale our arenas,” Silver told reporters in February. “The challenge for this league is how can we then bring that experience to our well over a billion fans around the world who will never get a chance to see a game in person. So technology and creating a more immersive experience for fans is something that we spend a lot of time on at the league office.”
But whether intentionally or coincidentally, many of the NBA’s recent developments have positioned it to be a major player in the new sports betting world. Data discretizes the game and becomes the resource upon which bets are both made and decided. The more data there is, and the more granular it can become, the greater the number of types of bets that can be made. Streaming and social media provide ways to share the outcomes of in-game events, and to engage potential bettors with those outcomes.
“The vision goes as far as the imagination,” Silver said when discussing the possibility of integrating streaming and gambling in April, before the fate of PASPA had even been decided. “I’m not a technologist myself, but I’ve found that, to the extent that we can imagine things, within reason, technologists can figure out how to do them.”
For his push to keep the NBA on the cutting edge of innovation, and his foresight to not just advocate for legal sports betting but also to position the league in such a way that it would be able to capitalize on that, we have selected Adam Silver as SportTechie’s Outstanding Executive for 2018.
