The NBA’s Board of Governors approved a series of new anti-tampering measures last week as the league looks to crack down on the “pre-agency” deals that have become increasingly prevalent in recent years. However, there are league-wide doubts about how effective those measures can be, given the inherent limitations in identifying and proving instances of tampering.
As Sam Amick of The Athletic writes, one team executive believes that even a $10MM fine – the new maximum for a tampering violation – wouldn’t necessarily dissuade a club if it was the penalty that club had to pay for landing a star player. A second team exec suggested that the only way to truly clamp down on tampering would be to find a way to sanction agents, not just franchises.
With these concerns in mind, Amick spoke to commissioner Adam Silver about the new anti-tampering measures to get a little more clarity on how the NBA expects them to work in practice. If you’re an Athletic subscriber, the Q&A is worth checking out in full, but here are a few of Silver’s most noteworthy quotes:
On the NBA’s efforts to create a “culture of compliance”:
“There needs to be — maybe more important, even, than the penalty — a true stigma around cheating. …There’s something unique about sports, (and) I think no one wants to be viewed as having had to cheat to win. And I think what we saw was that it was a slippery slope over time, and people no longer saw themselves as violating our rules. They saw certain practices around tampering, around signings, as business as usual, rather than inappropriate conduct.
“So a lot of what we’re trying to do is make a cultural shift in this league, and I believe we can do that successfully because I believe teams want to compete on a level playing field.”
On how the league plans to handle player-to-player recruiting:
“If two players are going out to dinner and say, ‘Boy, wouldn’t it be great to play in City X together?’ That’s not something we’re looking to go after. The only context in which we raised player-to-player communication is where we have a belief that a player is being sent out at the behest of the team to have a conversation with another player that the team itself could not have with that player. In essence, where a player is acting as an agent for the team, and then saying to the player, ‘What do you think about the following scenario, with the confidence that this is something that my team is willing to do?'”
On whether Silver believes the new measures will be effective:
“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. 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.”