Why the NBA Feels Broken—and Why the League Can’t Fix It

The NBA’s vibes have been unusually awful recently. There has been widespread hand-wringing about the homogenization of modern offenses and the league’s notoriously weak regular-season TV ratings. A tanking crisis saw about a third of teams purposely try to lose games in a race to secure the top pick in the 2026 draft. A barrage of gambling scandals took out a head coach and several players. And the playoffs have brought relentless complaining from fans about foul baiting and flopping, tactics that have often been rewarded by the referees.

At the center of this is Adam Silver, who was once the most popular and celebrated commissioner in all of sports. In recent years, though, his reputation has soured. Fans have begun to wonder: Why isn’t he addressing the problems that everyone else seems to see? Is the right guy running the league?

In a profile of Silver for The Atlantic, the journalist Tim Alberta wrote, “Companies take on the personality of their leader.” Today, Alberta joins Derek to talk about the state of the modern NBA, whether the league has optimized the fun out of basketball, and what the impact is when a sport stops being treated like a game that exists to remind people that there is more to life than work and money.

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Host: Derek Thompson
Guest: Tim Alberta
Producer: Chris Sutton
Additional Production Support: Ben Glicksman