Adam Silver Addresses Controversy Within NBA, New Rules Apply Soon

On Friday, NBA Commissioner Adam Silver gave his response regarding the controversies that arose within the NBA. This relates to stricter penalties for intentional “transition take fouls” and format changes in the NBA.

Transition foul in the match

In matches, sometimes a defender deliberately commits a foul to stop a transition opportunity for the opponent. This has been studied by the NBA and its competition committee further over several seasons. So, related parties expect changes.

Transition Take Foul Example

Silver said, “I am sure that we will see a change. I wouldn’t say I’m overly confident that it will be the final change. Nonetheless, these are the rules we have learned from the G League over the last 4 years.”

The G League and Summer League served as traditional testing laboratories for the NBA before making changes to these rules and policies. The offenses mentioned above have been committed since the 2018 G League.

In this case, when a defending player commits a foul, i.e. no ball play is taken but does not advance to a clear lane offense level, the offended team retains possession of the ball and gets one free throw before play resumes.

Under FIBA’s rules governing international basketball, the penalty for a transition violation is two shots and the ball. This rule was not approved by several coaches, including Steve Kerr as the Golden State coach who wanted the abolition of this penalty.

In response to this, Silver said that “I always tell people including about the potential for change when taking this offense. If anything was clear it would have happened a long time ago.”

Silver also emphasized that there are pros and cons to all changes made by the NBA. Even so, this change is considered something not only liked by him, but also by basketball fans.

The election of Joel Embiid as the All-NBA second team

Being selected as one of the three All-NBA teams is indeed something to be proud of for the players. That said, they were seen as quite elite athletes.

Unfortunately, this does not apply to Embiid who was selected to the second team of the All-NBA. Meanwhile, Nikola Jokic, who is a Denver Nuggets center player and is the winner of the MVP title, enters the All-NBA main team.

The election of Embiid the Philadelphia 76ers star was controversial because he was the runner-up MVP for the second season in a row. As a big player, he has also achieved an average of 30.6 points per game.

Several parties considered that since the beginning of the voting to select MVP players, Embiid was considered to always be second. In fact, Embiid has a strong reason to be able to win the award. This continued until the moment of the All-NBA team selection.

Regarding this controversy, Silver commented that “In terms of deciding for the All-NBA, I think quite a lot of consideration goes into whether we should really set up a framework.”

According to him, the media should choose top players rather than choosing based on position. He also judged that the current growing system could result in some injustice based on the player’s position.

In this case, Silver provides an opportunity for change in the voting process. This means that Embiid can have a better chance of becoming a first-team player in the future.