It looks like Adam Silver wants to have his cake and eat it, too. Yesterday, I wrote about Tony Jones reporting that the NBA was sending its own doctors to verify the injury to Lauri Markkanen.
Today, Tony Jones apologized for getting something wrong. Apparently, they are just going to verify the MRIs, which is apparently standard practice, but not sending their own medical personnel to Utah.
This is the second time the NBA has made a point of critiquing the reporting on what they are doing. If you don’t remember, they critiqued Rick Carlisle, saying they didn’t do what he said they did.
Obviously, Tony Jones was contacted by someone, which led to his apology today. It’s not clear what to think at this point, but given how the NBA has been going about things, I have a hard time believing anything they say. Or finding any fault with Jones at all.
Putting the he-said he-said behind us, it’s an absolute scabby mess that the NBA keeps picking at. It’s a bad look for the league and for Silver’s leadership to continue creating a PR disaster like this, all for some momentary gains with threats to Utah and Indiana. For what? games with their best players on the floor to manufacture some bogus competitiveness? What if they focused on the upcoming playoff race instead of two small-market teams that they never push anyway? It’s not like Utah or Indiana had any notable number of national games.
The best thing for Adam Silver and the NBA to do right now is to stop. That’s literally all they have to do. Let the Utah Jazz do the things that so many other teams have done for so many years. Do your job and cover the competitive games going on as we speak, rather than trying to harm the future of teams doing what’s best for them.
