Commissioner Adam Silver: NBA’s Moratorium Period Is ‘An Imperfect System’

When DeAndre Jordan went back on his word with the Dallas Mavericks and re-signed with the Los Angeles Clippers, it exposed a huge flaw in the NBA’s moratorium period. And Adam Silver agrees.

The NBA commissioner spoke about the Jordan situation during NBA TV’s broadcast Sunday of the Philadelphia 76ers-Boston Celtics summer league game. Silver stressed that while what the center and the Clippers did was perfectly legal, it’s not what anyone (including the league) expects to happen.

“Well, what happened was, until the end of the moratorium, you cannot have a binding agreement in our league,” Silver said, per CBSSports.com. “And everybody understood, going into the moratorium, just that. Nothing can be binding until you get to the end of the moratorium with a signed agreement. Having said that, there’s no doubt it’s not what we want to see happen. Of course, DeAndre Jordan has apologized to (Mavs owner) Mark Cuban. I mean, it puts the Mavericks and Mark in a difficult position.”

However, Silver also brought up a good point as to how the moratorium period is necessary, despite there being kinks to work out in the system.

“But on the other hand people have to remember one of the reasons for the moratorium was it used to be a guy could go from being a player under contract to all of a sudden at 12:01 signing with a new team,” Silver said. “And people would say, ‘How in the world would that happen if he had been under contract and wasn’t supposed to be talking to other teams?’ So everyone agreed we needed a period of time in which more than either the player’s existing team or some team that somehow miraculously had had a conversation with him without having it directly.”

But at the end of the day, Silver agrees with NBA fans that the system needs to be changed and said there’d likely be discussions at Monday’s competition committee meeting and Tuesday’s owners’ meeting.

“I will say it’s an imperfect system, there’s no question about it,” Silver said. “The question is, ‘Is there a better system?’ And that’s something that the league office, and in discussion with our owners, we’re always looking to do things better. … And on top of that, it also is part of our collective bargaining agreement as well. So even if we say, ‘Yeah, here’s a better way of doing it,’ we can’t unilaterally change it. It has to be changed through a collective bargaining process.”

Thumbnail photo via Bob Donnan/USA TODAY Sports Images