Adam Silver says fans who can’t afford streaming services to watch NBA games can still watch free highlights

Adam Silver went out and said the quiet part out loud this week calling the NBA, the one he’s in charge of, a ‘highlight league.’ If you’re a basketball fan and can’t afford the ever-growing list of streaming services, Adam Silver wants you to shut up and just watch clips on the internet.

Adam Silver calls NBA a ‘highlight league’ tells fans to watch clips on social media if they can’t afford streaming platforms

Adam Silver was asked about the rising cost to watch a season of NBA games as a fan of a particular team, considering all the games on either cable or streaming services. He said that there a bunch of games that will go on free, broadcast TV, and that fans can also consume the…

— Rachel Nichols (@Rachel__Nichols) September 10, 2025

Adam Silver doesn’t care if you’re poor just watch highlights

Adam Silver says fans who can’t afford streaming services to watch NBA games can still watch free highlights, calling the NBA a “highlight sport.”

(h/t @ohnohedidnt24 )

pic.twitter.com/op0DayFFqR

— NBACentral (@TheDunkCentral) September 10, 2025

What an answer. What an unbelievably bad answer for the commissioner of the NBA to give. Imagine being a TV partner who just cut the league billions of dollars in checks and then hearing Silver tell fans “eh, don’t bother watching the full games.”

The Highlight League Problem

To be honest, Adam Silver should have said the quiet part out loud that most NBA fans are just illegally streaming games anyways. It would have been better than suggesting that watching highlights, completely out of context on a platform like TikTok for free was some type of added benefit.

I couldn’t imagine following The Liberty Line on Instagram and attempting to watch illegally ripped Sixers highlights and actually having a grasp on the game. You think we’re posting the bad parts?

Absolutely not. We could casually post 10 highlights of Joel Embiid dominating in a game and leave out the part that he’s actually playing on one leg with Bells Palsy and the Sixers just lost 120-87.

Doesn’t matter. We are posting content, not basketball. If Adam Silver and the other rats at the league offices are saying it’s fine to consume basketball in that matter, then they are saying “hey, none of this shit actually matters, fuck us” and completely outcasting a generation of fans, preventing them from actually understanding the game itself.

Okay…We’ll Be Fair

Adam Silver did expand on the quote, pointing out that the new media deals will increase NBA games on broadcast TV from 15 to 75.

On paper, that sounds nice but if you’re a fan and your team has x-amount of national games, only 14 of those will be on free broadcast. The other 20, you’ll find behind a paywall on Amazon Prime, ESPN, and Peacock.

Hope you’ve got deep pockets or don’t mind missing half the season. Actually now that I think about it, it might be good to avoid the Sixers regular season and just hold onto hope that when I tune in sometime after the trade deadline in February, this team is still on the court together, but you get my point.

That’s where leagues like the NBA are screwing up. Fans don’t want to juggle 15 apps and 10 logins to figure out where their team is playing tonight. They just want to watch the damn game. Meanwhile, Adam Silver’s answer makes it sound like if you can’t afford it, congrats, just watch highlights, broke bitch.

You don’t feel the weight of a big shot if you didn’t live through the 47 minutes that came before it. That’s what people are missing now. They already took baseball away from us with their dumb pitch clock. Now they are doing the same with the NBA. Forget sitting down for a couple of hours and actually living the game, you’re just doom scrolling through an algorithm that only shows you the good parts.

As a content creator, yes highlights are fun and social media plays a massive role in what we are able to accomplish. That doesn’t change the fact that if Adam Silver’s vision of the NBA is a “highlight league” with fans catching dunks on TikTok instead of full games, then the league is selling out its own product.

The NBA should be fighting to make the games more accessible, not waving the white flag and telling fans to settle for YouTube scraps. Once the league truly becomes a “highlight league,” the game itself doesn’t matter anymore and that’s how you lose a generation of real fans.

Join The Chase