NBA Commissioner Adam Silver clarified that he has no power to veto a trade amid confusion from league fans in the wake of the controversial Luka Doncic trade to the Los Angeles Lakers.
The overriding sentiment was that the Dallas Mavericks gifted the Lakers a generational star who has not yet reached his prime to become LeBron James‘ successor.
While many of the Mavericks fans were heartbroken to see Doncic get traded and outraged for the coldness of the stealth execution, some felt their team should have gotten more than the Lakers’ package of Anthony Davis, Max Christie, 2031 first-round pick and a 2030 pick swap. Some fans even clamored for Silver to step in and block the trade, referencing the late David Stern’s role in the nixed Chris Paul trade to the Lakers in 2011.
I would have fully supported the NBA vetoing the Luka trade. There were probably plenty of teams that would have offered much more than what the Lakers did, and they didn’t even get the chance to make an offer. https://t.co/4EaANfFWM3
— Ryan Suydam (@ryansuydam) February 2, 2025
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“No [I don’t have a veto power] believe it or not,” Silver said on the Barstool Sports’ “Pardon My Take” podcast on Feb. 12. “And there’s some confusion. People have yelled out to me for some reason in the last week or so when I’ve been at games that I should be vetoing that trade the way David Stern vetoed a trade back in the old days.
“There’s always some confusion there. David never vetoed a trade. When he was the acting owner of the New Orleans [Hornets] and the commissioner at the time, he turned down a trade that was proposed to him by the general manager of the team.”
Jeanie Buss Set the Record Straight
Three years ago, Lakers governor Jeanie Buss also set the record straight about the infamous Chris Paul trade on Showtime’s “All The Smoke” podcast as it happened in unusual circumstances.
“So if you remember we were in a lockout, right? When there’s a lockout, there’s a moratorium on everything: you can’t make trades, you can’t do anything,” Buss said at the time. “As we were making a deal with the union and then starting to lift the lockout rules, all the representatives of the teams had to be in New York for the Board of Governors meeting to ratify the new CBA. And so as we’re in this room, all of a sudden, there’s kind of this rumor that goes in around the room about a trade. Well, at that time, the team was run by the league, right?
“So there’s no way a trade can be happening if we’re all in this room doing league business. Except the [New Orleans] general manager of the team felt that he had the authority to make a trade. … So the trade was happening while everybody is in this room, so teams felt like ‘How is that possible? We didn’t get a chance to make a trade for Chris Paul?’ And so they all attacked the league and said this wasn’t fair.”
Buss said Stern rejected the trade as Hornets owner, not as the NBA commissioner.
NBA Commissioner’s Role in NBA Trades
Silver explained that his office doesn’t judge the merits of a trade but rather they make sure it is legal under the Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA).
“What our basketball and legal folks do is they make sure that trade works under the confines of the collective bargaining agreement with whatever rules are in place,” Silver continued. “Then it’s up or down; it gets approved based on those rules. We don’t get to weigh in on what we think the merits of the trade are or should be.”
So whether the Mavericks were fleeced or not is no longer Silver nor his office’s concerns.
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