NBA Commissioner Adam Silver may be channeling Norma Desmond of “Sunset Boulevard.”  To Silver’s reckoning, the league’s finals are still big. It’s the cities that are small.

Oklahoma City versus the Indiana Pacers may make for great basketball, but nobody ever confused OKC or Indianapolis with New York, Boston, Dallas, Los Angeles, San Francisco or Houston, major markets that fell by the wayside to the teams in the finals. 

The teams that made the NBA Finals feature stars who are up-and-coming rather than established. That means casual fans will not be attracted to see LeBron James or Steph Curry, which also means national interest and TV ratings are likely to be down. That’s never good news for a sport.

Look no further than baseball’s 2023 World Series, which featured the Arizona Diamondbacks versus the Texas Rangers. The Southwest loved it. The rest of the nation, not so much, and ratings plummeted 23% from the previous year. 

On Wednesday's edition of "Breakfast Ball,"  Silver defended the little guys.

"At the end of the day, we are a league of relatively small markets. The goal is to have a league where every team is in position to compete," Silver said. "It's been intentional, from our standpoint, to create a system, a collective bargaining agreement [CBA], that allows more teams to compete. We're going to have to go through a process of getting to the point where people are accustomed to tuning into the finals because the two teams deserve to be there, and it's the best basketball.”

Silver wants to emulate the NFL’s Super Bowl, where people tune in no matter who is playing.

"'It's a national holiday. That's nirvana. If the Knicks are in the finals, there's a segment of our fan base that's going to watch that may not watch if it's other teams. But my job is to get people to love and follow this game, so that if you're a huge basketball fan, you should want to tune in to the finals.”