 Now, this is SiliconANGLE.com's exclusive coverage of Sapphire. This is theCUBE, our flagship program where we go out to the events and extract a signal from the noise. This is our fourth year of theCUBE, born four years ago at SAP and EMC World. We called it the ESPN of tech back in the day and we always joke that there wasn't any deep dive commentary but we're pleased to actually have what ESPN would love to have on. Adam Silver, the deputy commissioner of the NBA, Chris Berman and all the folks at ESPN would eat their heart out to have you here. So, welcome to theCUBE. Well, thank you. It's great to be here. So, SAP, obviously, is talking about the future of business, this modern era of business with technology in real time. NBA has been very progressive. You guys have a modernization going on now. The franchises are changing. The fan base is changing. You're here at SAP. What are you talking about here at SAP with Bill McDermott and the team? And what does the NBA look at as a sports league and with a lot of franchises? It's moving, changing, and the old contracts and the old rules aren't really relevant when you have Twitter and you have unlimited media frictionless sharing. How do you view all that? Well, we're here looking for solutions. I mean, frankly, we know what we don't know. I mean, just a specific example with HANA and SAP is that when David Sternknife first sat down with Bill McDermott a few years ago and said, we have this issue with our stats database, and we want to find a way to allow fans wherever they're located to engage deeply with those statistics, whether for predictive behavior and to analyze what they think is going to happen in a particular game or to make relative comparisons between players among players in the league. And he explained to us what HANA was, and we ended up meeting with one of Bill's teams at SAP who ultimately designed a new statistical database system for us where you can go on mba.com and access any of the kinds of permutations, statistics I've been talking about. And frankly, one of the reasons we got there to your point about how the world is evolving around us is that there were lots of other sites that I won't name that were doing that. You know, they didn't necessarily have the official data, and I thought this isn't a question of sending out an army of lawyers to shut them down, this is a question of out-competing them. I said, how can anybody be doing a better job than the NBA? We own this data. We have the richest data. We have the deepest data. We have it in real time. Fans should want to come to nba.com to get that information. Best defense is a good offense in this case, right? Exactly. Exactly. And so that's our relationship with SAP. And even just the several hours I've spent already here today, sort of in the green room behind the scenes talking to Bill and his executive team, it's like, all right, here are some other business issues we have. We've talked about China earlier today. We've talked about how to connect with our fans. And look, you know that only a minuscule percentage of our fans actually experience our game in person. You know, that's just the nature of it. So it's really through technology, through innovation, that we're going to connect with fans on a global basis. That's why I'm here. So what was your comment on the keynote about Bill McDermott? Share with the folks here about his history with basketball. Oh, so anyway, with Bill, isn't that interesting? Coincidentally, when we first sat down with Bill, he mentioned that his grandfather was Bobby McDermott. Bobby McDermott I'd heard of, but honestly, I hadn't thought a lot about. I went back to the office and we have an archive, his name, Paul Hirschheimer, and I said, Paul, tell me everything you can about Bobby McDermott. He goes, Bobby McDermott. And like he just off the top of his head, he goes, Bobby McDermott, you might not realize this, but in 1946, he was named the greatest basketball player in the history of the then NBL, the predecessor league to the NBA. He was a 5'11 guard. He averaged over 20 points a game. And back then, this was like obviously more than 35 years before the three-point shot. This was before anybody was averaging 20 points a game. And he was, I think, a three-time MVP. He won two championships. I can go on and on, but it's incredible. And you know, this morning, I actually, my friend and colleague, Paul Hirschheimer, found an old Bobby McDermott trading card. I don't even know how he found it, which I presented to Bill. But, you know, it's like the coincidence that that's our relationship now. It's just, frankly, a really cool thing. I found the gesture would be fantastic. And Bill McDermott, such a great guy. And the keynote up there, they had that little anchor desk, kind of like the cube format here. And don't forget JB's basketball credential, either. Captain of the Harvard Basketball Team. I was on Twitter saying, I'm negotiating with JB's age. People thought I was really serious about coming on an anchor in the Cube. So JB, if you're watching, we want you. Drafted by the Atlanta Hawks. McDermott on his keynote, talked about a business example. You know, talking about all these talks about, you know, people using this. And you've got the bartender, how they're instrumenting the tab. It's just a great example of instrumentation, measurement, data that they couldn't get before, Internet of Things, whatever. Industrial Internet, as G.E. calls it. I want to ask you something a little bit more about the NBA in this regard. Because the NBA has really done great strides of, I won't say cleaning up the game, but looking at the integrity of the players off the court and on the court. And that's been something that, you know, Stern has done extremely well. But now you have the ability to instrument the actual athletes. They're on Twitter. They're building their own direct fan bases. So the question is, how do you guys look at that as an opportunity and challenge? How do you guys, because now you have more media. They're self-promoting. Well, right. And look, I don't want to suggest by any means we can control, you know, what they do. But you can monitor. We can monitor. We can do it to a certain extent. And what we said to our players, I mean, your employee is just like I'm an employee of a company, and I think, you know, and there are certain limits. I mean, especially one thing we can do is say, you know, during 45 minutes before the game, through the game, certain period afterwards, when we require media availability. We don't want them going off and tweeting in the corner. We want them talking to media, and they recognize that's part of their job. And, yeah, we monitor it to a certain extent, but we also are realists. You know, I think that we understand that it's an opportunity for them to connect directly with their fans, or in certain cases, people who aren't their fans. But we also understand that it's an expectation of fans in this day and age that they're going to have that direct access to our athletes. And I think it's synergistic. I mean, it's effective. I mean, recognizing that it's warts and all, that players get themselves in trouble, league executives get themselves in trouble, and owners get themselves in trouble, increasingly, on Twitter as well. I know you got to run, so you want to kind of get one last question. And honestly, the TV contracts over the years have been pretty much territorial. A couple networks, and now you have cable. Now you have unlimited. Now you have NFL, TV, MLB, TV, NBA, vertical and programming, where you can control your own destiny, you have different inside looks, all that data. How are you looking at the future of media in that regard, where now you have unlimited outlets potential? Can you talk about how you're looking at that, and maybe some of the tech approaches that you're taking? Well, I would just say it's going to be a balance. We recognize that people still want aggregators or editors, and that you mention ESPN at the top of the show. I mean, people are still going to go to ESPN and expect to get the best highlights, you know, presumably the game of the week, or the game of the night, or whatever else. But in addition to that, there are some fans who only want to consume NBA, don't want to sit through SportsCenter and get the hockey scores first, or the baseball scores, or whatever else. And for those people, there's NBA TV, there's NBA.com, and other outlets, and like thousands of others that we didn't create. So I think for us, it's a realization that you need to do both, and that some fans, you know, are out there have want to consume us, you know, in incredibly deep ways, and get down to like the nitty gritty statistics, and others just want to have the highlights, and you've got to serve all those fans. Well, we're getting a hook from your handler, Adam Silver, How come my man, Jeff, doesn't get a question? Jeff didn't get a question. All right, Jeff, I got it, I got it. I'm not going to wait, Jeff. I don't have any handler. This is for Jeff. Fantastic, I appreciate you taking the time. So my question I wanted to ask was, so obviously we're at SAP Sapphire, it's a technology event in some ways, but it's also a business event. And in this market, we talk a lot about the technology, but less maybe sometimes about the business value of all this technology. And you mentioned an example earlier about making data and predictive analytics available to all the fans out there who might not actually go to an event. So can you translate that? How does that translate to business value for the NBA? And more broadly, when you're looking at areas where data might provide business value, how do you identify those areas where you want to focus on, build new capabilities, focusing on the data is the underlying kind of enabler, and the technology is the enabler. But really, how do you identify where the business value is? You know, I'd say one easy example, again, just going back to the stats database that SAP HANA built for us, we've already seen that we've doubled the amount of time that our fans spend on mba.com, looking at statistics than we did before we had the HANA database. So that's just a simple example, and clearly there's all kinds of ways of monetizing that traffic when you double it there. But I think from a more general standpoint, it's about increasing engagement. As I said in response to an earlier question, one of the fundamental things we look at in terms of television viewership is duration. And we found that from when the time I still got involved in the NBA a little over 20 years ago, let's say the average fan was watching a two and a half hour game, 50 minutes. The average fan is now watching around 40 minutes, just because it's the nature of the number of options they have, and if through deep data we can increase that engagement, we find other ways that the people remain interested in the game, frankly, that they may be a Nick fan, but if their team is down 15 points and there's two minutes left, they're turning the channel. On the other hand, if they're engaged and they're thinking, all right, what does Carmelo Anthony do typically with a minute left in the game? What are his fourth quarter statistics? How does he behave when a team is down? Can statistically a team overcome a deficit of 15 points in that many minutes? We find all those kinds of new approaches in the game help us monetize and help by increasing the level of passion and depth of fandom for our consumers. And in terms of actually making those decisions, how is the ability to do those kind of analytics? Internally, how has that impacted how the NBA operates in terms of sometimes making data-driven decisions and using data to do business is that there's a cultural and a people issue there as well. Yeah, I'll give you another example, and this is on the business side, and that is ticket pricing. I mean, through analytics, we've entered into a new world of flexible ticket pricing where it's dynamic pricing. Price so now, in the old days, which weren't so long ago, if you bought a season ticket package for the Orlando Magic here in Orlando, of course, it was the same price for every ticket. Now the teams have recognized that people, that there's different values for different games. So it's just a function of data, and it's based on demand for those particular games. People may care more about seeing the Miami heat play than they will another team that I won't mention, at least in that particular season. And then secondly, teams are also realizing that people, just like with the airlines, people will pay a certain price for the ability to lock in that seat two weeks before the game, and they're going to pay a different price to get a seat an hour before the game. And so by mining all that data, we're in essence able to increase the yields from any particular game. Fantastic. Well, Adam, I appreciate you taking the time to answer some of the questions. Yeah, absolutely. We didn't know we'd get the hook, so sure, but Adam Silver, thanks for coming on the queue. This is the NBA on the side of the queue. We call this ESPN of tech, and we copied ESPN on Twitter. Thanks for coming on theCUBE, and NBA is transforming, and obviously digital media is also exploding, and obviously with technology like SAP, they're going to start doing new things. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate it. We'll be right back with our guests. Deep dive into SAP and all the action here on the ground. This is exclusive coverage from siliconangle.com and Wikibon. This is theCUBE, we'll be right back at this short break.