I have always understood watching sports as a kind of pleasant helplessness and following the business of it as wasting one’s spare time nosing around in someone else’s spreadsheets, but I don’t have my hand on the culture’s rudder. No one does, really. We collectively slip into these currents of thought and no one can locate the point at which we deviated from our previous path.

Perhaps as a product of the internet using the whole buffalo or perhaps because we’re getting more cynical by the month, we have grown increasingly fascinated with shop talk. In entertainment, you can see it in the slew of What This Means For… pieces that circulate when something makes a splash or a thud. There are at least as many pieces kicking around about the implications of Get Out’s box office success for black auteurs, independent cinema, and the film industry as a whole as there are pieces that engage with the text of the movie. In sports, there is an ever-nattering discussion about endorsement and television contracts, salary cap specifics and the finer points of collective bargaining agreements. You hear leagues referred to as products a lot more than you used to, and opinions abound about what Adam Silver or Roger Goodell should do to solve this problem and that.

Personally, I have a fundamental dislike of anyone who makes eight figures a year working for bankers and oilmen, but those are shoes people apparently want to try on. Case in point, we’re having a debate about Silver’s options with regard to punishing teams that sit their stars for nationally televised games. When the Cleveland Cavaliers rested LeBron James, Kyrie Irving, and Kevin Love this past Saturday night against the Clippers, Mark Jackson grumbled during the broadcast that the tactic is an absolute joke, and from there, we’ve been soaked by a deluge of takes arguing in every direction: that it’s smart strategy, that it’s disrespectful to ticket-buying fans, that something—shake Dan Gilbert by the lapels, dammit!—must be done.

The solution to the problem—such that a game you were looking forward to turning out uncompetitive is a problem—is simple: shorten the season. Lop some ten or twelves games off the schedule so the contests are more evenly spaced out and the overall mileage on players is reduced. The quality of play would improve and teams would be less inclined to sacrifice losses for the sake of preserving their stars. Of course, that’s not going to happen but the sole reason it won’t is financial. Television partners aren’t going to accept fewer games, nor will franchises smaller gate receipts, nor the players less lucrative contracts. This predicament is a compelling argument for capitalism’s counterproductiveness. The NBA could be more enjoyable to watch, but it will choose to be more profitable instead.

So, assuming the NBA and its partners don’t do the obviously correct thing—I don’t know, I guess Adam Silver should put more pressure on owners to play their best players on nights when there’s an ESPN production truck in the parking lot? The star-benching practice matters because there are nights when a working class family has saved up a not-inconsiderable amount of money to see Blake Griffin and Chris Paul take on LeBron James and Kyrie Irving and they don’t get to, which is a bummer, but let’s not pretend the NBA cares primarily about that. This is about millions in ad revenue from Verizon and BBVA Compass. And I can’t be bothered to concern myself with the massive corporations’ bottom lines. The only time I think about Verizon is when my cell service gets spotty, or when they’re clashing with their workers. I don’t weep for Lowell McAdam’s travails. His raison d’être is buck-making.

By the same token, Adam Silver’s job is the perfection of the sport as a saleable good, which means his interests overlap with fans’ only occasionally. Silver is the reason the NBA has poured additional resources into officiating, and he’s also the reason Wisconsin is paying $250 million for a new Bucks arena and the reason corporate logos are allowed on jerseys now. He got an absurd amount of credit for running Donald Sterling out of the league after Sterling revealed himself on tape to be a Chappelle’s Show sketch villain, but everyone who followed basketball already knew he was an awful human being. Silver was empowered to remove him only once Sterling became an unignorable blight. This is all just business and some of it is for the greater good of the game and the people who love it and some of it isn’t, but the motivations involved aren’t ever pure. Silver’s function is to make decisions in service of profiting the obscenely wealthy folks who own NBA franchises. That’s the beginning and end of the gig.

Silver has been a cuddlier commish than David Stern. That he’s less bellicose and Napoleonic than his predecessor makes him more well-liked by journalists, who tend to portray him as an affable, whip-smart pragmatist who’s interested in solutions as opposed to optics. Whether this is true or not, if Silver wants to make the issue of teams punting on national television games go away, he’s going to have to coerce his owners into compliance, whether through hammer-of-god fines or more subtle measures. You can bet his pitch won’t have much to do with the working class family’s disappointment at missing out on LeBron.

This is all fine as far as it goes, and business is business, but we should be honest about what we’re talking about here, when we’re putting ourselves in Silver’s place, which are the inner workings of an entity that is designed to commodify basketball as efficiently as possible. If that’s something you want to invest in any more than you absolutely have to—well, I don’t have my hand on the culture’s rudder. But playing pretend executive and imagining trying to balance the desires of the paying public with the appetites of unscrupulous plutocrats and television suits and marketing honchos has nothing to do with the sport itself. It has a lot to do with the NBA, but I shove that thought deep down whenever I can.