The NBA has reached agreement with MGM to make the company their first official gaming partner.

As part of the deal, MGM will use official NBA data on its betting platform and work with the league to detect and prevent fraud and game-fixing.

The value of the partnership with MGM was not disclosed.

The NBA will also look to sign similar agreements regarding its data with other sports betting operators. 

MGM has sponsored the NBA's Summer League in each of the past two years.

Adam Silver announced free agency will be moved from its typical midnight Eastern start on July 1st.

Silver said free agency will be shifted to earlier in the day beginning in 2019.

“I not only heard from my friends in the media, but as I get older, I think we are all tired of all-nighters,” Silver said with a smile. “I also heard from several teams, ‘Does this really have to be at midnight?’ I think that’s something we need to find agreement on with the Players Association, but I think we can change it for next year.”

ESPN had live coverage leading up to the start of free agency but the late start time makes it difficult to draw ratings.

The 2019 free agency class will include Kevin Durant, Kawhi Leonard, Kyrie Irving, Jimmy Butler, Klay Thompson and others.

Adam Silver revealed he believes the NBA is ready to scrap its one-and-done rule and begin to allow high school players to enter the NBA directly from high school again.

"I'm not here to say we have a problem," Silver said. "And I love where the league is right now. But I think we can create a better system."

Silver expects the new rule to be in place for the 2021 NBA Draft.

Silver was a proponent of making the eligibility age older, up to 20 instead of the current 19, though has changed his stance on that in recent weeks.

"My personal view is that we're ready to make that change," Silver said. "It won't come immediately. But when I've weighed the pros and cons, given that Condoleezza Rice and her commission have recommended to the NBA that those one-and-done players now come directly into the league and in essence the college community is saying `We do not want those players anymore,' I think that tips the scale in my mind."

Michele Roberts has been reelected as Executive Director of the NBPA on another four-year term.

Roberts replaced Billy Hunter in 2014.

Michele Roberts responded to a series of assertions that blamed the NBA's current competitive balance issues on the rejection of cap smoothing by the players leading to the 2016 cap spike.

“Frankly, I have been amused by the chatter suggesting that smoothing — or more accurately the failure to smooth — has now become some folks’ boogeyman de jure,” Roberts said in an email. “While we haven’t yet blamed it for the assassination of MLK, some are now suggesting that it is responsible for all that is presumably wrong with today’s NBA.

“Needless to say, I beg to differ.”

The salary cap, which limits the amount each team can spend on players, is tied directly to league revenue. In 2016, the first year under the new agreement, the salary cap increased by $24 million, to $94 million.

“Under the concept we discussed, the total salaries paid to players in the aggregate each season would not have changed, but smoothing would have allowed for steadier, incremental Cap increases, instead of a one-year spike,” an N.B.A. spokesman, Mike Bass, wrote in an email.

In February 2015, union reps from each team unanimously rejected the proposal from the NBA.

Agreeing to artificially lower the salary cap “offends our core,” Roberts wrote. “It would be quite counterintuitive for the union to ever agree to artificially lower, as opposed to raise, the salary cap. If we ever were to do so, there would have to be a damn good reason, inarguable and uncontroverted. There was no such assurance in place at that time.”

Many players had been preparing for the expected spike to become free agents in 2016.

Roberts explained, instead of artificially depressing the salary cap, the league could have proposed advancing television money into 2015 and increasing spending. But it didn’t want to “in part because teams weren’t expecting an early Cap increase,” Roberts wrote.

“Just the same way that they shouldn’t be faulted for seeking to meet teams’ expectations,” she added, “folks should recognize how important we felt it was to meet the reciprocal expectations felt by the players.”

Roberts believes the teams who signed players to bad deals should be blamed.

“I get that there are folks who believe that some of the contracts executed post the smoothing rejection were too large,” she wrote. “I vehemently disagree as I am sure do the players that negotiated those contracts. However, if that’s the beef folks have, take it up with the GMs that negotiated them. The argument that we gave teams too much money to play with is preposterous.”