76ers: NBA Commissioner Adam Silver Refuses to Rule Out Anything

If there's one thing you can credit NBA Commissioner Adam Silver on -- it's his consistency. Throughout the entire NBA suspension, which has gone over a month now, Adam Silver has kept the status of the league quite clear. What's the state of the league, you might ask? I don't know, and neither does Silver.

As much as the unknown might frustrate basketball fans around the world, the NBA Commissioner is just as honest as possible. There's hope the NBA can make a return in some sort of capacity, but there's also a real possibility we might've seen the final slate of games for the 2019-2020 NBA Season.

"I don't mean to send any signals about the likelihood or not of restarting the season," Silver said in a conference call on Friday afternoon. "All I can say is we're still at a point where we don't have enough information to make a decision."

Silver's latest message doesn't really offer anything we didn't already know. Just last week, the commissioner made it quite clear that he won't truly have any idea on whether the league can return or not until May 1st at the earliest. 

"There is no appetite to compromise the well-being of our players," Silver mentioned. "In terms of priorities, if you begin with safety, we're not at a point yet where we have a clear protocol and a clear path forward where we feel that we can sit down with the players and say, this is a way to resume the season. Without that, we really haven't engaged in discussions about whether or not it's better or worse to begin focusing on next season."

Basically, Silver is very much open to resuming the season, but it won't ultimately be up to him. Instead, the league will have to rely on health experts and COVID-19 data. "We're looking for the number of new infections to come down," Silver explained. "We're playing close attention to what the CDC is telling us on a federal level and what these various state rules are that are in place."

"There's a lot of data that all has to be melded together to help make these decisions. But that's part of the uncertainty. I think we're not even at the point where we can say, 'if only A, B, and C were met, then there's a clear path.' I think there's still too much uncertainty at this point to say precisely how we move forward."

Justin Grasso covers the Philadelphia 76ers for Sports Illustrated. You can follow him on Twitter: @JGrasso_