Adam Silver talks mid-market NBA Finals, new All-Star game format and the Mavs lottery

The Oklahoma City Thunder and Indiana Pacers will square off in the 2025 NBA Finals starting on Thursday night at the Paycom Center.

It's a matchup of two teams who play in mid-level markets, which always creates the conversation about how the sport's ratings will fare outside of NBA diehards.

On Wednesday's edition of "Breakfast Ball," NBA Commissioner Adam Silver offered up his take on why the matchup is great for the NBA. 

"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.

"If I asked somebody if they were going to watch the Super Bowl, they wouldn't say 'who's 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 because that's the best basketball."

It's the first time that the Thunder have appeared in the NBA Finals since 2012 and the Pacers' first trip to the championship round since 2000.

Here are some other notable tidbits from Silver's appearance:

The Dallas Mavericks were awarded the No. 1 pick in the NBA Draft Lottery with a 1.8% pre-lottery chance to win the pick. (Photo by Jacek Boczarski/Anadolu via Getty Images)