NBA commissioner Adam Silver discussed the DeAndre Jordan fiasco and the moratorium period during NBA TV's broadcast of the Philadelphia 76ers-Boston Celtics summer league game on Sunday. Here's the full quote:

Well, what happened was, until the end of the moratorium, you cannot have a binding agreement in our league. And everybody understood, going into the moratorium, just that. Nothing can be binding until you get to the end of the moratorium with a signed agreement. Having said that, there’s no doubt it’s not what we want to see happen. Of course, DeAndre Jordan has apologized to Mark Cuban. I mean, it puts the Mavericks and Mark in a difficult position.

Having said that, I’ve talked to Mark directly about it, he understood the system going in. By the way, there’s no one on the planet more competitive than Mark Cuban. I think he’ll work through it. But it’s not what we’d like to see in our system.

But on the other hand people have to remember one of the reasons for the moratorium was it used to be a guy could go from being a player under contract to all of a sudden at 12:01 signing with a new team. And people would say, 'How in the world would that happen if he had been under contract and wasn’t supposed to be talking to other teams?' So everyone agreed we needed a period of time in which more than either the player’s existing team or some team that somehow miraculously had had a conversation with him without having it directly -- you needed an opportunity where other teams would have a chance to talk to that player. And now, what happened in this case was, of course, his own team -- and I don’t know what the facts there are, and I’m sure we’ll ultimately spend more time looking into it, but at least as reported, DeAndre Jordan, through the moratorium period, reached out -- that’s the report at least -- and had second thoughts about leaving.

I will say it’s an imperfect system, there’s no question about it. The question is, 'Is there a better system?' And that’s something that the league office, and in discussion with our owners, we’re always looking to do things better. It so happens we have an owners’ meeting here in Las Vegas on Tuesday, we have a competition committee [Monday]. And there’s no doubt we’ll spend time talking about it to see just that, if there’s a better way. And on top of that, it also is part of our collective bargaining agreement as well. So even if we say, 'Yeah, here’s a better way of doing it,' we can’t unilaterally change it. It has to be changed through a collective bargaining process. 

Silver makes a good point about the 12:01 a.m. signings without a moratorium period. There have been calls to get rid of the moratorium, but if that were to happen and deals like that were to take place again, you'd have some angry front-office people.

One idea: shorten the moratorium period. Wouldn't two or three days be enough time for teams to reach out to all of their main targets? The moratorium begins on July 1 in the current system, and Jordan verbally committed to the Dallas Mavericks on July 3. The main problem with what happened here wasn't the decommitment itself, but the five-day period in between that and the original agreement. If the moratorium was shorter, the Mavs could have had a binding contract on their hands, or they could have turned their attention to other players.

Adam Silver says the league will talk about the moratorium.  (USATSI)
Adam Silver says the league will talk about the moratorium. (USATSI)