THE NBA'S TECH SUMMIT TURNS 25 THIS YEAR, AND ITS RETURN TO THE BAY AREA IS A FULL-CIRCLE MOMENT

NBA Commissioner Adam Silver had no idea 25 years ago that the Tech Summit would turn into much of anything, much less one of the hottest tickets at All-Star weekend.

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Then again, nobody could have seen this coming.

The NBA celebrated 25 years of tech summits on Friday, a full-circle moment of sorts. The event started when the league's All-Star weekend was most recently in the Bay Area in 2000 - and now, a quarter-century later, with this weekend's events in San Francisco the tech summit is back and still growing.

The question at that first summit was a simple one: "What's next?" Turns out, nobody had the entire answer.

"Our first Tech Summit feels like a distant memory because there has been so much innovation around media and technology over the past 25 years," said Silver, who was president of NBA Entertainment when the tech summit was born."We started the Tech Summit in San Francisco during the early days of the internet. At that time, there were skeptics, including many of the prominent leaders in sports media, who felt the 'World Wide Web' wouldn't become as transformational as some were forecasting.