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Establishing Her Position in the Post

Michele A. Roberts was selected to lead the N.B.A. players union in July.Credit...Gabriella Demczuk/The New York Times

Late this summer, as Michele A. Roberts was finishing up one of her first long interviews as the newly appointed executive director of the National Basketball Players Association, she confessed to feeling some dread about moving into the spotlight of the news media.

At the time, she was still weeks from the official starting date of her new job and not yet comfortable articulating positions on league matters. She said, too, that she did not particularly like talking about herself.

But as Roberts and a visiting reporter walked back down to the lobby of her office building that afternoon, she let out a sigh of resignation. “Well, it will be good for the union,” she said.

After a few months on the job, it is clear that Roberts has taken that feeling to heart.

In what has amounted to a media tour lasting months, Roberts has told and retold her back story and, increasingly, detailed her problems with the N.B.A.’s business structure. She has forcefully questioned the league’s pay model and labeled its entire cadre of owners as replaceable. She has criticized Adam Silver, the commissioner of the league, accusing him of violating the collective bargaining agreement.

All of this has apparently been done with a purpose.

Last February, Silver, 52, made his entrance onto the public stage after taking over the position from David Stern, and he earned fast praise for his handling of a variety of issues, including what to do about Donald Sterling, whose inflammatory remarks made it virtually unthinkable that he could continue as the owner of the Los Angeles Clippers.

Acting in determined fashion, Silver was able to get what he wanted — Sterling’s ouster. Silver popped up on various magazine covers and cultivated an image as someone who was smart and personable and effective.

Concurrently, Roberts has felt compelled to establish her own presence on the national stage so that she can compete with Silver’s growing aura.

She is aware that Stern was able to overshadow her predecessor, Billy Hunter, who was ousted from the union in 2013 after 17 years on the job. As a result, it has become imperative for her to come across as a strong figure to the players, unify them, and, as well, influence public opinion — even if the expected negotiations for a new labor deal will not take place until 2017.

“Whether the issues will later allow it or not, she can create the perception that she will be Adam’s equal,” said Len Elmore, a former player and agent who is a college basketball commentator now working on ESPN. “It’s important that she have their attention, and not just when they get around to collective bargaining.”

In a telephone interview this week, Roberts said her recent visibility in media outlets had “helped set the table” as she has settled into her new role. Players she has not yet met have reached out to her after reading about her or seeing her being interviewed on television.

Just as important to Roberts has been inserting herself into the public conversation. Any substantive negotiations with the league will take place in private, but she said the continuing act of shaping the perceptions of the N.B.A. was crucial, even at this early stage. In her opinion, Hunter did not do enough to protect the image of the players or fight what she saw as the predominant narrative of the 2011 lockout — that the players were money hungry, and that the owners were the ones taking risks.

“To the extent that there’s going to be any pressure on the players to accept some proposal from the owners, that pressure will come from fans, and it will come from fans if they have an image of the players as greedy and unappreciative,” Roberts said. “So I felt early on that conceding the airwaves to the owners would be a mistake.”

Receiving particular attention was an interview with ESPN the Magazine in which Roberts called salary caps “un-American,” challenged owners to play the games themselves, described the league as a monopoly and scoffed at Silver’s notion that one-third of the league’s teams were unprofitable.

The article drew a statement of rebuttal from Silver, who, among other things, noted that the salary cap had been in place since the 1980s. In the telephone interview, Roberts clarified that she was expressing her personal feelings and principles — “What executive director would actually favor a system that supports an artificial suppression of player salaries?” — and not a road map of the union’s future negotiating strategy or a signal that she wanted to dismantle the cap.

It was not the only back and forth she has had with Silver recently. On Nov. 19, Silver issued a long statement explaining his decision to impose a 24-game, unpaid ban on Jeff Taylor of the Charlotte Hornets, who last month pleaded guilty in a domestic violence case involving an altercation in a hotel hallway with a woman he knew.

The next day, Roberts released her own statement characterizing Silver’s actions against Taylor as “excessive, without precedent and a violation of the collective bargaining agreement.”

Her response raised some eyebrows. Taylor had not indicated at the time that he would appeal the suspension — this week, he said he would not, instead apologizing for his actions, which will cost him nearly $200,000 of his $915,000 salary. Further, the collective bargaining agreement grants the commissioner discretionary power to suspend players who have engaged in conduct prejudicial to the league.

Beyond that, Roberts put herself in a position where she was, in effect, running counter to the growing sentiment that domestic violence in sports needs to be treated in as tough a manner as possible. To Roberts, the issue was that the league had resorted to inappropriate posturing in the Taylor case because it was mindful of the uproar the N.F.L. had created in the way it initially handled a number of domestic violence cases.

“Whether or not the union responds to what it perceives as a violation of the C.B.A., that’s not the player’s call, that’s the union’s responsibility,” Roberts said of the Taylor case. “The point needed to be made to the league and the public.”

Roberts, who is the first female head of a major sports union, said the fact that she was questioning the punishment Silver imposed in a domestic violence case did not give her any hesitation. “As a lawyer, what is fair or what is not fair, to me, has nothing to do with gender or race,” she said.

William B. Gould IV, a sports labor expert at Stanford, said the various public statements from Roberts were signs that she wanted to “rally the troops, restore their confidence in collective bargaining, instill some credibility in terms of her own leadership” and to show her constituents that she was willing to challenge Silver, however popular he may now be.

“This guy is kind of walking on water right now,” Gould said. “I think probably she wants to chip away at that a little bit and also feel him out, see what his reaction is.”

Roberts praised Silver as “a smart guy” but said she did not feel intimidated. Elmore suggested that N.B.A. players tended not to become unified or educated on the issues until it was too late and that Roberts seemed intent on keeping her constituents engaged, even if that requires her to maintain a consistently high profile.

Inevitably, this period of rhetoric will give way to a time of action. Charles Grantham, who worked for the union from 1978 through 1995 and was the executive director over the final seven years, said unions too often approached negotiations as a “single bargaining transaction and not enough as a long-term business relationship” and that Roberts needed to form a framework of partnership with Silver.

He pointed to the way that Silver and the players union cooperated in the Sterling matter and said that could be a template for the future for both Roberts and the league.

“Adam is very popular right now, and that could be a challenge,” Grantham said. “But her relationship with Adam is going to be very important as they go forward.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section B, Page 10 of the New York edition with the headline: Leader Not Afraid to Throw Elbows for N.B.A. Union. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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