The NBA’s owners will meet later this month to decide whether the league will move forward with plans to add new franchises in Las Vegas and Seattle, in a possible next step toward long-awaited NBA expansion.
Team governors will vote during a March 25 meeting on whether to give the NBA the green light to formally examine those cities as potential expansion markets, according to a league source.
During All-Star Weekend, NBA commissioner Adam Silver said team owners would formally discuss expansion at the March Board of Governors meeting. He cautioned that while the NBA would not come out of the meeting ready to vote to approve expansion, “we will likely come out of those meetings ready, prepared to take a next step in terms of potentially talking to interested parties.”
The league has pointed to potential expansion for years, with Las Vegas and Seattle long considered the frontrunners to land new NBA teams. Seattle, which lost the SuperSonics to Oklahoma City in 2008 after a contentious battle to keep the team in town, is the second-largest American media market without an NBA team, after Tampa.
Las Vegas, while significantly less populous than Seattle, is a tourism hub that has successfully brought the NFL (the Raiders), the NHL (the Golden Knights) and the WNBA (the three-time champion Aces) to the city in the last decade. Additionally, the MLB’s Athletics will begin playing in Vegas in 2028. In addition, the NBA has successfully developed the Vegas Summer League, with co-founders Warren LeGarie and Albert Hall, into a significant offseason event on the calendar.
Silver cautioned last month, however, that nothing is assured. While the NBA will consider expansion over the next few months, and employees in the league office have already been studying it and what that could entail, Silver did not say it is definite.
Expansion would ultimately need to be approved by a vote of 23 of the league’s 30 team owners. While adding two teams would allow for scheduling symmetry in each conference, Silver cautioned last month that adding just one new franchise is also a possibility. The league most recently operated with 29 teams between 1995 and 2004, before re-establishing the Bobcats in Charlotte in 2004. That franchise replaced the Hornets, which had moved to New Orleans in 2002. (In 2014, the Bobcats reacquired their original “Hornets” name, with the New Orleans franchise renaming itself the Pelicans.)
“It doesn’t have to be a two-team expansion,” Silver said at All-Star Weekend. “Frankly, it doesn’t have to be any number of teams. I think the logical next move would be to say, all right, we’ve had those discussions internally, we’ve made decisions about cities to focus on and what the opportunity is, and now we’ve got to go out into the marketplace.
“I think that’s probably the most important step, to find out who is potentially interested in owning a franchise in particular cities, what’s the value of that franchise. There’s some work to do in terms of potential conference realignment. That’s the next step there.”
With some owners skittish about expansion, The Athletic reported this past summer that the league has pushed back its original timeline for the process. Several years ago, Silver said the NBA would explore expansion once it was done with a new collective bargaining agreement (finished in April 2023) and a new media rights deal (finished that summer). If the NBA expands, the 30 current teams would dilute their share of the league’s overall revenue, though that money could be recouped in expansion fees.
NBA franchise values have leapt significantly over the last half-decade. Several years ago, sports financiers and investors estimated that a new NBA franchise could fetch $5 billion but that was before the Boston Celtics sold for $6.1 billion and the Los Angeles Lakers were bought for $10 billion.
Industry sources have opined in recent months that an expansion fee could run as high as $8 billion per team. Team governors do not have to split expansion fee revenues with the players.