LAS VEGAS – NBA commissioner Adam Silver said the league would decide in 2026 whether to add two teams, and if it happens, Las Vegas and Seattle are the most likely expansion cities.
Silver, speaking ahead of the NBA Cup championship in Las Vegas, said the league had looked at several markets for expansion, including Vegas and Seattle, and clarified to The Athletic after his news conference that those two American cities are the ones upon which the league is most focused.
The league almost surely, based on Silver’s comments and math, would add two new markets if it were to add any, which means if there is NBA expansion, it would likely reach both Las Vegas and Seattle.
“We’re in the process of working with our (existing) teams and gauging the level of interest and having a better understanding of what the economics would be on the ground for those particular teams and what a pro forma would look like for them,” Silver said. “And then sometime in 2026, we’ll make a determination.”
Las Vegas has hosted the championship rounds for the first three NBA Cup tournaments, though that could change next season, and has been the site for the league’s primary Summer League since 2004. Additionally, Vegas, with about 2 million people in the city and surrounding communities, is already home to the Raiders of the NFL, the Golden Knights of the NHL and the Aces of the WNBA, and the Athletics are scheduled to open a new ballpark here in 2028.
Seattle, meanwhile, was home to the SuperSonics from 1967 until 2008, when the franchise moved to Oklahoma City and was renamed the Thunder.
Silver said the main issue under review by the league’s existing 30 teams is whether there is appetite to divide the NBA’s roughly $11 billion in revenues by two more teams. He also said he is aware potential expansion has been a topic of discussion for years, and cities like Las Vegas and Seattle have been waiting for a long time for a decision like this.
“I want to be sensitive about this notion that we’re somehow teasing these markets, because I know we’ve been talking about it for a while,” Silver said.
He said the difference between expansion in North America – the league considered Mexico City as a possible expansion site – and the NBA’s dual-track plan to begin a new league in Europe with FIBA, the governing body for global basketball, is that traditional expansion is “selling equity in the current league.
“It’s a much more difficult economic analysis in many ways and requires predicting the future,” Silver said.
The NBA last added a team in 2004, when the Charlotte Bobcats became the league’s 30th franchise. Per the collective bargaining agreement, players get 51 percent of all basketball-related income, so the pie owners divide amongst themselves is a little more than $5 billion. Perhaps the largest piece of the league’s fixed income is the 11-year, $76 billion broadcast agreement with major networks and streaming services. The contract for media rights doesn’t grow with two additional teams, so the league’s governors would have to be satisfied that the revenues generated by new franchises would offset the losses of carving up the media rights package by 32 teams, instead of 30.
While Silver didn’t necessarily rule out the possibility of existing teams relocating to new markets, he said the NBA can’t force a team to move. There is routine chatter in league circles about the possibility of the Grizzlies moving from Memphis or the Pelicans from New Orleans, but Silver said “relocating a team requires that team to desire to be relocated, specifically the governors, and there is a process.”
“Just because some markets don’t generate the same revenue as others, it doesn’t mean they are markets that are not worthy of NBA franchises,” Silver said. “If you look in our constitution, the factors that the owners are required to look at in making determination on whether to relocate a team is to look at the support that team has historically had in that community, the operation of that team,, the competitive opportunity in that market. And we live in a big country. So I think if we were to relocate team, I don’t think the right way to do it would be to rank the teams 1 to 30 in terms of market size or economic opportunities, markets, and then just take the two teams at the bottom and say, let’s take them to markets where they could be more prosperous.
Silver called relocation a “separate issue” from expansion for the NBA.