The league is still kicking the expansion idea around.
National Basketball Association fans in Las Vegas and in Seattle will have to wait a little longer to get a team in their cities. The commissioner, Adam Silver, said the process of expansion has not begun. There is no expansion committee at this point but that could change in a hurry. However someone in the NBA office has considered the ramifications of expansion whether it is Silver or his office and the conclusion is simple. “We’re not quite ready yet,” said Silver. “There’s certainly interest in the process. We’re not there yet in terms of having made any specific decisions about markets, or even frankly to expand. We’ve told interested parties, ‘thank you for your interest, we’ll get back to you’.”
Silver did say, “it was something that we told our board we plan to address this season.” It has been thought for a long time that Las Vegas and Seattle would be the two markets that the league would want as expansion cities. The NBA left Seattle in 2008 because of an arena issue, the Seattle building was outdated even though there was a 1990s renovation of the building that opened in 1962. There is a state-of-the-art Seattle building ready to go but it is a bit unclear where a team would play in Las Vegas. There is an arena in town but there are two groups who would like to put up another Las Vegas arena that would be a showcase for basketball. The NBA has not established a price for a potential owner of an expansion team but in 2023, the Phoenix Suns and the WNBA Phoenix Mercury franchises were sold to Mat Ishbia for around $4 billion. The price will be higher for any potential owner. There will eventually be an expansion in the NBA. There is too much money for owners to split to be ignored.
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