The NBA intends to decide in 2026 whether to expand, Commissioner Adam Silver said tonight, the first time he has put a timetable on whether to presumably add Seattle and Las Vegas to the 30-team league.<\/p>\n
Speaking before the NBA Cup final in Las Vegas, Silver again mentioned the economic conundrum behind expansion, in that a decision to move forward \u201cis selling equity\u201d in a league that is already revenue sharing an 11-year, $77B national media rights deal 30 ways.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you own 1\/30th of this league, now you own 1\/32nd if you add two teams,” Silver said. \u201cSo it\u2019s a much more difficult economic analysis, in many ways requires predicting the future. At the same time, I think Seattle and Las Vegas are two incredible cities. Obviously, we had a team in Seattle [the Supersonics, who moved to Oklahoma City], had great success. We have a WNBA team here in Las Vegas, the Aces. We\u2019ve been playing the summer league here for 20 years, playing our Cup games here so we\u2019re very familiar with this market.\u201d<\/p>\n
Besides publicly acknowledging the league was focused on those two cities, he also provided a vote of confidence specifically for Las Vegas, which is likely going to lose the NBA Cup final next season due to a perceived lack of buy-in from the town.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t have any doubt that Las Vegas, despite all the other major league teams that are here now, the other entertainment properties, that this city could support an NBA team,\u201d Silver said. \u201cI think now we\u2019re in a process of working with our 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. And then sometime in 2026, we\u2019ll make a determination.\u201d<\/p>\n
Silver has previously said the league would not expand until it sorted out its local television decline, as rights fees have been freefalling for individual teams — leading to some franchises leaving RSNs to go over-the-air. The commissioner has implied he\u2019d like to have a national streaming RSN in place before expanding in which a platform such as Amazon, Apple, YouTube or ESPN would house an aggregate of local broadcasts.<\/p>\n
By pointing to 2026 for expansion, it is a likely sign the streaming RSN could be formalized in the same calendar year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The NBA intends to decide in 2026 whether to expand, Commissioner Adam Silver said tonight, the first time…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":353187,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[64],"tags":[355,99],"class_list":{"0":"post-353186","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nba","8":"tag-nba","9":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/353186","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=353186"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/353186\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/353187"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=353186"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=353186"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=353186"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}