Las Vegas and Seattle, the NBA announced Wednesday<\/a>.<\/p>\nNBA veteran Jerome “JYD” Williams, aka the “Junkyard Dog,” says Vegas is the perfect place to have an expansion team, with unique characteristics you can’t get anywhere else.<\/p>\n
He got his name during his early days as a Detroit Piston for his hard work and hustle, and now he gives that same energy back to the Las Vegas community.<\/p>\n
“We started our Shooting for Peace program and serving the community at large with scholarships for the students here, as well as outreach from Toy drives to Thanksgiving meals,” said Williams.<\/p>\n
Williams, who lives between Las Vegas and the East Coast, is the founder and Chairman of the National Basketball Retired Players Association Las Vegas Chapter, now known as Legends of Basketball, which he started 10 years ago.<\/p>\n
“To really serve as another nonprofit that was not only waiting for an NBA team, but also because of NBA Summer League and the things that were going on here in the community,” said Williams.<\/p>\n
He gives a unique perspective on what an NBA team could mean for the Entertainment Capital.<\/p>\n
It’s a place where the NBA already has a big presence with the annual NBA Summer League, but also the more recent “in-season tournament”, the Emirates Cup.<\/p>\n
“This city, over all the other cities that were vying for this position, is a city that can do it. I mean, you’re talking about college towns, you know, cities with huge basketball fan bases did not get it. So the NBA did their research,” said Williams.<\/p>\n
Williams says the fan base is definitely available, even though Vegas is not a major city population-wise.<\/p>\n
“Especially when you see all the Los Angeles Laker fans that come into town, the LA Clippers fans that come into town, even the Sacramento King fans that visit Las Vegas when their teams are doing preseasons and those kinds of exhibition games,” he said.<\/p>\n
And he says Vegas has a fan base that may not exist in other places.<\/p>\n
“It ushers in the Euro League. Las Vegas is really going to be able to be a hub for the Europeans to really want to, you know, establish their teams and connect with the NBA. So I think Adam Silver has a huge play here that no one’s even thinking about,” said Williams.<\/p>\n
Williams spoke about the benefits of having a new team rather than a team relocation.<\/p>\n
“You’re not having the bad blood of another city saying, hey, Las Vegas took our franchise and now dubbed it as theirs. (cut middle) ” The fan base will really be Las Vegas driven,” he said.<\/p>\n
He used the success of the Vegas Golden Knights as an example.<\/p>\n
And when it comes to a team name, he gave his take.<\/p>\n
“I tend to like lean towards anything dog related, just by nature. So I’m thinking, I gotta kind of look in there. You already have the timber wolves, right? So, you know, Las Vegas, you know, coyotes could be in there somewhere,” said Williams. “I’m looking forward to getting my tickets and my suite and everything else that goes along with the NBA in Las Vegas. Dog pound, you heard it here first.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"LAS VEGAS (KSNV) \u2014 The NBA will move forward with exploring an expansion team in Las Vegas. The…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":547711,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[64],"tags":[355,99],"class_list":{"0":"post-547710","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\/547710","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=547710"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/547710\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/547711"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=547710"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=547710"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=547710"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}