Seattle SuperSonics Thread

NBA Commissioner Adam Silver said during his news conference at All-Star Weekend in Los Angeles in February that owners would formally discuss expansion at the March Board of Governors meeting. While he said the league wouldn’t formally approve expansion bids at the March meeting, “we will likely come out of those meetings ready, prepared to take a next step in terms of potentially talking to interested parties.”

Silver, according to a source with knowledge of the discussions among ownership, has privately told NBA governors that he expects expansion fees to run between $7 billion and $10 billion. Two senior NBA team officials told The Athletic they believe the minimum expansion fee will likely be $8 billion per city.

“In my mind, there’s no question it’s going to be eight (billion), and nine (billion) to 10 (billion) is certainly doable,” one executive said.

The vetting process will determine who can carry such a financial load — and have enough to then successfully run an expansion team — in each city.

Seattle, which lost the SuperSonics to Oklahoma City in a 2008 relocation, has long been a frontrunner among many current team governors when and if the league decided to again expand, something last done in 2004, when the NBA approved a new franchise for the city of Charlotte to replace the one that relocated to New Orleans in 2002.

Las Vegas has emerged in recent years as a strong candidate, based both on its history as a year-round, revenue-producing city through tourism and legal gambling, and on its successful launch of multiple pro sports franchises in the last decade. The NFL’s Raiders relocated to Vegas in 2020 from Oakland; the WNBA’s Aces moved there from San Antonio in 2018, and the NHL awarded Vegas an expansion team, the Golden Knights, who began playing there in 2017.

In addition, Major League Baseball has approved the move of the Athletics from Oakland to Vegas, with the team expected to begin play there in 2028 after three interim seasons in Sacramento, while a new stadium in Vegas is completed.

While there is still at least some sentiment among some teams to relocate existing teams to Seattle and/or Vegas rather than giving both expansion teams, it’s more likely at this point that expansion will go forward — provided there are buyers in each city that can handle the massive cost of buying into the club.

“I don’t believe there are any red flags for those two cities at this point,” another high-ranking team official said this week, noting that an update is likely at the BOG’s next scheduled meeting, to take place in July during the NBA’s Summer League — which also has become a major event for the league since moving to Vegas in 2004.

At issue is giving two new teams a share of the lucrative new 11-year, $77 billion media rights deals the league reached last year with NBC/Peacock, Amazon and ESPN/ABC. Those revenues are divided equally among the current 30 teams. Adding two expansion teams would dilute each team’s share. Some governors had previously expressed reluctance to include two more teams that would get in on the action, but there is history of the NBA delaying new teams a full share of TV money.

When the ABA and NBA merged in 1976, the four ABA teams absorbed into the NBA – San Antonio, Indiana, Denver and New York (now Brooklyn) – did not receive any national TV money during their first three seasons in the NBA.

And the sale of the league’s two most storied franchises last year — the Lakers, at a $10 billion valuation to a group led by Mark Walter, and the Celtics, at a $6.1 billion valuation, to a group led by Bill Chisholm — gave owners an indication of how strong the lure of having an NBA franchise remains.