LAS VEGAS — NBA Commissioner Adam Silver said Tuesday that the league’s Board of Governors green-lit during its annual summer meetings an “in-depth analysis of all the issues around expansion.”
The NBA, which most recently expanded to 30 teams in 2004, has long contemplated the possibility of adding a new team or teams, with Seattle and Las Vegas mentioned frequently as possible destination markets. Seattle was home to the SuperSonics from 1967 until a 2008 relocation to Oklahoma City, and Las Vegas hosts the NBA Cup and NBA Summer League tournaments.
While Silver referred to the league’s plans to explore the issue as a “significant step,” he made it clear that “nothing has been predetermined one way or the other” and that the NBA still has not set a timeline for expansion or settled on an expansion franchise fee. The league plans to weigh the “economic and non-economic” impacts of adding teams, including the potential “dilution” of the player talent pool and the possible impacts on current franchise values. Any move to add teams would be done in a “very deliberate fashion,” Silver said.
“It’s really day one of that analysis,” Silver said. “How (an owner) would potentially value the (expansion) opportunity has a lot to do with your projections on the future growth of the league because you are selling equity. For every additional team you add, you’re diluting the economics of the current league.”
Silver said that the Board of Governors didn’t conduct a “straw poll” on the issue and that there was “no sense in the room that people were taking sides.” Rather, he described the owners as “very engaged” and “curious” for more information. The league’s next steps, he added, will be to explore specific markets, determine whether those markets have NBA-ready facilities and gauge how those markets would “impact our national footprint.”
In past years, Silver said the league would table expansion talks until after it reached a new collective bargaining agreement with the National Basketball Players Association and struck new rights deals with its media partners. The NBA ratified a seven-year labor deal with the players’ union in 2023 and reached 11-year media rights agreements with Disney, Amazon and NBC in 2024, setting the table for a more serious consideration of expansion.
The NBA’s advisory finance committee will lead the exploration of expansion, and its audit and strategy committee will be “looking more precisely at the economics” of adding teams, according to Silver. Together, those committees make up approximately half of the league’s owners.
During Silver’s tenure, which began in 2014, the NBA has enjoyed an ongoing economic boom. The NBA’s salary cap will reach $154.6 million next season, up sharply from $58.7 million in 2013-14. Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Lakers were valued at a record $10 billion and the Boston Celtics were valued at $6.1 billion in franchise sale agreements this year. Comparatively, the Sacramento Kings were sold for $534 million in 2013, shortly before Silver replaced David Stern.
“In terms of the most recent team transactions, there’s no question that those purchase prices have an impact on any economic analysis of a team,” Silver said. “It doesn’t necessarily complicate [expansion] more, but it certainly is an indication of value. It’s just one other factor we have to look at as we are trying to think what is the value of expansion and what does it mean to dilute the existing equity.”
