During a Thursday interview on the Pat McAfee Show, Adam Silver spoke extensively about the NBA's potential expansion plans. The NBA has long been expected to explore expansion following its most recent collective bargaining agreement and media rights deals. While the media rights deals were agreed to during the 2024 summer, the NBA then wanted to wait to see what the Boston Celtics would sell for before pursuing expansion. The Celtics were agreed to be sold for $6.1 billion, which helps set a benchmark for their expansion fees.
“In terms of expansion, we try not to look at it every year just because we don’t want it to be too much of a distraction,” Silver said. “What I’ve been saying for the last several years, we knew we needed to get a new collective bargaining agreement done. We did. We needed a new media deal to get done… We did that. We’ve locked in our television rights for 11 years.
“And part of the reason you want to know what your television deal is is because you now have new partners, you’re going from dividing up the money in terms of 30 teams and those players to, let’s say, if we expanded by two teams to 32. So you want to know what those economics are. So now that those things are done, we’re just beginning a process. Internally at the league of exploring the opportunity to expand.
“I will say sometimes on the outside (that expansion) looks like a no-brainer because it seems like you’re printing money to expand. But again, as I said, you’re really selling equity in the league. You have 30 teams that own the league, and now you’re saying we’re gonna have 32 teams that own the league, so you’re diluting the economic interest of all the 30 teams. And you’re also potentially diluting the talent, because with… roughly 450 players in the NBA, even among those the greatest in the world, there’s only so many difference-makers. And then how are those players going to be distributed around the league? That’s a lot of what we spend time on in collective bargaining agreements, the right distribution of players. And so we’re looking hard at it, we’re sort of modeling it, for lack of better term, in the league office.”
Silver mentioned the Las Vegas and Seattle markets as candidates, but also said other markets will be considered by the NBA.
“Look, there’s no doubt there’s been interest in Las Vegas," said Silver. "Seattle, I’ve been very public about it that it was a market that was fantastic for the league that we left at the time for understandable reasons, but there’s no doubt that there continues to be enormous passion in that market for the NBA. So we’re looking at those markets and others.”
Silver expects expansion to pick up momentum in the summer.
“I think as we get into the summer, we’ll get into a more formal process of how we go about doing it. I don’t want to say it’s a foregone conclusion that we’re going to expand, but I also think over time, organizations tend to grow. And I look at the success of those markets for other major league teams, and so it’s easy to present a scenario where you can see it working successfully for the league.
“But I don’t want to jump the gun here," said Silver. "We have the 30 existing teams who all need to weigh in on this process, and also at some point need to have direct conversations with the people who are who are interested in those teams. It’s premature to do that right now. We’ve been contacted by groups who are saying we have interest in potentially being part of expansion, not just in those cities but others, and we’ve sort of said we’re not quite ready yet. But again, we will go through a very methodical approach to it and do it very cautiously, but we’ll continue to look at it.”
