LAS VEGAS—The NBA Cup final is at T-Mobile Arena again Tuesday night with the Milwaukee Bucks playing the Oklahoma City Thunder in the tournament’s second edition.
And despite Vegas once again putting its best foot forward as host—drawing an announced 35,050 for a split admission doubleheader on Saturday, up slightly from last year’s 34,854—the NBA has put Vegas on hold. This city is no closer to landing an NBA expansion franchise than it was at this time a year ago.
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For myriad reasons, the NBA is taking its time with the expansion process. The league has yet to even establish an expansion committee to evaluate those prospects, an NBA official confirmed Monday.
“We’re not quite ready yet,” NBA commissioner Adam Silver told reporters in September before the season started. “There’s certainly interest in the process, [but] we’re not there yet in terms of having made any specific decisions about markets, or even frankly to expand.”
To be sure, expansion is a delicate, complicated process. But as far as Las Vegas is concerned, the NBA is behind the other pro sports leagues.
“I love it as a host city,” Milwaukee coach Doc Rivers said on Saturday. “This city is a convention, big event city. This is a big event, so it’s perfect. I’m assuming Vegas will be in the NBA someday. Baseball is here, football is here, and everything else is here, right? So, we need to come as well. I think it would be great. I think it will happen.”
The NHL, NFL and WNBA are already here. About a half mile from the arena on the intersection of Tropicana and Las Vegas Boulevard is the demolition site where a $1.75 million ballpark for MLB’s Athletics is supposed to be built, though the sticker price has escalated. The A’s, who had permission from MLB owners to leave Oakland, are expected to play the next three seasons at a minor league park in West Sacramento until the Las Vegas Stadium is built.
But what seems like an inevitable NBA expansion is happening at a snail’s pace—and the belief an expansion fee could cost an ownership group at least $4 billion limits the potential pool of applicants.
The NBA grew from 17 teams to 30 from 1980 to 2004, but the league hasn’t added a franchise since then. Similarly, the league hasn’t had a team relocate from one area to another since the Supersonics moved from Seattle to Oklahoma City in 2006.
For years, the assumption has been that the NBA would head back to Seattle and add another team in Vegas. More recently, Mexico City, where the NBA plays an annual regular season game, has been touted as a possibility, though security, arena issues and living arrangements for players pose big hurdles.
In Las Vegas, the Oak View Group is looking to fund and construct a basketball-only arena, and the NBA could begin play in T-Mobile Arena as soon as next season, sharing the facility with the successful NHL Golden Knights, who won a Stanley Cup in 2023, in just their sixth season after owner Bill Foley paid a $500 million expansion fee.
“It’s a growing city,” former NBA star Kevin Garnett, who’s in a town doing a Cup media gig, said Monday. “You think about all the new things that are going to happen, especially from 2025 to 2030. … Everything is opening up. Production houses and studios are coming here. Yeah, Vegas is the future, man.”
Silver had said that signing a new media deal and a labor agreement were prerequisites before expansion. Both have since happened, the ink now dry and on an 11-year, $76 billion media package.
But the latter creates additional problems. How do the 30 current owners bring in two new partners and give them an equal slice of those media deals? An expansion draft is memorialized in the current CBA, with each team subject to exposing players in the same fashion Charlotte was built in the 2004 expansion. The new Charlotte team selected 19 players, and no NBA club lost more than a single player.
The current NBA salary cap is $140.6 million, and a pretty good expansion team could be built from scratch without all the problems of trying to keep an existing team together under the current cap.
These are some of the considerations Silver is talking about. Not insurmountable, but certainly complicated.
Meanwhile, Vegas is trying to keep its image up by hosting an impeccable NBA Cup. It’s working so far. “It feels like this is a perfect place for this,” Rivers said.
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