Adam Silver tells ESPN that Las Vegas is ‘definitely’ on list of expansion candidates
FILE - NBA Commissioner Adam Silver smiles during a news conference announcing that the 2025 NBA All-Star Game will be played in San Francisco at the Chase Center in San Francisco,, Nov. 6, 2023. Thursday, Feb. 1, 2024, is the 10th anniversary of Silver taking over as commissioner of the NBA. The league’s board of governors rewarded him with a multiyear extension this week, ensuring that he will oversee the NBA for the foreseeable future. (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu, File)
INDIANAPOLIS (AP) — NBA Commissioner Adam Silver told ESPN on Wednesday that Las Vegas is “definitely on our list” of cities under consideration for expansion franchises.
Las Vegas has been mentioned as an NBA destination many times before and the timetable for when the league will add new franchises to its existing group of 30 clubs is unclear. The NBA has another year after this season on its $24 billion, nine-year media rights deal and Silver has long said that serious expansion talks won’t happen until the new media deal is finalized.
“We want to figure out what our media relationships are going to look like but then we will turn to expansion,” Silver said again Wednesday in the interview with ESPN, one of the league’s media partners.
Las Vegas already plays host to the NBA’s primary summer league, has a successful WNBA franchise in the two-time defending champion Aces, has been the site of All-Star weekend and was where the semifinals and final in this season’s inaugural in-season tournament took place. It has been an expansion target for years, and LeBron James has said many times that he wants to own the team that many believe will inevitably come to Las Vegas.
Seattle has also been often mentioned as an expansion candidate. Silver told NBA.com for a story published earlier this week that Mexico City is “on our radar” but the league bringing a team there is “probably not going to happen in the next wave of expansion.”
Nashville, Vancouver and Montreal are among the places that have also been mentioned in recent years as cities that would have interest in an expansion franchise.
Silver is scheduled to hold his annual All-Star weekend news conference with multiple news outlets on Saturday night.
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