NBA commissioner says expansion discussion is ‘inevitable’
Tim Sullivan of the Louisville Courier-Journal wrote earlier this year about that city’s hopes for an NBA expansion team, a dream that at the time seemed a bit farfetched considering an NBA spokesman’s response to Sullivan’s questions about whether the league was looking to go increase in size from the 30 teams it has now.
“We have no plans for expansion at this time,” the league’s Mike Bass told Sullivan, “and there is no discussion of any teams relocating right now.”
In the months since, the league finished the first season of its nine-year, $24 billion television deal with the most-watched NBA Finals series since 1998 and an NBA draft telecast that saw ratings rise 13 percent over the year before. Then came the start of free agency and the league’s new collective bargaining agreement, which led to massive paydays for the league’s top stars and sizable deals for its lesser lights. A dead time in the sports calendar became the NBA Offseason Show.
This is all to say that the NBA is enjoying a pretty good run right now, which means expansion is back on table, according to Commissioner Adam Silver.
“I think it’s just a question of when the right time is to seriously start thinking about expansion,” Silver told Blazers guard and aspiring journalist C.J. McCollum. “I don’t want to put a precise timeline on it, but it’s inevitable at some point we’ll start looking at growth of franchises,” he continued.
As for possible expansion, Silver only mentioned one city as undoubtedly being “on a shortlist of cities we’ll look at”: Seattle, which had its SuperSonics ripped away to Oklahoma City in 2008.
It’s an obvious choice, and not only because it’s a chance to right what is widely considered one of the biggest wrongs in NBA history. Last month, Seattle announced plans for a $564 million renovation of Key Arena that will result in basically a new arena, with the hoped-for result being new NHL and NBA teams. Then there’s the size of Seattle’s media market. Ranking 14th in the nation, it’s the second-largest U.S. market without an NBA team behind Tampa-St. Petersburg.