NBA Looking into the Economic Value of Expanding League to 32 Teams

The prospect of adding not one but two expansion teams may be a favourable option for the NBA.

According to Brian Windhorst of ESPN, the league office has provided a hypothetical price tag of approximately $2.5 billion if two expansion teams were to join the NBA in the near future.

Of course, there has been plenty talk of the Seattle Supersonics returning to the NBA. Seattle, a very popular sports city, just received an NHL expansion franchise the Kraken. Another city that could potentially land an NBA franchise is Las Vegas which just inherited the Oakland Raiders. Las Vegas, of course, would be a major sports market which the NBA would most certainly hope to target.

RealGM noted that “unlike other major revenue streams, owners would not have to share that money with players and could result in $160 million per team, which would effectively eliminate the debt currently piling up.” The possibility of an expansion would force the NBA to employ an expansion draft and re-align its conferences.

“I think I’ve always said that it’s sort of the manifest destiny of the league that you expand at some point,” said NBA commissioner Adam Silver. “I’d say it’s caused us to maybe dust off some of the analyses on the economic and competitive impacts of expansion. We’ve been putting a little bit more time into it than we were pre-pandemic. But certainly not to the point that expansion is on the front burner.”

A story definitely worth keeping an eye on moving forward!