Adam Silver has opened up about the possibility of watching one or more teams new teams in the league in the future. The NBA commissioner has seemingly changed his stance on that topic after spending the last couple of years dismissing that possibility. Back in 2019, he made it clear the league wasn’t looking to get an expansion team but that might have changed now, as he revealed they’re studying what options they could have for the future.
“I think I’ve always said that it’s sort of the manifest destiny of the league that you expand at some point,” Silver said while talking to media members Monday, via ESPN. “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.”
That is a start but Silver admitted that the league is looking to be as competitive as they can before pulling the trigger and bringing another team to compete.
“We’re very appreciative of the markets that have indicated an interest in having an NBA team,” Silver said. “One of the issues for the league office, and this comes up all the time in terms of competitiveness, it’s not a secret that we don’t have 30 competitive teams at any given time right now when you go into the season, measured by likelihood of ability to win a championship.
“One of our focuses as the league office is always on how do you create better competition. So that’s one of the things that we continue to think about as we consider expansion. It’s an economic issue and it’s a competitive issue for us. So it’s one that we’ll continue to study, but we’re spending a little bit more time on it than we were pre-pandemic.”
Whenever people talk about expansion, the name of Seattle is brought up to the conversation. The city lost its team when they left for Oklahoma City Thunder and became the Thunder. That would be a great spot to locate a new team but the league has to do a lot of research before making a final decision. This won’t happen overnight and maybe in four or five years, we’ll have a clear picture of their plans to add another franchise.
