As the NBA continues to look for ways to make up some of their financial losses in 2020, adding expansion teams is looking like an increasingly plausible scenario.
While league Commissioner Adam Silver hasn’t always advocated for adding more teams, he did recently expresses an interest in it.
“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 during a preseason press conference, per ESPN’s Tim Bontemps. “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.”
According to ESPN’s Tim Bontemps, the Seattle Sonics are apparently next in line if the NBA does decide to grow.
“The NBA hasn’t added a team since it expanded to 30 by agreeing to add the Charlotte Hornets — then Bobcats — in 2002 (they began play in 2004). Should the league choose to expand, Seattle would likely be first in line. Seattle nearly got the Sacramento Kings in 2013 before Vivek Ranadive bought the team and kept it in Sacramento. Seattle hasn’t had a team since the SuperSonics moved to Oklahoma City in 2008.”
Seattle is a big basketball town and, since their team moved to Oklahoma City, have not had a home-town team to root for. It makes sense that Seattle would be at the top of the list.
Perhaps even more interesting, though, is that an expansion team seems more likely now than it has been over the past few decades now. If you were a Sonics fan, this may be the tome you’ve been waiting for.
Nevertheless, we’ll see how things progress over the next few months.
