LAS VEGAS—NBA commissioner Adam Silver gave Vegas a double dose of wait-and-see Tuesday, saying the city will not have an NBA expansion franchise anytime soon, and adding that the NBA Cup semifinals and finals might be staged elsewhere next season.
“We’re not sure about that right now,” Silver said in addressing the NBA Cup’s return to Las Vegas before a group of media members prior to the final. The Milwaukee Bucks trounced the Oklahoma City Thunder, 97-81, to win the league’s second Cup at T-Mobile Arena.
Silver said the NBA is not close to expanding, adding that a committee to examine the process has not been formed, which Sportico reported earlier.
“As I’ve said before, we haven’t turned all into that process,” he said. “It’s something that in the league office we’ve been modeling different approaches to expansion, taking a general look at cities. But we haven’t invited applications yet. We’re not having any conversations with specific groups, including Las Vegas.”
As far as the Cup is concerned, the NBA is studying the option of staging semifinals and finals in a league city rather than a neutral site like Vegas.
“There has been some interest from teams in playing in their home markets,” he said. “From a scheduling standpoint you have to consider how this is going to work. Here we’re building a tradition. You have a lot of fans who can plan to come to Las Vegas and build a holiday around it. You can look at both sides of it.”
Once again, Vegas put on a show. The final game was another sellout of 18,519, as Milwaukee’s Giannis Antetokounmpo posted a triple double—26 points, 19 rebounds and 10 assists. The Bucks pulled ahead by as much as 20 points late in the fourth quarter to record the decisive victory. The three games drew 53,569.
The Bucks, after opening 2-8 this season, have won 13 of their last 16 games, including all six Cup games. They were here last year, but lost to Indiana in a semifinal game.
All this would seem to give the NBA more reason to keep the tournament in Vegas.
“We’re really open to anything,” Evan Wasch, an NBA executive vice president, said in an interview. “It might makes sense to have the semifinals and final in front of a home crowd. But what you lose there is the reward for the players to compete and win the Cup and come to Vegas to do it.”
There’s no question the players love it.
“Playing here was pretty sweet,” star Thunder guard Shai Gilgeous-Alexander said during the series. “We don’t do it every year, so the environment was dope. The fans were into it. It’s a basketball city. It was really fun playing out there.”
But the future timeline for basketball in Las Vegas is uncertain, as the NBA is taking its time with the expansion process.
For years, the assumption has been that the NBA would return to Seattle and add another team in Vegas. More recently, Mexico City has been touted as a possibility.
“In terms of the opportunity, there’s no doubt if you just focus on the U.S. there are several cities, no question they can support NBA basketball,” Silver said. “By the way, the WNBA is in expansion mode, too, much more active than the NBA at this point.”
To be sure, the WNBA is expanding to San Francisco this coming season and will add two more teams in Toronto and Portland by 2026.
Silver had said that signing a new media deal and a labor agreement were prerequisites for NBA expansion. Both have since happened, with an 11-year, $76 billion media package beginning next season.
But that creates additional problems, Silver said, despite the fact the 30 current NBA teams would evenly split $8 billion in expansion fees, a projected $4 billion per team.
“Our pitfalls are dilution of talent and dilution of economics,” he said. “In terms of the television deal, obviously, we’d have new partners. We use the money we generate through our revenues to invest in new initiatives. That’s how we built the WNBA. That’s how we built the G-League. We’re looking at opportunities other places in the world.
“And we also want to make sure that if we expand, those teams can be equally competitive.”
