By now, it’s like the drip, drip, drip of a leaky faucet.
It’s the tease of the long overdue.
The latest in the drawn-out saga of the NBA flirting with returning the Sonics to Seattle: The league may, finally, begin the expansion process this summer.
NBA commissioner Adam Silver was on SiriusXM satellite radio this week. There, for the first time, he gave a start time for the long-awaited process of the league expanding from 30 to 32 teams.
And Silver, for at least the second time since 2023, named Seattle first as a “tremendous” candidate for a new team.
“We have an NBA board meeting in July, in Las Vegas, and my sense is it will be on the agenda to discuss, with full ownership now for the 30 teams, to get directly the existing owners’ views on potential expansion,” Silver said Tuesday on SiriusXM’s NBA Today show. “And (it would be) how we would begin further study of all the implications.”
Those implications include the willingness of the 30 team owners to divide their massive annual media-rights revenue pie by two more slices, which means incrementally less revenue for them. Silver also mentioned two additional teams diluting the league’s player talent.
“And, then, get a sense of the level of interest from certain markets,” Silver said.
“Look, obviously I know there is tremendous interest in Seattle. I know there is tremendous interest in Las Vegas. Several other cities, as well. …
“Just to be clear, we haven’t begun any sort of process,” Silver said. “So, even to the extent cities have reached out, we’ve said, ‘Thank you for your interest, but we are not ready to take meetings yet, and have more in-depth discussions.’
“But we will have that opportunity early this summer, again, to talk to all the different ownership groups in the NBA and get a sense (on expansion).”
Silver added: “I’ll lastly say: I mean, expansion, I think, over time makes sense. As for precise timing, I think we still need to work on that.”
The NBA Board of Governors meets each July in Las Vegas during the league’s Summer League games there. This year’s Summer League is July 10-20 in Las Vegas.
When it does expand, the league wants it to be by two teams instead of one, for balancing game schedules and aligning its conferences. Two new teams, both in the west, make practical sense for the NBA. Right now, it has 15 teams in the Eastern Conference and 15 teams in the Western Conference. Teams in the Western Conference include not-exactly-west Minnesota and New Orleans.
We can hear the calls from the understandably cynical across the Pacific Northwest: I’ll believe all this when the new Sonics are actually tipping off in Climate Pledge Arena.
Such is the stalled quest since the SuperSonics, who began in the city and NBA in 1967, left Seattle in 2008 to move with new team owners to Oklahoma City and become the Thunder.
The NBA expansion process
The NBA’s Board of Governors will decide which cities’ expansion bids to improve. The Board of Governors are the owners of the league’s 30 teams.
An NBA expansion franchise is likely to cost $3-4 billion. That money would get divided evenly among the owners of the league’s other 30 teams. That expansion fee would help offset those owners having to divide the NBA’s new media-rights revenues 32 ways, with two expansion teams added, instead of by 30.
The NBA expansion process in most cases takes 2 1/2 to three years from bid submission to approval then beginning play. That depends on the availability of an arena the NBA deems suitable.
Unlike in 2008 when the Sonics left KeyArena for Oklahoma, Seattle now has a suitable NBA arena. The Oak View Group that built $1.15-billion Climate Pledge Arena for the NHL’s Kraken did so to NBA specifications — with the eventual return of the Sonics to Seattle in mind.
The stalled expansion saga
Silver setting a quasi-start date of July for the expansion process is the latest in this drawn-out saga.
The commissioner had said the league would begin talking expansion upon completion of the NBA’s new collective-bargaining agreement and its new media-rights deals.
The league got its new CBA with its players two years ago.
Then last summer, the NBA reached agreements on contracts with ESPN, NBC and Amazon worth $76 billion to for live game telecasts over 11 years.
But those deals weren’t final for months. Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns the TNT cable network that has broadcast NBA games since 1989, sued the league for being left out of the new deal.
The league and Warner Bros. Discovery settled that lawsuit in November 2024.
Then the Boston Celtics, the defending NBA champions and a signature franchise in the league, went on sale. The agreement on the Celtics sale came this March. They sold for $6.1 billion, a record for a North American sports franchise. It’s more than the NFL’s Seahawks’ value ($5.45 billion, by Forbes in September 2024).
On March 27, just after that Boston sale agreement, Silver said the league and its owners were “digesting” the Celtics deal before the NBA considered expansion.
While the Celtics are a traditional power far above the value of a new franchise, their sale gives NBA owners a ballpark figure from which to base expansion fees.
By saying expansion talks should begin among owners in July, Silver is indicating they’ve digested those dollar amounts. And they are obviously quite satisfied.
Seattle’s NBA efforts
While all that has gone on in the NBA, Seattle has kept laying groundwork for the Sonics’ return.
Climate Pledge Arena has been hosting NBA preseason games for years. The WNBA’s Storm plays there. This spring the NCAA men’s March Madness played its first- and second-round games there.
Last year, Kraken CEO Tod Leiweke said on KJR radio Kraken co-owner Samantha Holloway “will be leading the charge for the NBA here.” Holloway reportedly emailed Kraken season-ticket holders to be anticipating “a parent brand that will umbrella the Kraken brand and prepare for other big opportunities.”
That umbrella company is to put the Kraken and the new Sonics under one operating entity.
“We wanted to get in front of this,” Leiweke said on KJR in April 2024. “We wanted to build an arena that was custom-fit (for the NBA). We did a study that said our sight lines are better than two of the four NBA-only arenas.”
Leiweke has said he and his companies are ready to build an NBA team’s training center, much like they built the Kraken’s facility at Northgate north of downtown Seattle.
“Much of what the NBA left for (in 2008, a new arena with modern, luxury seating, a state-of-the-art practice facility) is here now,” Leiweke said. “And we have ownership that, I believe, will step up at the right time.
“And I think it’s something that’s going to happen.”
Seattle’s mayor agrees. He’s been touting it for a while now.
Bruce Harrell said at the mayor’s State of the City address in February 2024, days after Silver said the NBA “very likely” will expand: “I’m ready to add another point to our 46 points of our downtown activation plan: Bringing the Sonics back.”
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