Decision on Sonics return, NBA expansion coming in 2026

NBA commissioner Adam Silver said Tuesday night that a decision on possible expansion by the league is coming at some point in 2026, while again specifically mentioning the possibilities of Seattle and Las Vegas as target markets.

Silver spoke in Las Vegas before the NBA Cup championship game between New York and San Antonio. The location seemed fitting as it was in Las Vegas last July where Silver mentioned the league was entering a formal phase of having existing committees on its Board of Governors start to look at the possibility of expansion.

“I think now we’re in the process of working with our [existing] teams and gauging the level of interest and having a better understanding of what the economics would be on the ground for those particular teams and what a pro forma would look like for them. And then sometime in 2026 we’ll make a determination,” Silver said.

If this sounds like familiar posturing, well, it is. The expansion conversations and the potential return of the NBA to the Seattle market have been dangled as a possibility for the last 18 months.

Silver seemed to understand and acknowledge that fact it’s been a dragged-out process within his comments, saying, “I want to be sensitive there about this notion that we’re somehow teasing these markets, because I know we’ve been talking about it for a while.”

But his comments come after a stretch of little news or momentum around the expansion topic since the meeting in July with most of the attention on the league’s attempts at launching an NBA branded league in Europe.

Even with Silver’s comments, there still remains no guarantee the league will expand, especially with rising valuations for existing franchises meaning that an expansion fee could be in the $6 or $7 billion range.

It ultimately comes down to the current owners and whether they want to give up two more slices of their revenues to add additional teams.

“Domestic expansion, as opposed to doing a new league in Europe, is selling equity in this current league. If you own 1/30 of this league, now you own 1/32 if you add two teams,” Silver said. “So it’s a much more difficult economic analysis. In many ways, it requires predicting the future.”