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The lawmakers urged Silver to consider Las Vegas’ 20-year partnership with the NBA through hosting the Summer League and NBA Cup championships. “As you consider the future of the NBA, we strongly urge you to build on the League’s local momentum by selecting Las Vegas as a site for a future league franchise,” the letter reads in part.
Jared Weiss: Silver said the tension is that there are legitimate rebuilds and even teams shutting down starters to play young players late in the season is not tanking he is concerned about. He is more concerned about the ethical shifts in tanking we’ve seen this year in response to what he calls a “perfect storm” of a promising draft this June followed by less anticipated drafts the next few years. “There’s been a destigmatization around certain behaviors and I think that’s a broader societal issue. I think in other aspects of society, the guard rails have come off a little bit.”
There was a noticeable shift in Silver’s tone and demeanor on this particular issue, according to the three executives who spoke with The Athletic, with one of them saying, “He sounded more like Stern than Silver,” referencing Silver’s occasionally brazen predecessor David Stern, who was known for telling owners, general managers, players and reporters exactly what he thought, with choice words. It was a marked departure in behavior from Silver, 63, a lawyer by trade who is in his 12th season as commissioner and usually speaks in a lawyerly, collegial tone in meetings. At another point on the call, Silver said to a general manager that coaches on tanking teams “don’t want to do this,” essentially pitting these team execs against their most important employees (coaches can be fired, while players, essentially, cannot).
Silver told the executives on the call that the league had to change incentives “and mindsets,” so executives don’t have to implement tanking to save their jobs. One GM of a team that had undergone a tank and came out the other side of it as one of the strongest teams in the league said the executives on the call needed to “support Adam on this.” Another said “we are all to blame,” citing both rules that needed to change and teams taking too much advantage of those rules. “Let’s just say the message was sent,” one of the executives on the call said. “I am very happy Adam said what he said.”
What Silver means by this is that, if you chart team win-loss records by season, you get an interesting phenomenon: a bulge of teams that win 40 to 50 games and a paucity of those who win 30 to 39. In the four seasons since 2021-22, we’ve had 44 of the former and only 23 of the latter, and the disparity looks set to be even worse this season. The Milwaukee Bucks and Chicago Bulls may be the only teams that end up in the 30s, while 10 or more teams land in the 40s. Meanwhile, in 2023-24, seven teams lost at least 55 games, and in 2021-22 and 2024-25, six did. For comparison, we haven’t had a season where seven teams won at least 55 games since 2010-11, and we’ve only had six twice in the 11 full seasons since.
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There was, according to the source, a consensus on the call that this issue threatens the integrity and long-term viability of the league. And when Silver emphasized the importance of finding a solution, there was an acknowledgement that a change to the current system is needed.
Silver wants to put new teams in London, Paris, Rome, and Manchester, England, backed by soccer giants and the biggest investment funds in the world (the Saudi PIF has expressed interest). Existing clubs with similar financial backing are being targeted in Barcelona and Madrid, in Milan, in Athens and Istanbul, Berlin and Munich, and Lyon, France. If Silver is (and in all likelihood, he will be) successful in bringing this new league on line, current NBA players said, overwhelmingly, they would consider, some day, playing in NBA Europe. “Yeah, it would interest me a little bit. I think that’s pretty cool,” said Charlotte rookie and Rising Star Kon Knueppel.
However, if Silver and his advisers decided the only way to stop tanking, and thereby protect paying customers from forking over money to watch their teams lose on purpose, was to stop the draft altogether and turn rookies into free agents, that same league official said it would get serious consideration. “I think part of the problem is that if you step back, the fundamental theory behind the draft is to help your worst-performing teams restock and be able to compete,” Silver said. “The issue is if teams are manipulating their performance in order to get higher draft picks, even in a lottery, then the question becomes, even if teams were rewarded for draft picks purely according to predicted odds of the lottery, are they really the worst performing teams?
“Governor Ferguson initiated the call to introduce himself to Commissioner Silver and they had a good conversation,” NBA spokesperson Mike Bass said in a statement Thursday. Silver mentioned Seattle and Las Vegas as possible expansion markets of which the league was doing a complete assessment during his comments in December.
There are legitimate pro teams in each of those cities already, other than Rome, but not all of those teams may apply for a license. Two high-ranking basketball officials, one with the NBA in the U.S. and another in Europe, said the NBA wants “to start with a clean slate” in London, where it could cost a new team more than $1 billion to obtain a license. “Just walking the streets here and being in the hotels, I hear from people all the time saying, ‘I’m sleep deprived following your league,’ (in the U.S.),” Silver told The Athletic during an interview in London, prior to the Memphis Grizzlies-Orlando Magic game at London’s O2 Arena.
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“There are more people approaching us and saying, ‘I’d love to have the London franchise,’ and I think it’s not just because it’s such an attractive market, but because there’s no top-tier basketball team right now,” Silver continued. “So, there’s lots of groups seeing an opportunity to create a new brand here.” For the NBA, the London discussion is one of the sheer size, wealth and untapped basketball potential of the market. There are numerous potential suitors. Soccer powerhouses like Arsenal or Chelsea could create a team. The Saudi Arabia Public Investment Fund could do it. As could investment firms like Sixth Street.
FC Barcelona traveled to London to learn firsthand about the NBA's proposal . Josep Cubells, the section's top executive, and Jordi Trías, who joined the sporting department a few months ago, participated in a meeting that included Pau Gasol as part of an attempt to entice the club, but the meeting offered few new developments or concrete details . Barça, and perhaps it's significant that this meeting with Silver and his team didn't change anything, has a clear position: EuroLeague (which will be ratified by the board of directors), without completely closing the door on the new competition… but only once it has taken shape or is clearly going to do so. Why take the risk before then? The buyout clauses for those who have renewed, or will renew, their EuroLeague contracts until 2036 are the same as in previous contracts: ten million euros .
The game in Berlin served as a platform for Silver to demonstrate on the court that Alba, who left the EuroLeague after several years of very poor results, are fully committed to the project, now with team infrastructure and one of the few NBA-caliber arenas in Europe, the Uber Arena , where the Grizzlies and Magic recently played. In the move to London, another long-standing shadow also appeared: that of Paris Saint-Germain, with its football parent company linked to Qatari money . This business with the Middle East, currently limited by NBA agreements, is one of the obvious areas the American competition is focusing on. However, it seems that PSG is willing to listen… but not to invest, not on a large scale . Not at all, or so it seems right now, anything close to the price for a franchise in the new competition that Bloomberg has just placed at €1 billion .
Investment firm Qatar Sports Investments, which owns soccer giant Paris St. Germain, has been linked to Silver’s venture for Paris and is just one of the groups interested in either partnering with existing basketball clubs or starting new teams in targeted cities. According to league sources, investment groups with ownership of five percent or less of an NBA team will be permitted to own an NBA Europe team.