What NBA said about Sonics' possible return at Board of Governors meeting

NEW YORK — Another NBA meeting, another time when discussions of expansion were brushed aside by the league’s owners in favor of other topics.

The wait on substantive action surrounding expansion continues. The wait on the possible return of the SuperSonics goes on.

“No new developments,” NBA Commissioner Adam Silver said following conclusion of the league’s Board of Governors meeting.

The prolonging of the league’s expansion process continued with those words from Silver in a ballroom inside the St. Regis Hotel in midtown Manhattan on Thursday afternoon. Last September, the commissioner indicated coming out of those owners’ meetings that progress on the idea of seeing the league expand would take place before the end of the 2024-25 season.

The end of the regular season is just a few weeks away. And it will come and go without the league moving ahead.

It’s news that will draw even more groans and frustration from hoops fans in the Puget Sound region who have desperately sought the slightest breadcrumbs that the league was finally ready to move forward after clearing some significant issues in recent weeks and months.

Just like the NBA All-Star weekend last month where expansion conversation was mostly nonexistent, the league is choosing to keep the talk of expansion on the back burner for now.

Silver continued to be highly complimentary of Seattle as a potential market in the future but chose not to put a timeline on when the league intends to move ahead on talks of adding a 31st or 32nd team.

“I would just say again to our many fans in Seattle — and I hear from them often, the legacy of the Sonics is still very strong and it’s a fantastic basketball market — is that we are very focused on it. I think the fact that I’m sort of not being more forthcoming publicly doesn’t mean we’re not studying it very intensively,” Silver said. “We don’t take those fans for granted. We’re thankful that the interest has remained over all these years. And so I would just say the fact that we’re not ready to make any public announcements with a specific timeline doesn’t mean we don’t care a lot about those fans and are very focused on the potential for the NBA to return to Seattle.”

There was optimism that tangible news could come from this owners’ meeting following last week’s development that an agreement was reached on the sale of the Boston Celtics for $6.1 billion. The sale of the Celtics was viewed as one of the final hurdles for the league to clear before substantive conversation and examination of expansion would begin.

It seems the agreement on the Celtics and the scheduled meetings fell too close for there to be a robust review of the proposed transaction.

“I would say in terms of looking at this year, we’re still in the process of digesting the Celtics transaction. There’s no question a major transaction like that becomes relevant to expansion. So that deal has just been presented to us, so we’re analyzing it and my sense is that once we’ve been through that process that we’ll turn to it in a more serious way,” Silver said. “The league office has continued to model what potential expansion could look like over the last year or so.”

The focus of this meeting ended up being a different kind of expansion — the league receiving approval to start exploring partnerships for an NBA branded league in Europe and growing the international footprint of the league. It makes sense with the global growth of basketball and may someday well into the future create a pathway for European based teams to join the NBA.

Silver said the initial thought would be for a 16-team league in Europe with roughly 12 permanent clubs and the remaining four slots open for a promotion/relegation system similar to many of the top soccer leagues around the world and would fit with the sporting culture in many European countries.

“This is very important that we are having these conversations for our fans, for the development and growth of our sport,” FIBA secretary general Andreas Zagklis said.

It could be a terrific development globally, especially considering the number of international players now on NBA rosters and the fact that five of the last six MVP awards have gone to players who represent international countries — Giannis Antetokounmpo and Nikola Jokic.

But it does nothing to satisfy the desire of those domestically who want to see the league grow beyond 30 teams and in particular see the return of a city with 41 years of pro basketball history to the NBA footprint.

The earliest now there is likely to be any expansion movement would be this summer and only if the Board of Governors chooses to meet as it did last year during NBA Summer League in Las Vegas. Otherwise, it could be September before any action is taken on starting the expansion process and if so would seemingly ensure the 2028-29 season would be the earliest target date for the addition of teams.

But as Silver noted, there’s no timeline the league is willing to share publicly yet.

“I’m tremendously empathetic to those fans,” Silver said. “I will speak directly to Seattle … I wish I could be more conclusive today and say, ‘Here it is. Here is the timeline.' ”