NBA 'digesting' Celtics sale before expansion talk

NEW YORK -- NBA Commissioner Adam Silver said Thursday that the league will consider the topic of expansion more fully once the recently agreed upon sale of the Boston Celtics is completed.

"We're still in the process of digesting the Celtic transaction," Silver said after the league's annual spring meeting of its Board of Governors in midtown Manhattan. "There's no question that a major transaction like that becomes relevant to expansion. That deal has just been presented to us, so we're still analyzing it, and my sense is once we've been through that process that we'll turn to it in a more serious way."

Previously, Silver has said publicly that both the collective bargaining agreement, which was agreed upon two years ago, and the league's new national television contract, which was agreed to last year, had to be completed in order for the possibility of expansion moving forward. At the last Board of Governors meeting in September, Silver said that the Board had been that the "plan was to address this season."

In recent months, sources have told ESPN that the sale of the Celtics - which the team announced would be sold to a group led by billionaire William Chisholm last week for a North American record of $6.1 billion - would also be a precursor to potential expansion, as it would set a marker for how much those teams could possibly generate in expansion fees. In addition to needing to continue to vet out the Celtics sale, Silver also said the ongoing uncertainty around regional sports networks, and the loss of revenue coming along with that uncertainty, is also something the league is now having to consider on this front that it wasn't previously.

The widespread belief among sources throughout the league is that if the league does eventually expand, it would expand by two teams - with Las Vegas and Seattle the strong favorites to land teams, per sources.

Later in Thursday's press conference, Silver was asked directly about Seattle returning to the league, as it approaches 20 years since the Seattle SuperSonics last were part of the NBA. The team's last season in the Pacific Northwest was 2008, before it moved to Oklahoma City and became the Thunder.

"I wish I could be more conclusive today and say, 'Here it is. Here's the timeline,'" Silver said.

"Having said that though, I would just say again to our many fans in Seattle, and I hear from them often and the legacy of the Sonics is still very strong and it's a fantastic basketball market, is that we are very focused on it. The fact that I think that I'm not being more forthcoming publicly doesn't mean we're not studying it very intensively. 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 that we aren't very focused on the potential for the NBA to return to Seattle."

Expansion was just one of several topics Silver addressed as part of a wide-ranging press conference that was broken up into two roughly half-hour parts, with the first 30 minutes being devoted to the league moving forward with its plans, alongside FIBA, to explore the possibility of a new European league.

Others included:

- Silver said there have been no discussions of potential changes to the structure of team ownership moving forward in the wake of the proposed sale of the Celtics, which includes private equity fund Sixth Street buying 20 percent of the team - the maximum amount allowed under the league's current structure.

He also was asked if there were any specific written parts of the deal covering whether current owner Wyc Grousbeck, who has said he's going to remain in charge of the team, after former Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban had said the same thing in the wake of selling that franchise last year. That quickly proved not to be the case once Patrick Dumont assumed control of the franchise, and then last month Dumont approved the stunning trade of Luka Doncic to the Los Angeles Lakers.

"The Grousbeck family and the buyer are still working through those arrangements on exactly how that would work in terms of CEO roles and governor roles during the transition," Silver said. "I think the situation was very different in Dallas."

Silver also said the league is still in the beginning of stages of looking at the deal, including vetting the new owners.

- As for the other team currently up for sale, the Minnesota Timberwolves, Silver said that owner Glen Taylor is still mulling over whether he will appeal the arbitration ruling in favor of Marc Lore and Alex Rodriguez last month, and that he is still discussing options with Lore and Rodriguez, as well. Silver said at the All-Star Game last month "I don't see any reason why" Lore and Rodriguez wouldn't be approved as the new owners in light of the arbitration ruling, which could finally bring to an end a several years long saga for control of the franchise.

- Silver said that while he believes the league has made strides on the topic of tanking - from flattening lottery odds to creating the play-in tournament, the 65-game rule for awards and the player participation policy - that he understands why relegation is a part of many leagues around the world.

"It comes down to incentives," Silver said. "There's no doubt that incentives change at the end of a season, especially when you have a draft that's perceived not just with the top pick, but the top maybe few picks is an incredibly strong draft. That's a way, a legitimate way of rebuilding in this league. So I'm not sitting here saying, 'All right, here's the new calibration to the draft lottery and that will solve it.' We don't have a new plan at the moment.

"I don't have an answer sitting here today as to what we're going to do other than to say that we recognize it's an issue and it's an issue for our fans. And so we're paying attention to it."

- While Silver admitted the local media situation is unclear in terms of where the regional sports networks will land as the cable industry goes through ongoing changes, he is bullish on the NBA's ability to derive value from the situation as things move forward.

"We think there's tremendous opportunity there," Silver said. "You have bankruptcies of RSNs, other RSNs that have shut down and I think that's created, for lack of a better term, a lot of transactional friction of people who would otherwise be interested. At the same time, well-known streaming services that only a year ago were saying they have no interest in live sports are now aggressively bidding on live sports. So we see no reason why the extent there's that interest on a national basis or even a global basis there wouldn't also be on a local basis."

- In the wake of Jontay Porter being thrown out of the league over gambling, and the ongoing investigation into unusual wagering activity on college games that also included some betting involving Miami Heat guard Terry Rozier in 2023, Silver said he believes the legalization of gambling has played a part in bringing situations like that to light.

"I think that we now have the ability as opposed to the old days before there was legalized, widespread legalized sports betting to be heavily into the analytics of every game," Silver said. "Looking at any blip, anything that's unusual, I've compared it in the past to insider trading. I mean, they catch insider trading largely because the analytics are such in many cases that they see unusual activity and they investigate it. So I think here, these systems we have in place, I think are state of the art in terms of ferreting out unusual activity.

"So in terms of my faith in the future, human beings are fallible. I don't want to suggest that we have a perfect system and there aren't going to be any players that violate the rules. I certainly have absolutely no basis sitting here today to say there are multiple NBA players involved in anything inappropriate. If we had any independent knowledge, we would be acting on it. Law enforcement enforcement, they have the right to bring criminal prosecutions, but we have the right to regulate our own league. And so if we thought there was anything inappropriate with that, if we were aware of players on the floor, we would not be waiting for the conclusion of an investigation. We would be acting on it."