Early disclaimer, do not get your hopes up. Seriously.
The NBA lost the Seattle SuperSonics in 2008 to owner Clay Bennett and his aspirations to bring a team to his home state of Oklahoma. Now, just about eight years later and much success from the Oklahoma City Thunder in that time, the city of Seattle is still without an NBA franchise.
The city that once was the home to Gary Payton and Sean Kemp and also drafted Kevin Durant has been the subject of expansion talks in and around the NBA for a while. With a new CBA deal expected to be agreed upon sooner rather than later, the questions about a possible expansion also come with it.
It’s been noted by Adrian Wojnarowski of The Vertical on Yahoo! Sports that the NBA is really looking to compete with the NFL in every aspect. One way to go at them head on could be bringing a team to a market that has been a hotbed for football over the last decade. And to make it even better, it would also bring an intrigue of excitement to have a once beloved franchise return home. It appears that if the city of Seattle wants it, and they can agree to bring a new arena to the city, they might be getting an NBA team.
Kevin Nesgoda of SB Nation’s “Sonics Rising” has some more details on his discussions with representatives around the NBA.
The other night I reached out to a lot of media and league people in my contact list and simply asked, “Is expansion on the table?”
I had 57 people respond, 14 of those either did not comment or said they didn’t know. That leaves 43 other responses. Some that really jumped out were:
“With no arena, you’d get 14, maybe 16, votes toward expansion.”
“I’ve heard there are 14 definitely for it.”
“It [expansion] is definitely on the table and being discussed.”
“There are two who are fully no, everyone else can have their mind changed.”
Those would be the four most pessimistic responses that I got. The rest were definitely a lot more, well I got
goosebumps and it made me giddy. A couple of my favorites:“If Seattle had a new building, they would pass expansion.”
“An hour after Seattle approves their arena, they’d have an offer in hand.”
Nesgoda also noted in his piece that the new television deal the NBA agreed upon with their broadcast partners also includes a raise for expansion. Now if Seattle does approve a new area and gets the offer, that means most likely the NBA will need to add another team to make their league an even 32 teams.
While there have been discussions about the NBA wanting to move a team to Las Vegas, for obvious reasons outside of the league’s success in that area, adding a team into the Eastern Conference would make the most sense. Sure, they can add a team in Seattle and Las Vegas and then bump the Minnesota Timberwolves, Memphis Grizzlies or New Orleans Pelicans to the east. But that would present the Western Conference with two expansion teams in one conference and could water down the competition a little bit.
The last two expansions the NBA had in the 90’s saw a little bit of the same method. They added one team to each conference to make sure the balance was easy. The Vancouver Grizzlies and Toronto Raptors were added at the same time and before that the Orlando Magic and Minnesota Timberwolves joined the league in opposite conferences. If you want to bet anything on history being a precedent definitely keep an eye on an area like Pittsburgh, St. Louis and New Jersey being possible locations for a Seattle counterpart. Simply because those cities do not need a new arena right away, they already have older locations either not being used or hockey arenas which can easily be converted to an NBA stadium much like they do across the league.
Besides, who doesn’t want to see the Swamp Dragons be an actual team?
‘Sonics Rising’ also posted this video on their Facebook page further breaking down the situation in Seattle.
