During Super Bowl weekend, Las Vegas served as the Sports capital of the world. Not only was the Super Bowl in town but many other sports as well. The WNBA has a team, the NHL has a team, the NFL has a team and soon the MLB may have a team. The one sport that makes sense for Las Vegas is the NBA.
“We have one more year left on our television deals in the U.S. after this year,” NBA commissioner Adam Silver said Wednesday on The Pat McAfee Show. “So we want to figure out what our media relationships are going to look like and then we will turn to expansion. Vegas is definitely on our list.”
The Super Bowl week was a huge success. There’s no question about that. There was a number of parties and events taking place… including the WWE WrestleMania Kick-Off.
“Man, do they punch above their weight,” Silver stated about Vegas.
For years, the NBA has already had its Summer League in Las Vegas. So adding a team there full-time would make sense. The league is on pace to add two teams via expansion over the next couple of years. Something they haven’t done since 2004 with the Charlotte Hornets. In fact, the NHL is the only league to add teams since then.
Since 2007, the NBA has been continuously building its relationship with the city of Las Vegas. There’s only one problem as of now… there’s nowhere that an NBA franchise could play. However, that may change over the next couple of years. In 2022, Oak View Group purchased land near The Strip to build a privately funded, $10 billion casino resort that’ll include a $1 billion, 20,000-seat arena built to NBA specifications. The construction of the arena is set to finish without a commitment from a professional franchise as of now.
The new arena will be similar to Climate Pledge in Seattle, which could soon be the home to an NBA franchise as well. The OVG project would give an NBA franchise a potential home that it would not have to share with any other sports franchise. That would allow an NBA team first access to dates and scheduling needs.
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