Adam Silver, the NBA’s commissioner who introduced the in-season NBA Cup a few years back, was present to see the end of a well-received third installment of the competition last night. Despite the New York Knicks being the third team to win the NBA Cup, Silver’s comments before the finals caught everyone’s eye.

“I’d say in terms of domestic expansion, that is something we’re continuing to look at,” he said at a news conference before the final. “It’s not a secret we’re looking at this market in Las Vegas. We are looking at Seattle. We’ve looked at other markets, as well. I’d say I want to be sensitive there about this notion that we’re somehow teasing these markets, because I know we’ve been talking about it for a while.”

“As I’ve said before, domestic expansion, as opposed to doing a new league in Europe, is selling equity in this current league. If you own 1/30 of this league, now you own 1/32 if you add two teams. So it’s a much more difficult economic analysis. In many ways, it requires predicting the future,” he further stated.

The league commissioner revealed that the long-overdue expansion of the league from 30 to 32 teams might be on the horizon. This topic has been lingering in and around the NBA for over five years, since Silver first acknowledged the possibility. However, despite that, not much progress was made in that direction until Tuesday, when he provided a rough timeline for the decision.

Adam Silver even pointed out two cities on top of the list for the new franchises– Las Vegas and Seattle. Both of whom share quite a bit on NBA history, with Vegas being the destination for the Summer League for decades and now the NBA Cup as well. Meanwhile, Seattle having it’s own NBA team about 20 years ago, which was later shifted to Oklahoma City.

While this is great news for current and former players LeBron James and Shaquille O’Neal, both of whom have previously shown interest in buying their own team, the same cannot be said for the current set of owners. That’s because, as Adam Silver mentioned, the economics of adding two more franchises would dilute the share of the current owners.

Currently, the roughly whopping $11 billion in revenues is shared between 30 teams, which would get smaller if that number becomes 32, unlike the European expansion. This is a major reason why the NBA has not been able to add another team in a long time, with the last addition coming way back in 2004 when the Charlotte Bobcats became the league’s 30th franchise.

Having said that, many believe that the solution to this could be moving current small-market teams to new cities, something that would generate more revenue and help the league grow. However, it’s not that simple, as Adam Silver revealed the details behind relocating a franchise to a new market.

Adam Silver clarifies his stance on relocating franchises

Every now and then, there’s chatter of the Grizzlies moving away from Memphis or the Pelicans leaving New Orleans. This comes as a result of many teams being in smaller revenue-generating markets than their peers, with a few believing that a move might help the league and even sort of seem like an expansion. However, Adam Silver cleared the air around this in the same interview.

“Relocating a team requires that team to desire to be relocated, specifically the governors, and there is a process. Just because some markets don’t generate the same revenue as others, it doesn’t mean they are markets that are not worthy of NBA franchises,” Silver suggested while speaking about the topic of expansion and relocating teams.

“If you look in our constitution, the factors that the owners are required to look at in making a determination on whether to relocate a team is to look at the support that team has historically had in that community, the operation of that team,, the competitive opportunity in that market. And we live in a big country.”

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“So I think if we were to relocate team, I don’t think the right way to do it would be to rank the teams 1 to 30 in terms of market size or economic opportunities, markets, and then just take the two teams at the bottom and say, let’s take them to markets where they could be more prosperous,” he concluded while speaking to The Athletic.

The NBA commissioner suggested that there’s a process the league follows to relocate a franchise, and it’s not solely based on revenue. So, moving teams like the Grizzlies and the Pelicans isn’t truly in the league’s hands and also not the solution to expansion, despite many believing otherwise, according to Silver. Nonetheless, relocating is a different issue, and something the league will keep looking into.

However, in the meantime, the expansion news is a massive update. Now, it will be interesting to see whether the team owners will allow it to happen or not, as Silver and the NBA will most likely hold a meeting sometime in 2026 to discuss the same.