NBA commissioner: Las Vegas dominates expansion talks this week

NEW YORK — NBA Commissioner Adam Silver said Tuesday there was more discussion this week surrounding Las Vegas than Seattle in relation to potential league expansion.

Multiple bid groups and arena sites are still in play in Las Vegas, while Seattle has multiple groups and one arena site under consideration. That is why Las Vegas received more attention during the NBA Board of Governors meetings this week.

Patrick Dumont, who serves as governor of the Dallas Mavericks, led a discussion about potential NBA arena sites in Southern Nevada, Silver said.

“I’ll say that there was a discussion led by Patrick Dumont, of course, who is a Las Vegas resident and has operating experience there in Las Vegas, just sort of as an independent, objective party, led a discussion around the various sites, potential sites in Las Vegas,” Silver said. “I think that there is real excitement around either a renovated T-Mobile Arena (or a new arena).

“I think everyone acknowledges that T-Mobile’s there and still needs some significant improvements. But at the same time, there are groups who have presented plans to build what I would call a modern entertainment palace in Las Vegas. And it’s a unique market where you can truly see essentially 365-day-a-year activity.”

Should the NBA choose to add a team in Las Vegas, the city will have added teams from the four major North American professional sports leagues — MLB, the NBA, the NFL and the NHL — within a decade. The importance of that feat to the city can’t be overlooked, according to Steve Hill, president and CEO of the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority.

“It’s a huge step that Las Vegas will have taken really quickly,” Hill told the Review-Journal last week. “I mean, you look back, the Knights took the ice in October of ’17. It won’t have been 10 years. So being able to add the NHL and the NFL and Major League Baseball and then the NBA in that period of time is a pretty remarkable feat for this city.

“Vegas has been a basketball city for the entire time I’ve been here, and before that, UNLV got all that kicked off in the ’70s and ’80s into the ’90s, and it’s just stayed that way. We’ve got a great relationship with the NBA, and it’s going to be a huge draw, and we’re excited about it.”

PJT Partners, an investment bank hired by the NBA to evaluate ownership bids in the Las Vegas and Seattle markets and arena plans tied to expansion, has been vetting potential groups. Multiple deadlines have passed for the submission of plans, including financial information.

The expansion fee is expected to be between $7 billion and $10 billion, with the expectation that a group landing a Las Vegas expansion team would pay more than one in Seattle. The billions of dollars in fees collected by the NBA would be shared among the other team owners, with each receiving hundreds of millions of dollars.

At least four groups are pursuing an NBA expansion team in Las Vegas. The next deadline for the bid groups involved in the Las Vegas process is Thursday, Silver said.

“These are groups that have already qualified,” Silver told the Review-Journal after the news conference. “There were some groups that fell out after the first round of bidding.

“These are now groups that, again, are known to us and are working with our investment banking group, PJT. And again, they’re working on a process with them in a format for how to submit their next bids.”

The Las Vegas bidders include Golden Knights owner Bill Foley; Walmart heiress Nancy Walton Laurie and her husband, Bill Laurie; former Phoenix Suns owner Jerry Colangelo and former NBA player Vinny Del Negro; and one anonymous group.

There is no shortage of potential NBA-ready arena projects that have been floated in Las Vegas. Silver noted that about a dozen plans have been announced over the past few years.

Where an NBA team would play in Las Vegas would be determined by the winning bid group and whether it has its own arena plans or would partner with one of the groups that has announced plans.

With the 2028-29 season viewed as the target for expansion teams, a Las Vegas team almost certainly would play at T-Mobile Arena while a new arena is built. The exception could be if Foley’s group wins the bid. He told the Review-Journal that up to $400 million in renovations would be made to the 10-year-old T-Mobile Arena to accommodate an NBA team alongside the NHL’s Golden Knights.

Silver added that a group making the kind of investment required to land an NBA team likely would want to build a new arena to reap the benefits a new facility would offer, including lucrative naming rights, partnership deals and the ability to book nonbasketball events.

“I just think when somebody’s looking at the kind of investment we’re talking about in an expansion franchise in Las Vegas and the economic opportunity to generate significant revenue outside of core NBA basketball, it’s understandable that groups are looking at property, looking at opportunities to build new arenas.

“At the same time, I don’t want to rule out the fact that somebody on the T-Mobile site, whether it’s a significant enhancement to the current building or other ideas around it, that’s on the table. And it may be a combination of both. I mean, it may ultimately be that it’s T-Mobile for some period of time and then ultimately another arena. I mean, these arenas, from the point of permitting to shoveling the ground to construction, are a multiyear process.”

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The Review-Journal is owned by the Adelson and Dumont families, owners of the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks. Patrick Dumont is a member of the NBA’s Board of Governors.