The Mexico City rumor was always just leverage, players would never agree to live there. (It’s hard enough to convince them to move to Toronto, Mexico City would be ten times harder!)

Create leverage and also float the idea to gauge the negative PR of bailing on Seattle (again). Probably allows them to meet somewhere in the middle.

Silver shot that down like two days after it surfaced. So I don’t even think it was that. I think it was just a BS rumor.

I do think the Tulalip thing was being encouraged just to get a bigger bid.

It was clearly a negotiation tactic, not a serious consideration of NBA adding a CDMX bid

you mean Melinda?

Nah. That’s gonna be the Pelicans once their lease ends. Apparently the renovations pricing is being questioned.

Vegas makes the NBA more money, it’s simple as that.

The expansion Golden Knights had a 9 year streak of selling out games.

I think that’s the model they want to replicate — though the Golden Knights being immediately competitive is something that helped a lot.

Think like a billionaire as opposed to a normal sports fan when it comes to these decisions.

Vegas is a unique market. It’s not just about regular tourists, but rather the types of visitors that it has. Most fans are thinking about the weekend gambling crowd, which is certainly substantial and material. However, billionaires are thinking about the weekday trade show and corporate meeting crowd where expense accounts essentially have no limit and there are few things that top sales people love more than taking their top customers to prime seats at an NBA game. There are many weeks during the year where hotel room prices in Vegas are actually higher Monday through Thursday because of these massive conventions than they are on the weekend.

Separately, if you have your own arena in the Vegas market, there are national and international event opportunities outside of the NBA where Vegas can be competitive with NYC and LA in a way that no other market can: any entertainment industry events, major concert residencies, etc.

Finally, there’s a more subjective ego aspect. When you’re the owner that gets to sit in a suite or courtside with Bruno Mars or Adele or Tom Cruise whoever else is in town in Vegas as opposed to your normal local car dealer sponsors, it’s a different level of cultural power that you get that, once again, doesn’t exist anywhere other than NYC or LA. When you have all of the money in the world for buy whatever material things that you want, the one thing that becomes even scarcer to the richest of the rich is that cultural power.

I’m not Vegas resident at all, but purely putting myself in the imaginary shoes of a billionaire looking at the bigger picture, I totally get it.

People said the same about the Golden Knights but the locals absolutely love them now.

If they are competent, Vegas will absolutely love their NBA expansion team.

I actually think Vegas will do well if they choose the Foley group. Arena is already there and he built an identity and success for the Golden Knights which I think can easily happen here for the NBA. The return to Seattle is a slam dunk and the NBA knows that.

It will be a ton of people who are just in town on business or vacation that go “Oh let’s see who’s playing tonight against Vegas.” Then they go to a game on a whim.

What do you mean “Vegas over Seattle?” They’re doing both so that kinda invalidates your point.

Also you’re just completely wrong about Vegas. I lived there for 8 years, throughout basically the entire birth and growth of pro sports there (there were 0 pro teams when I arrived and WNBA/NHL/NFL + MLB on the way when I left). The locals have been begging for NBA this entire time, and no they’re not just “Laker fans.” I know this because I’m a Lakers fan, I had tons of friends that grew up there and only one liked the Lakers. What there are is a lot of general “NBA fans” who don’t really pull hard for one team or another, and this will give them one.

Pro sports in Vegas has been nothing but a massive success and the NBA will be an instant smash there

Billionaires enjoy spending time in Vegas, so owning a team there is convenient. Inviting their friends and business relations to Vegas is easy. You also get a boost to attendance from tourists seeing their team play there.

Destination franchise for players assuming it’s competently run*, further fills in that California-Southwest footprint of the map to reduce travel, and honestly west coasters are bandwagoners. There were more arguments against a Las Vegas NHL team than there are an NBA one.

*For this reason I think/hope the Foley/Colangelo bid wins. Foley has done an amazing job with the Golden Knights and Colangelo always had the Suns competitive and helped get the Sixers back on track after a long time in the shitter.

You have to think very specifically in terms of short term gains and factor in absolutely nothing else at all. Capitalism has nothing to do with the consumer. Capitalism is whoever controls the capital controls the market.

Gambling.

It’s because of gambling. Think of how many sports betting ads are tied to the NBA right now.

Gambling

The league is all about it now. Blatantly supporting it in fact.

They just want to encourage more gambling on the NBA

Vegas locals aren’t Lakers fans. And a bunch of transplants and visitors going to see their team is exactly on of the reasons that Vegas is being considered as a good expansion city.

NBA has a hard on for Seattle ever since they got exposed and called out for stealing the Sonics

There were more bidders for Vegas. Seattle has supposedly only really had two major bidders, and one of them wants to put the team north of Everett, 40 miles north of Seattle. Which would be a terrible idea. So they’re doing Vegas first to set the price for expansion for the Seattle team.

People forget the NBA is a business.

The only thing that matters to the NBA is generation of revenue.

Its decisions are based on how can investors make more money and have less liabilities.

The Raiders have a higher valuation than the Super Bowl champion Seahawks, and the Golden Knights have a higher valuation than the Kraken. The Aces and the Storm are about the same. So Vegas feels like a good bet (pun intended) in that regard

The league moved the Sonics to fucking Oklahoma City only to watch Seattle become a wealthy market while still being full of sports crazed people. They have left so much money on the table because of that and they’re still pulling this bullshit. At this point, if Adam Silver is involved at all, you can just assume the dumbest fucking thing possible is going to happen.

As someone who grew up in Tampa, what are you on about? Rays are loved there. I want around when they were created but know plenty who are just rays fans.

Zach Lavine is ready to put up 30 shots a game for his hometown team.

Cam thomas is going to be back in the league playing on a literal green light.

I dont care that he seems like a complete douche, I’d love to see my ROTY end his career here.

They will get the name and the history back.

Seattle will get the Supersonics name and history back, much like the NHL’s Winnipeg Jets

Thunder will give their teams history back to Seattle if there’s a new Seattle team. A situation like the Cleveland Browns.

They shouldn’t have to draft him. Reparations

Now that would be the hardest road

what better way to end his career.

How many players do teams get to protect? If a team gets to protect 8 players, it’s going to be super boring and the new teams are going to be trash.

Nah. I don’t want our first game back to be about them. It should be against one of our old rivals, like the Blazers

Not against those bums, should be Portland, with Lakers, Suns or Utah as alternatives

It should be against the Wizards wearing throwback jerseys, obviously

Would love to see it. I think it would be cathartic for Sonic fans to see the Thunder whooped on their home floor.

Maybe they’d stop hating us 😅

The forced Seattle vs OKC “rivalry” is strange. Seattle has a hate boner for OKC while OKC is indifferent

Fuck yeah. We gotta keep as many Portland vs Seattle rivalries as possible

Money

Because the sports teams in that “dying shithole” sell out all their games

To Oklahoma City for fucks sake, embarrassing. Had to jump to Portland at a young age, but always fun to see how Dame has owned them

if there was a discernible benefit to the league and the other teams, they could. but ‘better plan’ probably doesn’t qualify. an attached massive real estate development and investment that could be pitched as a method to increase value of teams across the league to their home cities, maybe

Different sport but the opposite happened with the Dodgers. The league desperately wanted them sold at the highest bid of \(2 billion, which beat the next bid by \)500 million, they let the new owners save \(100 million each year on their \)300 million tv deal.

It would be like if the Vegas team bid was so large, the NBA was like, you guys don’t actually have to pay as much luxury tax as the rest of the teams, giving the Vegas owners a financial advantage

The other owners split the expansion fee, why would they want a lower fee that would not raise the value of their own team? Also, if the other owners really cared about winning, they don’t want a good owner coming in, they just want someone to help increase the value of their team and get a couple extra wins a season.

Who determines what the better plan for managing a team is? If the highest bidder offers all his draft picks to the other owners alongside a higher revenue split, why would they say no? You think these fucks care about the fans? Beside Vegas is a new team, they have no fans to speak of.

Depends on the margin I guess.

If the difference is small enough, I guess they have some leeway if they really like other aspects of the slightly cheaper bidder.

Yes, they can accept a lower bid and they even say they look for long term stability and clean background, but since the revenue is shared between owners, I doubt they really care they just want the highest offer up front, the owners will end up being a billionaire anyways and that’s a small group they likely all know each other.

Kind of a weird statement since Kroenke has won a recent championship with the Nuggets and semi recent one with the Rams.

Broncos are competitive but they haven’t won one since Peyton Manning was their QB

The Walton-Penner group stepped into big shoes in terms of ownership and man have they delivered. Easy to hate owners but damn they have been great

Source: Broncos fan

I mean at least Kroenke is a good owner too. As an Angels fan I couldn’t be happier for the future

Kroenkes are some of the best owners in sports. Their teams just win. They mad a bad gamble post championship with paying guys like Braun but hey it happens.

No chance Tennessee would get 2 teams

Seattle and Vancouver if you ask me