Seattle has spent 18 years as the presumptive answer to the NBA’s next expansion question. According to owners who sat through last month’s Board of Governors meeting, it is not that anymore.
Brian Windhorst reported Friday that NBA owners left the September meeting in New York with the impression that a Seattle expansion team is no longer assured, and that Adam Silver revived Mexico City as a possible destination in those conversations.
The number is the whole story
A Las Vegas winning bid is expected soon, and Windhorst reports Vegas bidding could exceed $10 billion. KOMO’s local reporting in Seattle puts multiple Vegas bidders at $9 to $10 billion per franchise.
Seattle is not close to that. Windhorst says Seattle offers are well below what Vegas could reach, and KOMO’s industry sources put a Seattle franchise at $6 to $7 billion with no bidding war having developed.
That is a gap of three or four billion dollars, and it is being evaluated by 30 owners who each collect a cut. Windhorst reports a projected expansion windfall of $500 to $600 million per existing club, with one team modeling $533 million. KOMO’s math on a combined $17 billion two-team expansion lands above $566 million per owner.
Nobody in that room is paid to prefer a nostalgic market at a discount.
Seattle’s bid situation is not strong
Two known bidders. The frontrunner is a group led by Samantha Holloway, who owns the NHL’s Kraken and Climate Pledge Arena, operating through a vehicle called One Roof Sports and Entertainment, which declined to comment on the ESPN report. A second group plans an arena on the Tulalip reservation, and tribal leaders say they have committed land rather than money so far.
Climate Pledge Arena being NBA-ready is the reason Seattle has been treated as a near-certainty for years. An arena that already exists is worth something. It is apparently not worth three billion dollars.
Read the Mexico City part carefully
No bidder has been named for Mexico City. No organized group has been reported. Silver raised the market as a concept in a room of owners, which is a thing league commissioners do when they want a benchmark price to look negotiable.
It is worth saying plainly that the no-longer-a-lock framing is ESPN’s characterization of what owners took away from the meeting, not a quote from Silver. He did not announce anything. Seattle is not out.
What is on the record: Silver has said the league will decide on expansion by the end of 2026, and the NBA is separately working to finalize a European league to begin play in 2027.
What it probably is
This has the shape of leverage. The league has a market that wants a team badly, an arena already built, and an ownership group that has not been forced to compete against anybody. Introducing Mexico City and letting the Vegas number leak is how you create a bidding war where none existed.
That read could be wrong, and Seattle fans have earned the right to assume the worst after 2008. But the Sonics left a city with one of the largest media markets in the country and no NBA team, and the league has spent nearly two decades enjoying that as a talking point. If Seattle gets priced out of its own return, it will be because the owners found a market willing to pay more, which has been the actual rule the entire time.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.