Last month, NBA commissioner Adam Silver mentioned that the NBA was looking into potentially adding more NBA teams through expansion to help with the revenue lost due to COVID-19.
This week, Seattle mayor Jenny Durkan told KING 5 News in Seattle that she spoke with Silver shortly after the announcement and said that she is feeling “pretty optimistic” about the prospects of a Seattle SuperSonics return.
The topic is clearly a priority for the city, as Durkan laid out to the media:
I think that him saying it publicly means that they are very seriously considering it, and if you look at how sports moves, I don’t think it’s going to be a long multiyear process. I think it can be a shorter process than that, but it might be, you know, more than one year. I think first you got to get the ownership group in line. And they’ve got to decide what an expansion team price could look like.
Seattle is a natural possibility for expansion due to it having been an NBA city for over 40 years with the SuperSonics franchise before that organization relocated to Oklahoma City and became the Thunder.
However, David Aldridge of The Athletic recently reported that expansion will likely not be considered seriously until around 2022. He also mentioned that Las Vegas and Vancouver are other frontrunners if the NBA did decide to expand.
It appears that expansion of the NBA is becoming a real possibility.
