SAN FRANCISCO – The NBA is well on its way to adding two new teams a team back to Seattle after the SuperSonics departed in 2008 and delivering Las Vegas another major-league franchise.
On Wednesday morning, the NBA announced its Board of Governors (owners) had voted to “authorize the league to formally explore potential team expansion” to those cities.
Despite the league seemingly having more tanking teams than ever, Warriors coach Steve Kerr had no doubt that the NBA has enough talent to support a pair of new rosters, albeit with a caveat.
“I think there’s a lot of talent in the NBA, and I think the hard part is that the very top-end talent is limited, and it has always been limited to 10 or 15 guys who are true difference makers,” Kerr told the Bay Area News Group last week. “That’s the only thing. By increasing the teams to 32, that’s two more teams that are unlikely to get one of those top 15 guys. But there’s enough overall talent to spread across two more teams.”
On Kerr’s non-tanking roster, no Warrior is more excited about the possibility of expansion than Gary Payton II.
Payton spent part of his youth in Seattle, where his father Gary Payton captained the Sonics to the 1996 NBA Finals.
The city supported the SuperSonics from 1967 to 2008, when team owner Clay Bennett moved the team to Oklahoma City and rebranded it as the Thunder.
The younger Payton says the city is ready for NBA basketball again.
“It’s a long, long time coming, and they should have never went anywhere, but you know, business is business,” he said. “It’ll be huge just to see the city get their Sonics back.”
Golden State Warriors’ Gary Payton II (0) passes the ball to teammate after diving for a loose ball in the second quarter of an NBA game at Chase Center in San Francisco, Calif., on Tuesday, Feb. 3, 2026. (Ray Chavez/Bay Area News Group)
Payton, 33, has hopes of playing for the new-look Sonics if they debut. He will be a free agent after this season.
Seattle Times reporter Tim Booth has been covering the possible expansion for over a year, and he told the Bay Area News Group that the teams would likely start play in 2028 if approved.
With Wednesday’s vote finalized, that “if” appears to be more of a “when” now.
“There’s a lot of optimism at this moment going into the meetings, and then with potentially the next step, which would be some sort of approval,” Booth said last week.
Booth believes the second vote will occur either during the Board of Governors’ meeting during July’s Summer League, or in the fall this year.
Though more votes are required in the future, those appear to be mere formalities for a league that is set to make billions from adding more franchises for the first time since the Bobcats (now Hornets) joined in 2004.
Booth said expansion fees would likely be anywhere between $5 billion to $7 billion for each new franchise, and that revenue would be split between the owners, not shared with players.
“Something within the league’s owners clearly triggered them to really push ahead on this,” Booth said. “It could be the potential cost of what NBA Europe is going to look like, or it could just be the fact that maybe they see this as their best opportunity with where the team valuations are, based around the sale of the Celtics and the Lakers last year to really maximize what the expansion fee is going to be.”
Both cities have NBA-ready arenas.
Seattle has Climate Pledge Arena, where the SuperSonics used to play and the home of the WNBA’s Storm. The Warriors played a preseason game there in 2018, before it underwent a $1.15 billion renovation to prepare for the debut of the NHL’s Kraken.
“Seattle has a building that’s ready to go, there’s no major work that needs to be done on it, Booth said.
Seattle Storm forward Nneka Ogwumike (3) goes up for a basket against Golden State Valkyries center Temi Fagbenle, back left, as guard Veronica Burton (22) looks on during the second half of a WNBA basketball game Wednesday, July 16, 2025, in Seattle. (AP Photo/Lindsey Wasson)
Las Vegas boasts the Thomas & Mack Center, which hosts the annual NBA Summer League, along with T-Mobile Arena, where the NHL’s Golden Knights play.
Per the 2023 collective bargaining agreement, existing teams will be allowed to protect eight players from the expansion draft, and the new teams would not be allowed to draft more than one player from each team.
Although the NBA has a plan for those logistics, Warriors coach Steve Kerr raised other concerns that are not as high-profile.
“We need to think of everything, all at once,” Kerr said. “More travel, more games. Just thinking about the quality of the product. If the league is going to do this — the ownership, players association, league office — we need to really examine, what does the schedule look like? How much practice time can we build in?”
As he has recommended in recent weeks, Kerr again suggested lengthening the season by a few weeks to create more free days in the packed schedule.
He did mention that by bringing in two Western teams, the NBA could inadvertently alleviate that issue by a little bit. It would be expected that Memphis or Minnesota will move to the Eastern Conference, taking two Central Time Zone markets out of a conference dominated by Pacific Time.
It could balance the television schedule and usher out at least a handful of the dreaded 8:40 p.m local tip-off times.
“When we abandoned Seattle and Vancouver, we gave up two prime late-night slots, and that impacted all of the national TV schedules,” Kerr said.
Will Seattle or Las Vegas be must-see TV in Year 1? That will be determined over the next few years.
But now might be the right time to use expansion to fix some of the league’s issues.
“If we’re going to do it, it’s the perfect time to really examine the health of the entire league and come up with ideas that could help the overall quality of the league,“ Kerr said.
FILE – In this Jan. 16, 2007 file photo, the Seattle SuperSonics play the Cleveland Cavaliers in an NBA baseball game at KeyArena in Seattle. KeyArena is getting an appropriate send off Friday, Oct. 5, 2018, with an NBA game being played once again under its roof as the former home of the SuperSonics will see the Golden State Warriors meet the Sacramento Kings in a preseason game. Afterward, the building will be shuttered and remodeled. (AP Photo/Ted S. Warren, File)