Seattle Is No Longer a Lock for an NBA Expansion Team: What the Mexico City Report Means
Seattle has spent two decades waiting for the NBA to come back. The league just reminded the city that waiting is not the same as winning.
ESPN’s Brian Windhorst reported Friday that Adam Silver left owners with the impression at last month’s Board of Governors meeting that a Seattle expansion team is no longer a lock. The same report says a Mexico City group has approached PJT Partners, the bank advising the NBA on expansion, with a plan for a franchise and a new arena district.
Read that carefully, because the wording matters. Silver did not announce anything. This is reporting on what owners took away from a private meeting in September, and the phrase “no longer a lock” belongs to Windhorst rather than to the commissioner.
Nothing has actually been approved
The only formal action the league has taken is a March 25 vote authorizing it “to formally explore potential team expansion to Las Vegas and Seattle,” two markets Silver described as places “with a long history of support for NBA basketball.” There has been no expansion vote, no approved franchise and no announced fee.
Silver has been consistent on the clock. In July he said he was “still hopeful that this process would be wrapped up by year-end.” In September he said the league needs “to know by the end of this calendar year what it is we’re doing.”
Windhorst’s report says Silver is a full-go on Las Vegas and that a winning Vegas bid could be a matter of weeks. The sentence that should worry Seattle comes next: there could be a separate timeline for the two teams, or possibly no second team at all.
This is about price
Las Vegas has three groups bidding against one another, and ESPN reports the number there could pass $10 billion. Seattle has one serious bidder and no auction. Fox 13 Seattle put the leading Seattle offer at roughly $6 billion, while KOMO’s reporting pegs it between $6 billion and $7 billion. ESPN gave no Seattle figure at all and described the offers only as substantially lower than Vegas.
Every existing owner is reportedly looking at a payout somewhere between $500 million and $600 million, with one club modeling $533 million. A smaller Seattle fee takes real money out of 30 pockets, and raising it is the commissioner’s job.
The frontrunner is One Roof Sports and Entertainment, led by Samantha Holloway, who co-owns the Kraken and controls Climate Pledge Arena. A second group pairs Blacksun Private Equity with the Tulalip Tribes on a new building in Marysville. Holloway’s group declined to comment on the ESPN report.
Mexico City is leverage, and that is fine
The basketball case for Mexico City is not imaginary. The Capitanes have played in the G League since the 2021-22 season, the metro area holds more than 20 million people, and Silver said during a 2022 visit that “there’s no doubt we will be looking seriously at Mexico City over time.” The obstacles are just as real, starting with 7,349 feet of altitude and the travel map.
Newsweek and Forbes both reached for the same phrase to describe what is happening: stalking horse. An unnamed group with a conceptual arena district surfaced at precisely the moment the league needed Seattle’s bidders to feel some competition. Windhorst himself still expects the Sonics back, writing that he leans toward an eventual return but would “leave the champagne on ice for now.”
Seattle has heard worse. The Sonics played there from 1967 to 2008 and won the 1979 title before the franchise left for Oklahoma City. In 2013 the Board of Governors rejected a move of the Sacramento Kings to Seattle by a 22-8 vote. Climate Pledge Arena has been open since 2021 and seats 18,300 for basketball. The building is ready. The bid is not high enough yet, and the league wants the city to know it.
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.
