Adam Silver just kept bringing it up. Unprompted. Whenever discussion of NBA expansion came up as Silver spoke to the media in Las Vegas during Summer League, Silver spun the conversation toward the NBA having its eyes on Europe and a new league there. He and the owners see an opportunity — they are better at making money off the business of basketball than the current European EuroLeague system. The NBA is exploring the idea of jumping in with both feet across the Atlantic, forming a super league with some existing teams and creating some new ones (likely tied to soccer powerhouses on the continent).
“We’d be an independent league, what we’re contemplating operating in Europe, but the fact that we would be creating new basketball teams in Europe is related [to NBA expansion],” Silver said. “It’s separate but related to this notion around building additional organizations in the league.”
This would be a direct competition to the existing EuroLeague, and its CEO, Paulius Motiejunas, spoke to Mike Vorkunov of The Athletic, saying a new league would create more confusion than anything else.
“[The NBA has] a really strong image. They can help with TV deals. They can help with sponsorship. We can grow the pie bigger if we go and work together. This is always the same message… But we have a huge fan base. We have 25 years of history. This is what we said to them. Why not sit down and see how we go and make decisions together, rather than just creating a new league and for them to start over?…
“This new league would create confusion. It would create division and on simple terms, you go to the sponsor, and you say, ‘I’m now this new, you know, NBA League.’ And then we go, ‘Well, we are EuroLeague.’”
The EuroLeague is set up differently from, for example, soccer’s Champions League, where teams have to earn the right to play in it annually. There are 11 “A-license” clubs that are part owners and managers of the EuroLeague and whose teams are automatically in the tournament every year. Those teams include powerhouses Barcelona, CSKA Moscow, Maccabi Tel Aviv, Olympiacos Piraeus, and Real Madrid.
The NBA is a couple of years out from starting a league on the continent, but its broad strokes idea is to poach a handful of those A-license clubs as well as forming a couple of new ones — in locations such as Manchester, England — plus having the opportunity for some teams to play their way into the competition. The NBA, with reason, believes its marketing arm and brand power can have this league making money that the existing EuroLeague system leaves on the table.
The NBA and EuroLeague working together is not totally out of the question, but the NBA is working closely with the international basketball governing body FIBA, which has a history of tension with the existing EuroLeague.
Silver and the NBA are not going to slow their European plans down — again, there is a reason Silver kept bringing that up while talking about the current NBA owners pumping the brakes on expansion stateside. There seems to be a real taste for a European league from NBA owners, who have long understood that the biggest growth in the association and their franchise values was going to come from international growth.
If that means competing with the EuroLeague, NBA owners are not going to back away from it.
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