Report: NBA sets date to vote on a Seattle Sonics expansion team

A day 18 years in the making may finally be upon Seattle Sonics fans, as ESPN NBA insider Shams Charania reported Monday morning that the NBA will hold a vote at its Board of Governors meeting March 24-25 to explore adding expansion teams specifically in Seattle and Las Vegas.

More: ESPN’s Shams says Seattle Sonics NBA expansion expected to pass

Per Charania, the expansion additions would be targeted for the 2028-29 NBA season if the process moves forward, and there is a “growing number of owners believed” to now be in support of expansion in Seattle and Las Vegas.

Charania wrote that Seattle and Las Vegas’ market appeal along with a “parity-friendly collective bargaining agreement” could mean a “robust purchase market for expansion.”

The NBA has been absent from Seattle since 2008, when a group that had bought the team from former owner Howard Schultz moved the franchise to Oklahoma City, where it became the Thunder. The city opened Climate Pledge Arena, which was built on the site of the former Key Arena and Seattle Coliseum on the Seattle Center campus, in 2022. It is home to the NHL’s Seattle Kraken and was built with the hope of bringing the NBA back to the Emerald City.

The SuperSonics won the first major pro sports championship in Seattle when they beat the Washington Bullets in the 1979 NBA Finals.

The March vote would be a key first step to expanding the league to 32 teams, with Charania writing that it would “allow the league to focus on Las Vegas and Seattle and have a bidding process for the teams.” The next step would be a final vote later this year. To progress at each step, there will need to be 23 of the 30 NBA governors voting in favor.

Expansion being on the agenda is not a surprise: the board gathers for only a few meetings each year, and NBA commissioner Adam Silver has said on multiple occasions that a decision will be made by the end of 2026 on whether the 30-team league will add one or two new franchises in the coming years.

“Not a secret, we’re looking at this market in Las Vegas. We are looking at Seattle,” Silver said in December, while in Las Vegas for the NBA Cup final. “We’ve looked at other markets as well. I’d say I want to be sensitive there about this notion that we’re somehow teasing these markets, because I know we’ve been talking about it for a while.”

There have been countless factors to consider, including what the expansion fee for a new franchise will be — it will be in the billions, with some in the league thinking a number exceeding $6 billion is not out of the question — and what adding two more teams will mean for the on-court product.

Silver said last July that the league’s owners wanted an “in-depth analysis” of what expansion would look like, including what it would mean for the dilution of talent and the potential effects — good and bad — of selling equity in the league.

If both Las Vegas and Seattle were added, it’s also long been believed that an existing team would need to be moved from the current Western Conference into the Eastern Conference to create two 16-team sides of the league. Geographically, Minnesota, Memphis and New Orleans would be the most logical candidates to go from West to East.

The Associated Press contributed to this post.

Previously: The latest from commissioner on potential NBA expansion

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