FIBA secretary general Andreas Zagklis (left) and NBA commissioner Adam Silver (R) speak during a press conference to announce the NBA’s ongoing quest to further align with FIBA and expand its role in European basketball, in New York, on Thursday. (Photo by TIMOTHY A. CLARY / AFP)
(TIMOTHY A. CLARY via Getty Images)
NEW YORK — The NBA is ready for expansion, big expansion, but it’s not in Seattle or Las Vegas — the league is going all the way overseas.
NBA commissioner Adam Silver and FIBA secretary general Andreas Zagklis sat side-by-side on a dais in New York on Thursday afternoon, announcing the NBA will begin exploring a basketball league in Europe after a year of discussions on the enterprise.
Nothing is truly set in stone, but it seemingly could be a mark on Silver’s legacy as one of his biggest accomplishments as commissioner. The league will be 16 teams, with 12 permanent teams and four clubs that would be “in position to play on a yearly basis,” Silver said.
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There are certainly a lot of kinks to work out considering the tenuous relationship between FIBA and the Euroleague. The NBA believes the transparency of the announcement right now, as opposed to coming forward with an entire league full of teams and rules and mode of operations, will be beneficial to cutting through some of the red tape.
NBA deputy commissioner and COO Mark Tatum was instrumental over the last several months, working with FIBA and figuring out a way to use the NBA’s massive influence, especially considering it got a $76 billion media-rights deal done just months ago.
“We want to have very open and direct conversations with existing stakeholders and not have back-room conversations,” Silver said. “It was our feeling that if we announced our intentions then we could openly discuss with existing stakeholders, existing clubs what their level of interest is, and the community would know that, in terms of the FIBA community, as well. We felt that was a healthier way to go about it.”
Silver believes “now is the time” given the research the NBA has performed with fans, advertising agencies and other clubs in Europe. The NBA’s massive reach and financial backing is appealing to many, with basketball only trailing soccer as far as worldwide popularity.
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“Hundreds of millions of fans. Roughly 15 percent of the players in the NBA right now are from Europe,” Silver said. “Five out of the last six of our MVPs have been European. But there’s a huge gap, I think, between the amount of interest in the sport and the development in terms of how we operate a league here in North America.”
This is the culmination, both say, from conversations that began with late NBA commissioner David Stern and Boris Stankovic and Patrick Baumann, who were previous secretary generals with FIBA.
It’s very much in the modeling stage, so there are only so many details Silver and Zagklis could divulge, as the NBA game and international game, from the roots to the basketball operations, work so differently.
The international games are 40 minutes instead of the NBA-standard 48 minutes, and some teams would be subject to relegation, as opposed to the NBA being a “closed” league, where the franchises aren’t subject to overall penalty due to underperforming.
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From the NBA’s standpoint, having more of an official foothold in Europe is attractive, especially if one believes they are tapped out domestically. And given the NBA has been in existence for 79 years, it has the opportunity to do things from scratch in a way it can’t here.
“In Europe, on the other hand, there’s an open system,” Silver said. “Despite there being an open system, there’s certain clubs that are perennially playing in those tournaments or in that club competition. I think, given the opportunity to design a league from scratch, one of the things we’re looking at is what are the best elements we can take of both systems.”
There’s an outsized international influence in the NBA already, not just in the players but in style of play, and the NBA has embraced that now in ways it didn’t when the players first started coming over en masse in the early 1990s.
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Zagklis said “FIBA is for everyone,” as a nod to some of the complications Euroleague and FIBA have had through the years.
“We want our top-tier clubs to make more money, to become sustainable, because the majority of them are not,” Zagklis said. “And also to motivate the rest of the ecosystem to play against them and produce players.
“During that process of FIBA basically doing its job, whenever we’ve called the NBA, the NBA was there ready to help, ready to participate in meetings, ready to put its, no doubt, business acumen, but also its very high-level know-how of how you run a league and you deal with a different ecosystem. We will continue on that same path.”
That path will not likely have NBA owners coming into this new league and owning overseas teams dually, Silver said. Silver does want Europe to catch up to what the NBA franchises have done by way of building up-to-date arenas and practice facilities.
One would think that would be an attractive quality for clubs as they vie to get into what they expect to be a very profitable venture.
