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Adam Silver said the NBA’s prospective European league is still “two to three years” away from launching, but he already has an idea of what he doesn’t want it to look like.
Speaking at the Front Office Sports Tuned In summit in New York on Tuesday, the NBA commissioner said the league continues to explore a possible league overseas and one of the hurdles before launching is ensuring competitive balance.
“As much as I’m an admirer of European soccer, we don’t want a top-heavy league,” Silver said. “We don’t want a league where there’s only a few teams where the perception is they are in the position to truly compete like the Champions League. We want to try to model a league after a system we know where it might not be a hard cap system but where you can regulate competition. There’s a sense that if you have a team, your team has a fair chance to win a championship.”
While the NBA is exploring a European league, Maverick Carter, LeBron James’s longtime business partner, is doing the same. Silver mentioned he saw pictures of Carter and James on a yacht with Nuggets star Nikola Jokic and his agent Miško Ražnatović in July, when the group discussed Carter’s prospective league. Aside from that, Silver said hasn’t followed its developments.
“Competition is good,” he said. “It keeps everyone on their toes.”
Former Spurs star Tony Parker, who owns French team ASVEL, recently said the NBA’s European league is “going to happen,” but Silver said other barriers remain. Aside from European regulatory issues, the continent’s arena infrastructure “frankly doesn’t exist right now,” Silver said.
Europe’s arenas lack many modern amenities NBA arenas have, including sufficient capacity, luxury seating, and restaurants—partially because of their age. He said Accor Arena, which housed the later rounds of basketball for the 2024 Paris Olympics, is a suitable venue, but was still built in the 1980s and has its limitations.
Before Silver stepped on stage, a report from EuroHoops said the NBA’s Europe league will launch in 2027 with teams in London and Manchester. Silver was unaware of the report, but didn’t rule out a new league in two years.
“I think we could start with some of the existing arenas and then transition,” Silver said. “So ‘27 is ambitious, there’s no question about it, but I don’t think I’d want to go much longer than ‘28. The opportunity is now to do something like this.”
