Vegas Positioned for NBA Expansion Team, but Where Will It Play?

T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas gets another high-profile basketball event with Tuesday’s championship game of the Emirates NBA Cup. The title game, however, again raises the question of whether the eight-year-old arena will be the home of an eventual NBA expansion franchise. 

It’s long been believed Las Vegas is at or near the top of the league’s list of potential expansion markets, should it look to grow beyond 30 teams. Long before the NBA even formalizes a process to add new franchises, though, there are now at least three different potential site candidates in Las Vegas for a team, further complicating an issue that has to define itself fully.

Oak View Group has been at this the longest, with a plan dating back nearly three years for a large-scale resort and NBA-ready arena near the south end of the famed Las Vegas Strip. Much more recently, the Clark County (Nev.) Zoning Commission unanimously approved several key components for a somewhat similar project called LVXP near the north end of the Strip.

In between them is the existing arena, one in which Golden Knights owner Bill Foley wants to invest $300 million for improvements, and says building a new venue for the NBA in Las Vegas is a “waste of time,” adding that T-Mobile “is a perfect place for an NBA team.” Foley’s planned upgrades—being considered in coordination with the venue’s other two owners, AEG and MGM Resorts International—span a range of projects, including additional seating, new luxury-seating areas, and enhancements to the facility’s exterior footprint.

“It would be great to give T-Mobile [Arena] a real facelift if an NBA team were to come in,” Foley recently told Nevada Week. “We have a lot of things we’re working on, but there’ll be more revealed later. I’ve learned from my time with [NHL commissioner] Gary Bettman that I should not speak to anything about what a commissioner might do or might not do, because he laid it on the line for me.”

A Much Cheaper Ticket Market

In the meantime, the ticket resale market for Tuesday’s Emirates NBA Cup final between the Bucks and Thunder is way down compared to last year.

On multiple platforms, low-end, get-in seats for the championship game can be obtained for less than $50. That’s less than one-third of the comparable figure from a year ago, showing the impact of not having a marquee, big-market team such as the Lakers or Knicks involved, with the competition instead involving mid-market franchises from the Midwest and Southwest.