Question of the Day - 25 May 2021

The National Basketball Association has had a long relationship with Las Vegas.

Since 2004, the largest of the various NBA summer leagues (Orlando, Utah, California Classic) has taken place in Las Vegas at Thomas and Mack Center. The Summer League is an off-season competition organized by the NBA that takes place over a couple of weeks in early July, drawing all 30 teams to Las Vegas for games with makeshift squads that showcase rookie, sophomore, unsigned free agents, and a few veterans trying to work their way back into the league.

The NBA All Star Game was also played in Las Vegas in 2007 (never mind that it prompted an after-game melee in which 400 people were arrested). 

Of course, it's pretty well known that former NBA Commissioner David Stern declared, "Over my dead body will I ever allow an NBA franchise to come to Las Vegas as long as there's betting on sports events."

But though Stern's tenure lasted 30 long years, he finally stepped down in February 2014 and was replaced by Adam Silver, who wasted little time in announcing that he favored legal regulated sports betting, via an op-ed in The New York Times in November of that year. 

In 2018, then-CEO of MGM Jim Murren said he expected an NBA team to be announced for Las Vegas "within the next few years."

But that's where the history stalls. Though the NBA has been talking for several years about growing the league with two expansion teams, the league doesn't seem to be in much of a hurry. Also, it's been reported that the price of each team will be in the neighborhood of $2.5 billion -- more than four times more than Bill Foley paid in 2016 to turn an NHL expansion team, the Vegas Golden Knights, into Las Vegas' first major league team.  

Silver has been specific about his intention to return a team to Seattle; the city's previous team, the Supersonics, moved and became the Oklahoma City Thunder in 2009. Las Vegas has been mentioned as a possible second expansion city, but Mexico City appears to be the favorite when/if the league expands. 

As for an existing team moving here, following in the footsteps of the Oakland-Las Vegas Raiders, a few teams have been floated as possibilities: the L.A. Clippers, Sacramento Kings, Memphis Grizzlies, and interestingly enough, the Thunder. But those teams have basically been the objects of idle speculation and rumor, at least thus far. 

Only one "group" that we know of has been forthcoming about its intention to try to attract an NBA team to Las Vegas. Former NBA player-turned-businessman Jackie Robinson, who played for Seattle, Detroit, and Chicago before playing abroad, has for a long time been spearheading a $1 billion project to build a hotel-arena complex on the site of the old Wet 'n Wild water park on the north Strip (between the Sahara and Fontainebleau). Robinson's All Net Arena has been on life support since breaking ground, such as it was, in 2014. 

Last October, the Clark County Commission gave the project an ultimatum: Update the plan and post a bond within six months (by April 21) or the permits for the project would expire. Well, the project met the deadline; all the required documents, including performance agreement and developmental agreements, and a $12 million bond as insurance in case the project isn't finished, were submitted. 

Robinson says he has financing lined up from banks in Qatar, Zurich, and the U.S., so the All Net Arena is still alive. But now something more has to happen.

And that includes only the hotel-arena, not any team on the horizon.