Adam Silver: NBA’s European expansion plan needs work

The NBA on Thursday staged its fifth regular-season game since 2011 in London, but commissioner Adam Silver says European expansion is still a ways off.

NBA commissioner Adam Silver was in London Thursday for the Milwaukee Bucks’ 95-79 drubbing of the moribund New York Knicks at the O2 Arena.

If was the NBA’s fifth regular-season game at the facility since 2011 and it crowned Bucks coach Jason Kidd as the Association’s semi-official King of England, as he is now 3-0 there, with one win as a player and two as a coach—all with different teams.

Silver told BBC.com that a European franchise is something the league has been exploring, but is a reality that is still well out on the horizon.

“It is on our list as something that we continue to explore, but we do not want to get ahead of ourselves—it is something we continue to study,” Silver said. “There is an opportunity to bring NBA basketball to Europe on a permanent basis.”

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There are two main questions when one thinks about expanding to Europe.

There is “How?” That brings into play questions such as travel, logistics, how players get paid, how the players’ union would be able to represent members playing in a nation with vastly different labor laws than one finds in the U.S. and Canada.

But the bigger question on the minds of many fans is “Why?” Critics blast the NBA now for spreading the talent too far among 30 North American-based teams, and that is with the talent tap from Europe turned on full blast.

LeBron James said more than four years ago that the best thing that could happen for the NBA would be contraction, not expansion (per Forbes.com).

And as annoying as that assessment might have been to the National Basketball Players Association or to the guys in the suits on Fifth Avenue, James wasn’t wrong.

Too many games, too much travel—these are all complaints made by players regularly. So of course it makes sense then that the NBA’s answer would be to add more teams, more games (possibly) and more travel.

The NBA has a solution to the games/travel staring it right in its money-hungry face, but it’s one that would likely never be considered—eliminating inter-conference play.

That’s 30 games per team per season.

It eases the travel as teams on opposite coasts would not have to make those 3,000-mile flights. And in terms of playoff positions, conference races wouldn’t be skewed by teams playing 37 percent of their games against teams they’re not competing with for those playoff positions.

Dallas Mavericks star Dirk Nowitzki said in October (per ESPN Dallas) that he thinks the schedule could and should be shorter and that eliminating back-to-backs should be the first thing on the docket.

There are some fundamental reasons the NBA season won’t back down from 82 games anytime in the immediate future. There are 23.94 billion fundamental reasons—the NBA’s new television contract that begins in 2016 and runs for nine years at a rate of $2.66 billion per year, according to ESPN.com.

Those figures are based on inventory—shorten the season, reduce the inventory and the network partners might frown on that, with that frown taking the form of reduced rights payments.

And as far as European expansion goes, the NBA is going to have to do a much better job of answering the “why” before jumping in.

The NBA on Thursday staged its fifth regular-season game since 2011 in London, but commissioner Adam Silver says European expansion is still a ways off.

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