Denver Gazette beat writer Vinny Benedetto takes you around the NBA and inside the Nuggets locker room:

NBA Insider

One expansion movement seems to have a little more steam than the other.

Most expansion talk in recent years has been domestic with Las Vegas and Seattle being the likely new markets. That doesn’t appear as imminent as it was prior to the new collective bargaining agreement and media-rights deals.

“The fact is (there’s) no new news to report today on domestic expansion, but it’s something we continue to look at. We did discuss it at the board meeting. I think that we’ve spent a fair amount of time on the economic models around expansion. We’ve gotten into more of, I’d say, a deeper dive than when I last addressed the media on it. Certainly now that we know what our media contracts are. That helps in doing the math, at least over the next decade,” NBA commissioner Adam Silver said last week at his annual press conference following a Board of Governors meeting.

“Part of the difficulty in potentially assessing it is a sense of long-term value of the league, and a little bit maybe it’s a high-class problem, but as with some of the recent jumps in franchise valuations, that sort of creates some confusion in the marketplace about how you might even price an expansion franchise. So I’ll only say it’s something that we continue to actively look at.”

Expanding the NBA’s footprint into Europe sounded like it might move a little faster, though Silver maintained he sees those as independent ventures that would not impact the other. A league full of European teams comes with its own complications. Some countries have well-established leagues with no shortage of name-brand recognition thanks to the soccer clubs that exist under the same umbrella – think Barcelona and Real Madrid in Spain, Greek’s Olympiacos and Panathinaikos and Bayern Munich in Germany. It’s not the same in England where some of the most popular soccer clubs exist without a basketball squad. It’s additionally complicated because European clubs have existed without any sort of salary cap.

“Adding teams to an existing league where you have, from a national standpoint at least, a fixed pie of revenue, is very different than looking at an opportunity in Europe where it’s a clean slate. While there is an existing operation there, it’s sort of a greenfield in terms of what the opportunity might be,” Silver said.

“But to the extent anyone has taken from me a suggestion that Europe is more a priority than potential expansion in the U.S., it’s not the case. I view it as two independent work streams here.”

What I’m Thinking

It sounds like the NBA is planning for regional sports networks to be a thing of the past.

Silver spoke about the league’s new and existing media partners. ESPN will continue to broadcast games, but Amazon and NBC are joining the party.

“It was great to see the three partners together. They talked about ways in which they’re going to seek to elevate the game this season, ways they’re going to market it,” Silver said.

“We talked with them and among our owners on issues around streaming, the opportunities that present for our league over time to customize the telecast to do a better job engaging with our fans. There was a bit of a discussion around local television as well. Obviously, we’re going through a transition. Many of our regional sports networks have just come out of bankruptcy, and fair to say enormous disruption there. We’re thinking about the future when it comes to how we’re going to present the games locally to our fans.”

Streaming is the future, but there is concern over cost. For fans to watch every one of their team’s games, they will likely need Amazon Prime, Peacock and traditional cable or access to ESPN’s streaming platform. If Silver really wanted to take care of the fans who were interested in watching most, if not all, of their team’s games, he would remove blackout restrictions on League Pass now. Contracts are contracts, but it’s never sense that a Chicago transplant in Denver can watch the Bulls play without issue, while Nuggets fans in Denver have multiple hoops to jump through to watch the home team. It’s an issue that doesn’t appear to be going away anytime soon.

“I think we’ve all had that experience where you’re going to Google to find the game you want to watch because the world has changed it’s not just automatically in the place you thought it would be, but ultimately, I’ll talk about it in terms of reach and how you reach your consumers. It’s interesting because of the disruption in the regional sports network business. I never would have predicted this was coming 10 years ago, but a lot of our local games are moving back to broadcast television. In fact, we have more games on broadcast television locally than we’ve had anytime in recent history,” Silver said.

“We’re continuing to look at it. But the ultimate answer is we think a lot about it. We know where we have mass appeal. On a global basis, we’re literally reaching billions of people. We don’t want to disenfranchise people by working with partners that are creating price points that make it inaccessible to them.”

What I’m Following

• The Nuggets are reportedly bringing more size to training camp. Moses Brown, a 7-foot-2 center, and the Nuggets reached a deal, according to HoopsHype. The 25-year-old played in 13 NBA games last season with Indiana and Dallas but spent most of the season in the G League. Signing guys like Brown and Kessler Edwards to training-camp deals helps the Nuggets reroute them to their G League affiliate.
• Fan-favorite-turned-foe Bones Hyland is sticking stateside. There were reports Hyland had been courted by some European powers, but the Timberwolves front office — led by Tim Connelly, the man who drafted Bones in Denver — offered Hyland what appears to be a minimum salary to stick in the NBA.
• Dennis Schroder continues to use international competition to bolster his case as a future Hall of Famer. The point guard produced in the clutch, as Germany beat Turkey, 88-83, in the EuroBasket championship game. Schroder was named the tournament’s most valuable player, while Slovenia’s Luka Doncic, Greece’s Giannis Antetokounmo, Turkey’s Alperen Sengun and Germany’s Franz Wagner rounded out the tournament’s All-Star Five. Greece beat Finland in the third-place game.

What They’re Saying

The most popular talking point at Silver’s press conference was, of course, the league’s ongoing investigation into Kawhi Leonard’s reported $28 million endorsement deal with Aspiration. Silver said he had never heard of the company or its dealings with Leonard until Pablo Torre’s podcast on the matter was published. Here’s Silver’s most interesting comments on the league’s ongoing investigation that’s being handled by a New York law firm.

“The burden is on the league if we’re going to discipline a team, an owner, a player or any constituent members of the league,” Silver said. “I think as with any process that requires a fundamental sense of fairness, the burden should be on the party that is, in essence, bringing those charges.”

The commissioner spoke about his powers should the investigation conclude the Clippers deserve to be punished.

“My powers are very broad,” Silver said. “Full range of financial penalties, (forfeited) draft picks, suspensions, et cetera. I have very broad powers in these situations.”

Silver didn’t seem interested in policing which teams can sign agreements with which players, noting it makes more sense for certain companies to work with players in their home markets. He does feel like the league has gotten better in making things more fair than when he first started working for the league.

“We have made progress there. I think that there’s enormous stigma in this league around any sort of cheating or any lack of fair play. I think also the results we’re seeing, again, from 2019 to now … seven different champions. I think there is the sense around the league that there’s no league bias toward particular markets,” he said.

Silver added, “I’m an NFL fan. When Pittsburgh plays Green Bay in the Super Bowl, it’s not billed as a small-market Super Bowl. It’s two storied teams. That’s where we’d like to get as the NBA, that it’s not a function of market size or even market attractiveness necessarily. In order to do that, you have to have a fair set of rules that people think, that the community thinks are going to be enforced without any bias and in a full and fair way by the league office.”