The last time the Boston Celtics played, broadcasters Mike Gorman and Brian Scalabrine got a surprise visit from NBA Commissioner Adam Silver. In between talk of how that legendary pair might spice up their calls and early impressions of the league’s new in-season tournament, another topic came up that has been in the Association news cycle of late with the league’s NBA Mexico City Game having gone down the week prior.
That topic, NBA expansion, tends to pop up at the start of every season as the league lurches ever closer to adding new teams, and has been picking up speed recently due to one of the two major benchmarks Silver has outlined as needing completion before expansion (a new CBA) having been met as the other, a new media rights deal, remains in process.
And while the general consensus remains that Seattle and Las Vegas are top teams in the mix for new clubs, Canada and Mexico could be in the running as well, per Silver.
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“Mexico City is easy in terms of, I mean it’s high altitude, it’s 2,000 feet higher than Denver, so that affects the players a bit, but it’s a shorter flight to Mexico City from New York than it is to LA,” said Silver via Yahoo’s Jordan Daly.
“One day, I think that would be incredible to actually expand to a market like Mexico City.”
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“In the meantime, we are playing in Paris in January again,” he continued. “It is very much a global league, we’ve got players from roughly 40 countries, over a quarter of the players were born outside of the United States.”
“And especially now with digital media, streaming media, you guys know,” continued Silver. “I’m sure you get fan mail from 200-plus countries, that’s where our games are carried.”
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As a country of close to 130 million souls with a fastly-growing NBA fanbase, such a potential media rights deal for not only Mexico but perhaps all of Latin America could create a massive influx of cash into the league.
But cultural and logistical hurdles remain even as headway into the market grows apace with the success of NBA Mexico games and the Capitanes G League team based in Mexico City.
Perhaps in an effort to split the difference, Silver outlined a potential avenue for further expansion into Latin America via more G League teams based south of the US Border in his address at this year’s Mexico City Game.
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But as Director of NBA Mexico Raul Zarraga confirmed in an interview with the Celtics Wire, such a move is not yet fully on the league’s plan of attack, more of a realm of action the league is considering for the future.
The Celtics and the rest of the Association might be making trips to the Mexican Capital for regular season games in the future, and their G League squad, the Maine Celtics, may well be doing so in the very near future.
But for now, the scattering of Cs fans living in the Mexican Capital will have to see their favorite team on League Pass and other such broadcasts while we wait for the NBA to become a tri-national affair.
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