NEW YORK -- NBA commissioner Adam Silver and FIBA Secretary General Andreas Zagklis held a news conference in midtown Manhattan Thursday afternoon to announce that the NBA and FIBA are officially beginning the process of exploring the creation of a new professional basketball league in Europe that would rival the EuroLeague and, the NBA hopes, would create more economic opportunities on the continent.
"Basketball is the No. 2 sport in Europe," Silver said, adding that the league believed this was the "right time" to move forward with the idea. "It's widely popular. Hundreds of millions of fans. Roughly 15 percent of the players in the NBA right now are from Europe. Five out of the last six of our MVPs have been European. But there's a huge gap, I think, between the amount of interest in the sport and the development in terms of how we operate a league here in North America."
Silver said there was "enthusiastic support" among the NBA's board of governors during this week's meetings that preceded Thursday's news conference to move forward with the plans for a potential European league. Zagklis added that there was a unanimous vote among FIBA's board of directors to do the same thing.
While both men cautioned that matters were far from finalized, and no timeline was given for the potential creation of the league itself, there were a few things they were willing to immediately commit to. Silver said the league would likely have European, or international, rules, including 40-minute games, and would have more of a feel of the European or international game than the typically more free-flowing American product.
He did, however, say that any league would have a salary cap -- something that does not exist for the top European leagues in either soccer or basketball at the moment -- with Silver saying the goal would be, as in the NBA, for any team participating in the competition to have a fair chance of winning it.
As for the structure of the league itself, it would be a 16-team league featuring 12 permanent members, Silver said. The remaining four spots would then be left open for teams from across Europe to qualify into.
At the heart of these discussions is what Silver referenced: a belief that the NBA is better positioned to monetize European basketball than the current teams there are doing.
"The response we've gotten from the marketplace is very positive," Silver said. "Whether it's from media partners, whether it's from fan research that we've done, discussions directly with FIBA, advertising agencies and other clubs in Europe, several of them who have also been enthusiastic about the potential opportunity to better serve basketball fans in Europe."
That last point from Silver -- the potential to partner with existing clubs in Europe -- highlights an undercurrent of this entire discussion and the noteworthy fact that the NBA is teaming up with FIBA, the sport's international governing body, and not with the EuroLeague itself. That's because FIBA and the EuroLeague have been at odds for years, disagreeing on a wide variety of topics.
That disdain appeared to be on full display during Thursday's news conference, when Zagklis repeatedly referred to the EuroLeague as "that league."
For his part, Silver said the reason the NBA was being so open about its plans to explore the possibility of creating a league, rather than revealing them at the stage when it was officially ready to do so, was because the league felt it was the best path to creating an optimal outcome for a potential league moving forward.
"We want to have very open and direct conversations with existing stakeholders and not have backroom conversations," Silver said. "It was our feeling that if we announced our intentions, then we could openly discuss with existing stakeholders, existing clubs what their level of interest is, and the community would know that, in terms of the FIBA community, as well.
"We felt that was a healthier way to go about it."
It also could wind up being the best way for the NBA to make it a successful league, as many of the EuroLeague's top clubs -- including the likes of Real Madrid, Barcelona and Bayern Munich -- are among the biggest and most powerful brands in world sport, making potentially partnering with them rather than competing against them a more alluring idea.
Zagklis said he, and the rest of FIBA, would continue communicating with teams about the possibility of teaming up with the NBA on this venture, rather than sticking with the existing EuroLeague.
"We're going to have a full range of discussions," Zagklis said. "I want to be clear about the openness of our position, at least speaking for FIBA right now, on these discussions. This is very important, that we are having these conversations for our fans and for the development and growth of our sport.
"This does not mean that this happens to the detriment of other stakeholders. It's actually trying to raise the tide for everyone in European basketball."
But just what form that will ultimately take remains to be seen. Silver said that while the NBA wouldn't need to have full media deals fleshed out before being willing to move forward with a formal creation of a European league -- which would be the fifth league the NBA is operating, joining the NBA, the WNBA, the G League and the Basketball Africa League -- it would need to have a fully vetted business plan in place.
He also said that part of the discussion about whether there would be newly created teams and the ownership of the teams in the league is also about the NBA identifying specific cities in Europe to be part of it and creating NBA-level facilities in those cities.
"We are looking at existing arena infrastructure in Europe," Silver said, "although at the same time I'd say part of the opportunity here is to potentially build more state-of-the-art basketball-style arenas in Europe. That's where we see an opportunity in terms of incentivizing partners, potential team owners, maybe existing clubs to come in, modernize facilities or build new facilities.
"In addition, we of course are looking at size of cities. Certain European cities obviously are well-known in the United States, are media capitals, capitals of industry. Those are things we're looking at. But there also are some hotbeds of basketball in Europe ... [there's] tremendous interest in our sport."