NBA Las Vegas expansion update: Has another group fallen out of the race to land Southern Nevada team?

Editor’s note: This is the archetypal of a regular Sunday diagnostic to wrapup quality and developments successful the NBA’s imaginable enlargement to Las Vegas and Seattle by the 2028-29 season. The NBA expansion bid process for Las Vegas presently features at least four groups still interested in landing a potential franchise in Southern Nevada after the Bob Iger and Joshua Kushner consortium acquired the Los Angeles Lakers this week. The remaining known contenders include billionaire Walmart heiress Nancy Walton Laurie and her husband Bill Laurie, and a group led by Golden Knights owner Bill Foley. Another contender, the Las Vegas Jacks, is headed by former NBA owner Jerry Colangleo and includes former NBA player and coach Vinny Del Negro, Scott Colangelo—president and managing partner of Prime Capital Financial—media executive David Levy, American Century Investments CEO Jonathan Thomas, and former NBA lottery pick and current NBA analyst Jay Williams. A fourth group, the MAGI effort led by NBA legend Earvin “Magic” Johnson, has been quiet in recent months, not responding to messages from the Review‑Journal. A source said no contact has been made with the group in roughly two months, suggesting the effort may have stalled or that Johnson and other participants could have merged into another bid. Each of the other groups, including the Iger/Kushner alliance, has held recent local conversations as the expansion process unfolds, according to a source. Raiders owner Mark Davis has not yet been mentioned in expansion discussions, a source noted. Davis has been asked repeatedly about his interest in joining an NBA ownership group but has declined to comment each time. UFC president and CEO Dana White said this week that he was approached by an ownership group gauging his interest in participating in their bid. White stated he cannot yet answer yes or no regarding his willingness to join such a group. With implicit 10 NBA-ready arena projects having been pitched over the years in Las Vegas, a source said no bid group has been definitively linked to a specific arena proposal. Caesars Entertainment and landlord VICI Properties are exploring an NBA‑ready arena on land they own adjacent to Caesars’ properties—the Horseshoe, Paris Las Vegas and Planet Hollywood. That concept has been referenced by more than one group, though it remains unclear whether the arrangement is contractual or merely conceptual, the source added. Having high‑profile names attached to the groups showing interest in owning a Las Vegas franchise is universally beneficial to the city and its sports ventures, said Steve Hill, president and CEO of the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority. “The captious wide that we person generated astir sports and the vigor and elevated acquisition astir teams and events being present is conscionable being noticed by folks,” Hill said. “It helps summation the worth of those teams here, and it past generates much involvement from a wide assortment of precise notable radical who privation to beryllium a portion of that. So it’s conscionable each benignant of travel together, and folks are recognizing that.” Hill added that he has spoken with several of the interested NBA ownership groups, but those exchanges differ from the talks he held with the Raiders and the Athletics when those clubs pursued relocation to Las Vegas, since no public funding is yet involved. Both the Raiders and the Athletics received hundreds of millions of dollars in public support for their Las Vegas moves. “Folks privation to recognize Las Vegas,” Hill said. “They privation to recognize wherever the champion locations would beryllium for antithetic considerations whether that’s postulation oregon pedestrian entree oregon country entree oregon thing on those lines.” “They privation to recognize if they’re looking astatine different venue what different events we (LVCVA) mightiness beryllium capable to assistance bring to a venue similar that. Those kinds of things we’ve been reasonably progressive successful conversations with antithetic groups, whether it’s squad ownership oregon those floating opportunities for caller venues, but it’s not, hey, let’s marque a woody astir nationalist money.”