With NBA now talking expansion, Dan Issel says it’s time for Louisville to step up

The biggest development emerging so far from the NBA Finals between Denver and Miami is not the brilliance of Nikola Jokic nor the star turns by ex-Kentucky Wildcats Jamal Murray and Bam Adebayo.

It is what NBA Commissioner Adam Silver said before Game 2 on NBA TV in an interview with Shaquille O’Neal about future expansion.

Asked by Shaq about the NBA adding teams, Silver said “it is a possibility.” The NBA commissioner went on to say that expansion could move front and center for the league once it has negotiated a new media rights deal as early as next spring. The current NBA media deals with ESPN and Turner Sports expire after the 2024-25 season.

For those enticed by the dream of bringing pro basketball back to the city of Louisville and the state of Kentucky, Silver speaking publicly about expansion is significant.

“As far as I know, that’s the first time (Silver) has ever mentioned expansion being a possibility,” Dan Issel said Wednesday in a phone conversation. “All the quotes I’ve seen (in the past) and the couple of conversations I’ve had with him, he wasn’t taking meetings about expansion and he wasn’t ready to talk about it. So I thought that was a good thing for the commissioner to say as far as the efforts to get a team in Louisville.”

Prior to the coronavirus pandemic, Issel had returned to the commonwealth to work on bringing pro basketball back here. The Kentucky Wildcats men’s hoops luminary and former pro basketball star with the Kentucky Colonels of the old American Basketball Association and with the Denver Nuggets as both an ABA and NBA franchise was serving as the public face of the Louisville Basketball Investment and Support Group.

“We were gaining some traction, then COVID hit and the whole thing kind of fell apart,” Issel said of his work for the entity trying to get an NBA franchise in our state. “With this development from Commissioner Silver, it might fire up the organization again.”

Presently, even though Issel co-hosts a sports radio talk show on Louisville’s WHBE-AM 680 (ESPN Louisville) from 10 a.m. to noon Monday through Friday, he is doing so from long distance after having moved back to Denver full-time in 2022.

The groundwork laid by those who want to bring top-level pro basketball back to the commonwealth for the first time since the Colonels folded in 1976 — including the ever-active @nba2lou Twitter account — has at least positioned Louisville to be in the expansion conversation.

Following Silver’s remarks, Bookies.com oddsmaker Adam Thompson listed Louisville as having the fourth-best chance of winning the NBA expansion derby. USA Today For The Win’s Blake Schuster put Louisville sixth on the list of most likely cities to get a new NBA franchise.

Both Thompson and Schuster had the same top three contenders: 1. Las Vegas; 2. Seattle; 3. Mexico City.

One thing should be apparent after the star-crossed previous attempts to get NBA basketball to Kentucky: Unless the city of Louisville and the state of Kentucky can get all major stakeholders on board and pulling in the same direction by the time the NBA launches an expansion process, there’s little point in our state trying.

In the early years of the current century, the original Charlotte Hornets and former Vancouver Grizzlies franchises likely could have been gotten to move to Kentucky had forces aligned with University of Louisville athletics not sabotaged the chances. Instead, the cities of New Orleans and Memphis, respectively, got those teams.

No person or ownership group is going to be willing to spend the billions of dollars — Issel believes the expansion fee when the NBA next expands will be in the neighborhood of $3 billion — it will take to get a new NBA franchise only to then place it in a city where a major institution is in opposition to the team.

So if the leadership in the state of Kentucky and the city of Louisville want to make a play for an NBA team in expansion, they need to figure out a way to make that palatable to U of L on the front end.

After years of misfiring, our state finally got a major league pro franchise when the National Women’s Soccer League placed the Racing Louisville franchise here. It would benefit our state in myriad ways to be in “the big leagues” in more pro sports.

For various reasons, aspiring to an NFL or Major League Baseball team in Kentucky is impractical. To me, it seems realistic to at least dream for the NBA, the WNBA and/or seeing Louisville City FC advance to the Major League Soccer level.

For his part, Issel rejects the idea that Louisville as a medium-sized Midwestern/Southern market might not have enough “sex appeal” to win out in the NBA expansion contest against larger markets that would seem to pack a greater “wow factor.”

Said Issel: “That’s the part that bothers me or concerns me the most: For some reason, Kentuckians have this idea, ‘Well, we can’t do that. We’re not big enough to do that. We are not sexy enough to do that.’ … Well, sometimes you just have to roll up your sleeve and say, ‘Forget about all the negatives, we’re going to get this done.’ And have that attitude going into it.”