The NBA is looking at starting a new European basketball league.
The current plan is for the competition to feature 16 teams, with 12 permanent members plus four that would qualify each year.
NBA commissioner Adam Silver said the new league would likely have 40-minute games, in keeping with the European standard and not the 48 minutes seen in the NBA.
A salary cap would also be introduced.
NBA commissioner Adam Silver says basketball can better serve European fans
Silver was speaking at a press conference in New York on Thursday alongside Andreas Zagklis, the secretary general of basketball’s world governing body Fiba.
The two organisations will work together on the new league with Zagklis saying there was a unanimous vote among Fiba’s board of directors to proceed with the plans.
Silver added: “We feel now is the time to move to that next stage. Basketball is the No 2 sport in Europe. It’s widely popular.
“Hundreds of millions of fans and roughly 15 per cent 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.
“The response we’ve gotten from the marketplace is very positive.
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“Whether it’s from media partners, whether fan research, discussions directly with FIBA, advertising agencies and other clubs in Europe, several of them have been enthusiastic about the potential opportunity to better serve basketball fans in Europe.”
European teams currently compete in the EuroLeague, which has been run by EuroLeague Basketball since 200 after being founded by FIBA in 1967.
Zagklis added: “Coming out of the most successful World Cup and Olympics ever, we also believe it is the right time to take the next step for club basketball.
“Our role as a federation is to unite the basketball ecosystem.”
