The NBA announced plans to add a G League team based in Mexico City, deepening the strong ties between the league and country.
In a press conference ahead of The Mexico Games 2019, NBA commissioner Adam Silver dropped a bombshell that Mexico City will get a G League expansion team for the start of the 2020-21 season.
As hard as it is to keep secrets in the modern NBA, this one somehow managed to stay under wraps, despite the gravity of the league’s first foray into Mexico.
While it was no secret the league had interest in one day placing an expansion team of the NBA’s development league somewhere in Mexico, even as recently as September there was little news on whether the hoped-for team would ever come to fruition, never mind so soon.
With 21 million souls just in Mexico City and 126 million more across the country, the move firmly plants the league in North America’s largest market.
The NBA will integrate Capitanes of the Liga Nacional de Baloncesto Profesional (National League of Professional Basketball/LNBP) into the G League as that league’s 29th team, which will remain independent of any NBA team affiliation.
The Portland Trail Blazers and Denver Nuggets are the NBA’s two remaining franchises without a G League partner and both are expected to acquire one separately, according to Silver.
The announcement, made along with G League president Shareef Abdur-Rahim, NBA Mexico director Raúl Zárraga and Capitanes co-owners Patricio Garza and Gilberto Hernández, came in a press conference in the bowels of Mexico City Arena.
The move to add a team outside the U.S. or Canada is one of the most important in expanding the league internationally since the NBA ventured into the Canadian market in the 1990s.
It also marks the beginning of a much more intense relationship for the league with Latin America, one of the world’s biggest potential markets to grow the NBA’s viewership and talent base simultaneously.
“I think it’s an important signal to the market just how important we view the entire country of Mexico and all of Latin America,” Silver said. “We’ve seen an explosion of interest in Mexico over the last five years or so.”
“This is a pivotal next step not only for Mexico, basketball development in Latin America but also for the growth of the G League,” Abdur-Rahim said.
The NBA will have held 30 games in Mexico at the conclusion of 2019, more than any country other than the U.S. and Canada since the start of the league’s Global Games program in 1978.
In recent years, the level of commitment to Mexico has risen sharply in line with the viewership, with roughly 20 million fans already regularly watching games.
The league put one of its seven global academies in Mexico in 2017 as part of its ongoing efforts to expand the worldwide talent base and even opened an NBA store in Mexico City in the days before The Mexico Games 2019.
Capitanes co-owner Hernández was enthusiastic about the nascent partnership, noting, “this is a huge landmark moment for our organization, for our team. I would say a milestone.
Great news not only for our team, but I believe for our city, for Mexico City, a wonderful, huge city, driving and living basketball every day. This is great news for our country. The fact that the NBA, the most global league in the whole world, is putting solid two feet in our country, I believe it’s great news, not only for basketball, but for sports nationwide.
It remains to be seen how the city and country will embrace the NBA’s development league, still many months ahead of the start of the Capitanes’ inaugural season in the G League.
But based on the deafening sounds in Mexico City Arena on Thursday night, it seems very likely the fans are more than ready for the NBA to finally and officially arrive in the bustling capital city.
¡Viva Mexico! ¡Viva la NBA!
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