SBJ Unpacks: Silver talks NBA expansion, draft lottery

Tonight in Unpacks: NBA Commissioner Adam Silver reiterated that league expansion is not guaranteed, while he lauded the new draft lottery process designed to curb tanking, reports SBJ’s Tom Friend.

Also tonight:

• Jack Harvey once again parked his mic to take on the Indy 500
• MLB quietly adds The Team to its agency roster
• Lenovo starring in World Cup formation
• Op-ed: Modernizing college athletics without losing the academic mission

Listen to SBJ’s most popular podcast, Morning Buzzcast, where Abe Madkour looked at NBA Commissioner Adam Silver’s comments on expansion and NBA Europe, former college president Gordon Gee takes some blame for the issues in college sports, the 1901 Project breaking ground and more.

The NBA will either add one expansion team, two expansion teams or zero expansion teams, Commissioner Adam Silver reiterated Wednesday, with an assurance that the league will let candidates Las Vegas and Seattle know by the end of this calendar year.

“We’re focused on Las Vegas and Seattle,” Silver said. “There are multiple groups interested in both cities. We’re in discussions with them. And the timeline is that, as I’ve said before, it’s not a foregone conclusion that we will expand either in one city or both cities. But what we’ve told all interested parties that our anticipation, our Board [of Governors] will make a decision by the end of this calendar year.”

The determining factor will likely be the expansion franchise fees. Sources have said the NBA is seeking bids between $7B and $10B, which would incentivize the BOG to vote yes. By expanding, each current owner would lose a portion of their shared 11-year, $77B media-rights money — so the expansion fee is their way to make that money back, if not exceed it.

Halfway through the first portion of the Indianapolis 500, Jack Harvey sensed a vibration under the seat of his race car.

Harvey, a Fox Sports pit reporter and analyst who still moonlights as a race car driver for the Indy 500, instantly knew that his chance of winning his first Borg-Warner Trophy was in doubt.

“I was like, ‘We are—’” Harvey stopped himself. “Well, actually, I can’t say exactly what I said on the radio, because I think I get a pass on the radio when I’m driving versus when I’m giving interviews,” he said slyly.

For the second time in two years, Harvey worked out a deal with Fox Sports to put down the microphone for a few weeks and instead grab the steering wheel. Given the Indy 500’s stature, it has a long history of entries who only run that race.

A native of Bassingham, England, Harvey grew up a racer and won 10 championships in various levels that started with karting and British Formula 3, according to his Fox Sports biography. He moved to the U.S. in 2014 and debuted in IndyCar in 2017.

When Fox Sports picked up IndyCar’s rights from NBC Sports, starting with the 2025 season, Harvey moved to the broadcast side. But the one event he can’t stay away from is what’s known — and trademarked — as “The Greatest Spectacle in Racing,” which just had its 110th edition before an announced 350,000 fans at Indianapolis Motor Speedway on May 24.

Harvey has 95 starts in his IndyCar career, and while he hasn’t won any, he has three top-five finishes and 17 in the top 10. This year, he was back with the part-time Dreyer & Reinbold Racing team and its No. 24 Chevrolet, along with Indiana-based financial services company Invst as primary sponsor.

For Harvey, his second attempt at the 500 in the midst of his broadcasting career was less stressful than the first, and he felt like his preparation was on point. But that didn’t make the journey much smoother.

Harvey and his team were beset by issues all month, and he ended up starting dead last in the 33rd position after his car failed technical inspection following qualifying. He was one of the biggest movers in the race, finishing 11 positions better in 22nd, but handling issues prevented him from doing better.

“The first kind of scenario was I felt so relaxed because I knew what to expect. Last year was actually a lot more of the unknown. It was the first year I was working with Fox, it was the first year I was working with Dreyer without being full time,” he said. “I think this year … I just felt more at peace.”

Harvey said just like his racing, he’s still on a learning curve with how to do his broadcast work better. That includes being more comfortable with the camera, taking the right notes and providing better delivery. “It’s very much like driving a car,” he said. “When you’re used to it, everything slows down, you’re not quite as antsy all the time, you’re not quite as reactive to everything, but you respond instead of react.”

Harvey will make another attempt at racing the Indy 500 next year. For now, he was set to return to his regular role in the pits for Fox Sports for the May 31 running of the Chevrolet Detroit Grand Prix.

Now it can be told. During a period when the agency formerly known as Wasserman had “for sale” signs on it, not only was “The Team” (as it’s been rechristened) not losing any business on the non-entertainment side, but it also was gaining traction (and billings) on the B2B side. Most notably, the creative side of the house, combined from disparate portions of the company including agencies Laundry Service and influencer agency, Cycle, along with what was CSM’s creative division.

That combined agency has, oh-so-furtively, been serving as MLB’s lead brand agency all year, producing spots behind top-tier events, like the World Baseball Classic, Opening Day and America 250.

Perhaps even more notable is that Wasserman replaced creative powerhouse Wieden & Kennedy at MLB in that role, and that seems as surprising as W+K usurping one of The Team’s sponsorship clients.

The Team/Wasserman’s baseball work began last summer with an MLB Shop ad, and then it quietly won an agency review late last year.

“Reach plus engagement is what we’re looking for in our brand campaign, and we feel like The Team has given us both,” said MLB sponsorship chief Uzma Rawn Dowler, who took on additional duties as MLB CMO in early 2025 following the departure of Karin Timpone.

Dowler would not say precisely what precipitated the agency switch, but one of the first changes any new CMO normally affects is installing a new creative shop. It’s an “old dog/new puppy” dynamic. W+K was the league’s first creative agency of record, courtesy of Timpone. Dowler has not (yet?) affixed an AOR label onto The Team’s work, calling them “our lead creative for tentpole moments.”

Still, she was effusive in her praise, noting a strength based in the agency’s numerous MLB connections, including sponsors (Sage and Booking.com are MLB corporate patrons serviced by The Team), market research, analytics and valuation.

“Baseball fandom is nuanced, diverse and global and has a wide demographic range,” Dowler said. “We’ve been working with [The Team/Wasserman] for years in other sectors, and our feeling is that they understand fans and fan culture so well because of all their different touchpoints across our businesses.”

Brand growth

Meanwhile, The Team’s creative business has been growing, even outside of MLB. President of Brands and Properties Elizabeth Lindsey said that, since mid-2024 when those disparate creative shops were united, the yield has been around 40% growth, with work for brands including Casamigos, Gatorade and Google.

“I always felt like our vantage point across all of sports’ constituencies gave us a unique viewpoint, but we needed to prove that in the creative space,” Lindsey said. “Relevancy equals revenue and we think we’re providing both.”

It’s interesting to note that there are women heading both sides of this agency/client relationship.

As for The Team’s creative approach with MLB?

“We’re trying to get across that baseball belongs to everyone,” said Danny Nunez, The Team’s chief creative officer. “Tradition is vital in baseball, of course, but you can’t lose the people element, whether that’s with players or fans.”

This upcoming FIFA World Cup has been described as many things:

• The most sprawling because of its three-country setting.
• The biggest because it’s the first featuring 48 national teams.
• The most expensive, which is individually subjective but also quite documented at this point.

And this week, the governing body provided the clearest look at how Lenovo, FIFA’s official technology sponsor, will help this be the most innovation-infused World Cup yet.

FIFA Director of Innovation Johannes Holzmüller and Lenovo SVP/CIO Art Hu sprinted through the tech gauntlet this week during a chat with a select group of international journalists, covering the analysis tool Football AI Pro, three-dimensional scans of players, officiating boosts and more.

Here’s what intrigued me most from their wide-ranging breakdown:

Football AI Pro’s benefits to football staffs

Holzmüller shared that FIFA has often given teams massive mounds of post-match information in previous World Cups, but frankly, it was a tedious endeavor for coaches and analysts. “In the past, what happened was that after each match, we have been providing teams with a lot of data,” Holzmüller said. “It was a very long report ... I think 50-60 page reports.”

Football AI Pro changes that, giving analysts a generative AI platform to lean on for game breakdowns and opponent preparations. All World Cup competitors can engage the tool using natural language (no prompt training needed!) and ask “give me the positional breakdown for the USMNT’s Weston McKennie and where he’s been most effective.” If you’re a soccer fan, you know McKennie appears all over the field for both club and country.

Football AI Pro also points to various forms of supporting evidence for its answers and let users drop into a 3D version of a play and view the on-field progression through a player’s perspective.

“We’re able to make that much more natural language [with Football AI Pro], and we’re able to have 3D visualizations in terms of what is possible to answer deep football questions around analytics, match tactics, max strategies and player analytics that you cannot get from any consumer tool,” Hu explained.

The automation boost to referees

While semi-automated offside technology (SAOT) first appeared at the 2022 tournament in Qatar, an advanced version will debut at this World Cup. Perhaps most significantly, clear offside calls will be communicated directly with the assistant referees on the sideline, allowing them to quickly raise a flag instead of bogging down play.

This new version of SAOT still faces some limitations when dealing with clusters of players (referred to as occlusion) or individuals lying on the ground, Holzmüller admitted, but this is an effort to make sure that technology is additive to the flow of play and a running clock. Holzmüller said that over three years of testing at other FIFA tournaments, SAOT can now measure a player offside by as little as 10 centimeters (roughly four inches).

“The final call is still the assistant referee’s,” Holzmüller said. “It’s just a supportive tool where, for clear offsides, when the system is very confident that it’s offsides, then this information is directly sent.”

Data, data and more data

The sheer size of the data infrastructure is pretty eye-opening. All 16 World Cup venues will be equipped with 16 optical tracking cameras, which will measure 29 data points over 50 times per second of play. I tried to come up with a comparison here to help you digest the magnitude, but I hurt my brain and stopped.

The ball has sensors that convey the movement data. All players undergo a 3D scan during their media days, which plays into the visualization efforts of broadcasters (a faceless avatar is now replaced by a digital replica of Lionel Messi) and of officiating, which will see its offside calling capabilities boosted by exact player dimensions.

I see these innovations as setups for really compelling enhancements for future games, and I couldn’t help but imagine a day when we get a tabletop breakdown of games with player avatars, similar to NBC’s AR Sandbox used for NBA broadcasts.

Soccer fans (yours truly included) would eat that up.

As my 2025-26 term as president of the National Association of Collegiate Directors of Athletics (NACDA) comes to a close, I find myself reflecting on an era of unprecedented transformation. Driven by the realities of the House settlement, revenue sharing, NIL legislation, and the transfer portal, the landscape of college athletics has fundamentally shifted, continuing to evolve into what is being called “The Modern Era” of intercollegiate athletics. What I have learned/experienced from many conversations with student athletes, coaches, athletics directors, chancellors, presidents, and higher education practitioners across the country is that waiting for the dust to settle is no longer a viable strategy.

Institutions must proactively engineer modern, sustainable systems capable of adapting to the rapidly changing economics and governance structures reshaping higher education and intercollegiate athletics. To navigate this new paradigm, athletic departments must reconnect structurally with the broader academic mission of their universities. In our own attempt to control what we can control institutionally to meet the critical needs of financial sustainability, academic and athletic success, we (NIU) are looking forward to our transition into the Mountain West in football and gymnastics, Horizon League for the majority of our Olympic sport offerings, with wrestling in the Pac-12, all happening July 1, 2026.

As commercialization accelerates, there is a growing temptation to treat college athletics as a stand-alone professional enterprise. That would be a mistake. The better description is quasi-professional: College athletics increasingly looks, feels, and operates like a professional sports enterprise in certain respects, but it remains embedded in higher education, shared governance, broad-based participation, and student development. Athletics cannot become a commercial silo disconnected from the educational purpose of the university, nor can it consume institutional resources without accountability to the university’s broader mission.

At their best, universities exist to create environments where students discover, examine, preserve, and apply knowledge that improves society. Athletics remains an extension of that mission. Participation in sports develops discipline, teamwork, resilience, leadership, time management, and problem-solving. The central obligation remains graduation and long-term student success. College athletics also serves as a powerful bridge between universities and the broader communities they serve, creating engagement, school pride/affinity, alumni connectivity, and public visibility that few other university functions can replicate.

This does not mean we can ignore the commercial realities of the moment. Major college athletics is now driven by media rights, revenue sharing, private equity/capital, national entertainment economics, and rapidly evolving athlete expectations. Wishing away that reality is futile, but surrendering the educational purpose of college athletics to a purely professional model would be equally wrong. The task now is to modernize without severing athletics from the academic mission that gives it legitimacy.

That requires integrating athletics into traditional university governance and implementing mature operational safeguards. Institutions should adopt proactive harm-reduction protocols, including anonymous reporting systems, mandatory exit interviews, and partnerships with independent experts to address growing risks associated with sports wagering, athlete mental health, and institutional liability. Shared governance is not an obstacle to modernization; it is one of the virtues of the collegiate model, because it keeps athletics accountable to the institution rather than allowing it to drift into a purely commercial enterprise.

Commercialization also demands more sophisticated labor and compensation frameworks. Rather than participating in reckless short-term bidding cycles that threaten institutional stability, universities should build sustainable revenue-sharing systems that reinforce educational achievement, long-term development, and responsible financial planning. The goal should be to generate the resources now required without compromising institutional standards.

For example, portions of television distributions and revenue-sharing compensation could vest over time or through academic benchmarks, with unvested funds redirected into graduation pools for athletes who complete their degrees. That kind of structure would shift the focus from short-term transactional compensation toward long-term professional development, while reinforcing the substantial lifetime value of a college degree.

Executing this level of modernization requires leadership, institutional alignment, and a willingness to rethink legacy operational structures. Presidents and chancellors ultimately hold the authority to drive structural change, but athletic directors are the practitioners responsible for operationalizing it. Redesigning the collegiate model will require leaders willing to build coalitions, absorb criticism, and develop entirely new governance and business frameworks. Modern athletic directors must simultaneously navigate corporate-scale finance, Title IX obligations, Olympic sport preservation, political scrutiny, donor expectations, and rapidly evolving athlete priorities.

Managing this disruption/uncertainty requires operational sophistication without losing sight of the student-athlete experience. Unlike professional sports teams built around a single sport and commercial product, NCAA Division I, II and III athletic departments must support broad-based sport offerings, satisfy Title IX and other legal obligations, preserve Olympic programs, and maintain institutional control across campus systems. After more than three decades in intercollegiate athletics, one lesson has remained constant: Sustainable success comes not from simply spending more money, but from building smarter systems, exercising discipline, and adapting without losing institutional identity.

Surviving this era of disruption/uncertainty will require financial discipline, strategic execution, transparency, and an unwavering commitment to the university’s mission. Our quasi-professional status leaves college athletics vulnerable to criticism if we pursue professional-style revenues without preserving the educational compact that justifies our place within higher education. The future depends on leaders who can manage a highly commercialized enterprise while still anchoring that enterprise to the academic values that define the collegiate model.

If we successfully combine modern business innovation with academic purpose, college athletics can continue to thrive as one of the most impactful pillars of the university experience while preparing student athletes to lead in an increasingly complex and rapidly changing world.

Sean T. Frazier, vice president and director of athletics and recreation at Northern Illinois University, is the 2025-26 president of the National Association of Collegiate Directors of Athletics (NACDA), the primary professional and educational association for college athletics administrators.

• Gotham FC hired former Florida Panthers executive Mark Zarthar as team president, installing a new business leader as the NWSL club looks to parlay championship success into commercial growth in the country’s largest media market, reports SBJ’s Alex Silverman.
• The AUSL added Brewers owner Mark Attanasio and Ryan Sanders Baseball executives Nolan Ryan, Reid Ryan and Don Sanders to its investor group, reports SBJ’s Mike Mazzeo.
• Heading into the Stanley Cup Final, the NHL was averaging 1.5 million viewers for the playoffs across ABC, ESPN, ESPN2 and TNT/truTV, marking the league’s best figure on record ahead of the Final, reports SBJ’s Austin Karp.
• Karp also reports CBS drew the best English-language club soccer audience on record on Saturday, with 3.09 million viewers for the UEFA Champions League final, while LaLiga drew its best viewership yet for ESPN this past season, with games across ABC, ESPN, ESPN2 and ESPN Deportes averaging 91,000 viewers for the 2025-26 season, up 14% from last season.
• The D.C. Open, the only combined ATP/WTA 500 event on the pro tennis circuit, signed a new, expanded sponsorship deal with Mubadala Investment Company to make the Abu Dhabi state-controlled investment firm the tournament’s exclusive title sponsor through 2030, reports SBJ’s Rob Schaefer.
• CBS Sports and Italy’s top soccer league, Serie A, exercised an option to extend their U.S. media rights deal by one year through the upcoming 2026-27 season, reports Silverman.
• Telemundo will not be cutting away to commercials during FIFA World Cup hydration break, which are being used for the first time, reports Karp.