The NBA Has Three Bidders Left For Las Vegas, And A $12 Billion Price Tag Says The City Already Won

Somewhere between $12 billion and $13 billion. That is what ESPN reports the NBA expects the winning bid for a Las Vegas franchise to be worth, once a new arena is included.

The league is expected to pick the winner in the "very near future," and three groups remain. One is led by Nancy Walton Laurie and Bill Laurie. Walton Laurie is the daughter of Walmart co-founder James "Bud" Walton, her husband once owned the NHL's St. Louis Blues, and Forbes puts the couple's net worth at about $17 billion. Another is led by Canadian real estate executive Steve Apostolopoulos with former Milwaukee Bucks co-owner Marc Lasry. The third pairs Vegas Golden Knights owner Bill Foley with longtime NBA executive Jerry Colangelo.

How a city goes from strange idea to obvious choice

The NBA long kept its distance from Las Vegas. That has changed, and the change is easy to trace. The league's Summer League has been held there for years. In March 2026 the Board of Governors voted unanimously to explore expansion in Las Vegas and Seattle.

Commissioner Adam Silver described the city in July as a global entertainment hub, and he said a Las Vegas team could begin play in the 2028-29 season. He also insisted nothing is guaranteed. The league could expand by two teams, one team or none, and he has said he hopes the process wraps up by the end of this year.

Meanwhile the city has spent years assembling a sports résumé. The Golden Knights arrived in 2017 and won the Stanley Cup in 2023. The Raiders moved to Las Vegas in 2020. The Aces are the WNBA's reigning champions after their sweep of Phoenix last year. Formula 1 has its own Las Vegas Grand Prix. Basketball is late to the party, but the party is already loud.

The arena is the actual bid

Here is where the price tag deserves a closer look. That $12 billion to $13 billion covers the franchise and a new arena, which means the winning group is signing up for a construction project as much as a basketball team. The bidders are real estate people, hotel-and-casino-adjacent people and hockey owners. Building things is their day job.

Silver has said the league cares about who the owners are and where the team would play at least as much as the sticker price. Read that as a hint about how the decision will be made. A vision for the roster will not decide this one. The building will.

Seattle offers a useful contrast. The only publicly identified Seattle group is One Roof Sports & Entertainment, led by Kraken owner Samantha Holloway, and it holds a controlling stake in Climate Pledge Arena. That gives it a head start most Vegas bidders cannot match. Seattle has the building and Vegas has the money.

The unglamorous truth about the gamble

Calling Las Vegas a risk misses the point. The city will not struggle to sell tickets, sponsorships or suites. What it lacks is a place to put the team, and $12 billion of that price is really buying an answer to that problem.

For fans, the more interesting question is what kind of team eventually plays there. A tourist-heavy market changes how you build a season-ticket base, how you schedule a home date, even how a home crowd sounds. The NBA has never launched a franchise in a city where most people in the arena on any given night are visiting.

The league knows that, and it is going ahead anyway. So does a city that already hosts everything need an NBA team, or does the NBA need the city? The bidders have clearly picked a side, and the price tag tells you which.