NBA to explore expansion opportunities in Seattle and Las Vegas after Board of Governors votes in favor of move

The NBA took its first major step toward bringing back the Seattle Supersonics on Wednesday. The league’s Board of Governors reportedly voted in favor of the NBA exploring expansion opportunities in both Seattle and Las Vegas, the NBA confirmed Wednesday.

In a statement, NBA commissioner Adam Silver confirmed the news, adding, “We look forward to taking this next step and engaging with interested parties.”

The vote was expected, as ESPN’s Shams Charania reported in mid-March that the league would put the issue up to a vote at its Board of Governors meeting later in the month.

The vote does not guarantee Seattle and Las Vegas will receive expansion teams in the near-future, but it allows the league to explore those opportunities. NBA commissioner Adam Silver confirmed as much Wednesday, when he spoke about the vote publicly.

Silver added that not every NBA owner was convinced the league needed to expand to 32 teams.

But given the amount of money at stake — Charania reported bids could be in the $7 billon to $10 billion range — it should not come as a major surprise that the Board of Governors allowed the league to move forward with the process.

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There are still a few more steps the league and Board of Governors must take before officially expanding to 32 teams. The league and Board of Governors will likely vote to finalize the motion later in the year, Charania reported in mid-March. He also stated that momentum was moving toward expansion being approved, as a “growing number of owners are believed to support” the idea. In order for the motion to pass, 23 of the league’s 30 owners need to vote in favor of it.

If the league is allowed to continue down this road, the NBA would likely look to add both teams to the league ahead of the 2028-29 season. If Seattle and Las Vegas both receive teams, they would be put in the Western Conference, which would lead to some team re-alignment around the league.

For Las Vegas, the news opens up the possibility for the first-ever NBA franchise in the city. Las Vegas has shown the ability to support professional sports teams in recent year, with the NHL’s Golden Knights, WNBA’s Aces and NFL’s Raiders already in the city and MLB’s Athletics on the way.

Seattle hasn’t had an NBA franchise since the Supersonics left to become the Oklahoma City Thunder after the 2007-08 NBA season.

The NBA last expanded in 2004, when the Charlotte Bobcats — now the Hornets — started play.

Simple Food Safety Steps for Spring Holiday Meals

(WASHINGTON, D.C., March 25, 2026) – Spring holidays bring families and friends together for Easter ham, Passover brisket, and Mother’s Day egg-based brunch dishes. As consumers across America prepare these traditional meals for large gatherings, following basic food safety practices can help reduce the risk of foodborne illness.

After Hubert Davis’ firing, Celtics exec Brad Stevens reportedly says he’s not interested in UNC job

In the wake of Hubert Davis’ firing at North Carolina, Brad Stevens has no desire to leave the Boston Celtics.

According to CBS Sports, the former Butler coach and current Celtics president of basketball operations “has removed his name from consideration for the Tar Heels job.” Tuesday night, North Carolina made it official that it was moving on from Davis after days of speculation. 

Stevens last officially coached a basketball game in 2021 when he was on the sidelines for the Celtics and last coached a college basketball game in 2013. He took Butler to back-to-back Final Four appearances in 2010 and 2011, and in the 2010 championship game, forward Gordon Hayward’s game-winning buzzer beater from mid-court bounced off the rim.

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The Bulldogs were 166-49 in his six seasons with the school. Stevens left Butler at the end of the 2012-13 season to become the Celtics’ head coach. Even though he hasn’t coached college basketball in over a decade, Stevens’ name has come up when coaching jobs at blue-blood programs have come open.

He’s been one of the first names mentioned in Indiana’s recent coaching searches because he’s a native of Zionsville, Indiana. It’s not a surprise that he could have been linked to the UNC job. And it’s even less of a surprise that he is staying in Boston.

In eight seasons on the Celtics’ sidelines, Stevens was 354-282. Boston missed the playoffs in his first season, but made the postseason every other year and had three conference finals appearances. 

Stevens moved up to the front office after longtime Celtics general manager Danny Ainge announced his retirement (though Ainge is now back in the Utah Jazz’s front office). With Stevens overseeing basketball ops, the Celtics won the 2024 NBA Finals and are one of the best teams in the Eastern Conference in 2025-26 even though Jayson Tatum had missed much of the season. 

The Celtics are 47-24 ahead of a Wednesday night game against the defending champion Oklahoma City Thunder. Tatum has played in just eight games after tearing his Achilles during the 2025 playoffs. 

Streaming MLB games has never been easier! Just follow this simple 16-step guide

The 2026 MLB season is just around the corner, and you know what that means: It’s time to catch up on how the league has once again changed the way you’ll be watching 162 games of your favorite team, plus playoffs and special events.

Have no fear because Yahoo Sports is here to walk you through what’s ultimately a very simple process. It just breaks down into 16 steps across seven streaming platforms.

To be clear, we are going to be trying to sign up for every service you’d need to watch every MLB game and major event this year, and we’re assuming you’re approaching this without a subscription to any of them or a cable provider.

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Your first step is probably going to be to try to watch the home team. How that works depends on where you live and how much watching that team means to you. Ponder that, and let’s move on.

This is several steps in itself, but we’re just saying that the best way to watch your local team is still probably by signing up for a cable bundle or something similar that offers you a slate of sports channels.

If you’d rather stream the games, in-market streaming has become the norm in MLB, so you can likely sign up for something in that realm with your team.

If you had MLB.TV last season, you can skip this step (for now). Just renew your subscription as you normally would. You also probably don’t need this if you shelled out for MLB Extra Innings with your cable or satellite provider.

But if you’re new to MLB.TV, our next step will be to go to MLB’s streaming page, which will then send you to ESPN Unlimited, the new, $30-per-month, direct-to-consumer streaming service that will be the home of MLB.TV — the platform through which fans have watched out-of-market games for years.

As with all Disney streaming products, you’re going to need a login with the Mouse if you want to sign up for ESPN Unlimited, in order to sign up for MLB.TV. So go ahead and create an account there.

OK, so $30 per month might sound like a lot of money just to have the ability to pay even more money to watch baseball games. Fortunately, MLB and ESPN have offered a buffer for this year.

Go ahead and sign up for ESPN Unlimited, which will give you the first month free. You can also get ESPN Unlimited through your cable or satellite provider, so definitely check if that’s an option for you.

Our next step is to sign up for MLB’s actual subscription service, which will run you $150 for the season or $30 per month.

The good news is you don’t actually have to pay for ESPN Unlimited all season to use MLB.TV — this year, at least. If you cancel ESPN Unlimited during your one-month free trial, you will continue to have access to MLB.TV for the remainder of the season.

Next year, however, ESPN and MLB might not be so kind, as returning MLB.TV subscribers won’t be able to go through the league’s platform to renew, and the free month of ESPN Unlimited might no longer be available.

If you don’t want to spend $30 per month on ESPN Unlimited, you’ll still need to maintain access to ESPN if you want to watch every baseball game. That’s because while ESPN no longer has “Sunday Night Baseball,” the network does have a seemingly random selection of MLB games, many of them TBD, to air this season, as well as the Little League Classic and the second-half opener.

ESPN Select, formerly known as ESPN+, won’t cut it to watch baseball on ESPN. So you might need to keep ESPN Unlimited after all.

The new home of “Sunday Night Baseball” is NBC. If you want to watch all of the games that NBC will broadcast, you will need its Peacock streaming service to watch not just SNB but also the new “MLB Sunday Leadoff” package previously featured on Roku.

So go to Peacock and get ready to pay either $8 per month or $80 per year so you can have full access to MLB on most Sundays. NBC and/or Peacock will also be the home of the entire wild-card round, the MLB Draft, the Futures Game and some prime-time games (such as the Los Angeles Dodgers’ opener on Thursday).

Netflix has also entered the MLB arena with a deal for the Opening Night game between the New York Yankees and San Francisco Giants on Wednesday, the Home Run Derby on July 13 and the Field of Dreams game between the Philadelphia Phillies and Minnesota Twins on Aug. 13.

Those are three events that, quite conveniently for Netflix, fall at least a month apart. To watch all three, you’ll have to pay $8 (with ads) per month for at least three months.

Fox and Fox Sports 1 remain the home of the World Series, the MLB All-Star Game, half of the games in the Division and Championship Series, and the “Baseball Night in America” games on Saturdays.

If you signed up for a cable subscription, you should be fine here. If you didn’t, you might need to sign up for Fox One, which will run you $20 per month. Fox games are also available by over-the-air antenna if you have that, while Fox Sports 1 games are usually non-exclusive.

Want to watch the other half of the Division and Championship Series games, plus the TBS “MLB Tuesday” games? Again, a cable subscription will cover the TBS slate, but otherwise, you’re going to need HBO Max, which costs $11 per month with ads.

OK, here’s our last stop. Apple TV is where you must go to watch “Friday Night Baseball.” Sign up for that, too, for $13 per month.

Let’s add all of this up (and hopefully by now you’ve realized we are dealing heavily in satire).

If we try to calculate all the streaming services a person would need to watch any out-of-market game without a cable subscription — namely MLB.TV, ESPN Unlimited, Peacock, Netflix, Fox One, HBO Max and Apple TV — we’re talking about a group of streaming services that add up to $120 per month when not factoring in free trials or annual plans.

Heck, you can add Amazon Prime to that list, too, if you’re a New York Yankees fan inside the team’s footprint, as they have a package of 21 games available only on Prime Video locally.

Does any of this sound pleasant to you? Does any of this sound fan-friendly? The cord-cutting trend seems to have reached its natural conclusion, as the full assortment of MLB games is now available to either cable subscribers with a few streaming subscriptions or people with a collection of streaming subscriptions that perhaps cost even more than a cable subscription.

The transactions here are at least understandable. In a world of increasingly fragmented entertainment options, in which streaming services are attempting to juice subscriber counts by any means possible, sports have become an attractive option. And MLB has decided to fill its dance card more than any other league in the industry.

Sure, Netflix might be getting only a few events here and there. And Peacock’s “MLB Sunday Leadoff” slate is likely to be relatively light on must-see games. But if they get you to sign up for even one month to watch a particular game they acquired at a cut rate, when compared to the Fox and TBS packages, they’ve won. It’s all likely good business for MLB, which is doing its best to navigate the ongoing destruction of its previous television business model, the regional sports network.

It’s again at the cost of fans, who are about to spend a season relearning how to watch their sport.

Shohei Ohtani strikes out 11 Angels but stumbles late in final spring training start

Shohei Ohtani appears ready for the MLB season to start — but maybe not for a full start.

The Los Angeles Dodgers’ superstar finished spring training on Tuesday with an impressive showing against his former team, the Los Angeles Angels. He posted 11 strikeouts against his first 14 batters but left in the fifth inning after allowing three straight singles.

His final line: 4-plus innings, 4 hits, 3 ER, 2 walks and 11 strikeouts on 86 pitches. He also went 1-for-2 at the plate.

As much as Ohtani and the Dodgers would’ve likely preferred a complete shutdown performance, the more important information from a spring training start is the pitch count and how his stuff looked.

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Ohtani’s pitching has been something of an unknown this spring. This is the first time he has entered spring training with plans to be part of the Dodgers’ Opening Day rotation, but he didn’t pitch in a game this spring until he returned from the World Baseball Classic.

While working as a full-time hitter for Japan, Ohtani was stretching out with bullpen sessions and simulated games on the side. That’s how he got up to 61 pitches in his first spring training start last week while throwing as hard as 99.9 mph.

The Dodgers were clearly interested in stretching him out even further on Tuesday. He was sitting at 79 pitches after four dominant innings, but the team sent him back out for the fifth.

It was evident that he was feeling some fatigue at that point. Ohtani averaged 98.4 mph with his four-seam fastball in his first start, but that ticked down to 96.5 mph on Tuesday. And the three fastballs he threw in the fifth inning: 94.2 mph, 93.4 mph and 93.5 mph. The latter two pitches were both sinkers, but those numbers were also more than a tick down from the rest of his spring training sinkers.

Compare that to Ohtani’s final batter of the fourth inning, against whom he reached as high as 96 mph with his four-seamer and 97.3 mph with his sinker.

Is that concerning for the Dodgers? A sudden drop in velocity can often be a red flag for injury, but in this case, it seems more feasible that Ohtani was simply stretched out a little longer than advisable.

Ohtani spent his first season with the Dodgers as a full-time hitter. He returned to the mound in June of his second season and spent much of the year under limitations, as the Dodgers were clearly most interested in ensuring he would be starting for them in the postseason.

All of that obviously worked out just fine for the Dodgers, who will be going for their third straight World Series title in 2026. Where it gets interesting, however, is in what they plan to do with Ohtani as a full-time pitcher throughout this season.

Ohtani has never thrown more than 166 innings in a season, regular season and postseason combined, and that was four years ago in 2022. A full season of pitching on his usual schedule (once every six or seven days) might get him there in the regular season alone.

You can usually bet on the Dodgers to know what they’re doing. It’s just notable that the team was willing to stretch their golden arm past 80 pitches shortly before the season, when the more predictable route might’ve been starting him in a limited capacity and letting him build up as the months progress.

However many pitches or innings Ohtani throws, the Dodgers are set to open the season with a rotation consisting of him, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Tyler Glasnow, Emmet Sheehan and Roki Sasaki, with Justin Wrobleski available as a sixth starter when the rotation can’t get a rest day in between turns.