In 1949, the Basketball Association of America merged with the National Basketball League to become the National Basketball Association. The NBA has been the dominant professional basketball league of the United States ever since, though not for lack of attempted competition. In the 75-plus years since the NBA was born, at least 31 professional basketball leagues have played a game in the United States. Their levels of success vary wildly, but what they have in common today is that none of them serve as direct and meaningful competition to the NBA.

A group of investors is reportedly trying to change that. According to a recent report by Bloomberg, longtime LeBron James ally Maverick Carter is advising the group as it seeks to raise $5 billion to launch a legitimate competitor to the NBA. The basic premise would be to form six men’s and six women’s teams that would play in eight different cities across the globe, spending two weeks at a time in each of them. Despite the association with Carter, James himself is not involved with the project. Investors could reportedly include private equity groups and sovereign wealth funds, who can currently invest in NBA teams, but can’t own them outright or govern them. They are currently limited to 20% stakes.

The concept, on the surface, has some interesting potential. By basing a league in one place at a time and limiting the number of teams, this new entity could avoid many travel-related wear-and-tear issues that the NBA faces today with its bloated 82-game schedule. Theoretically, it could hold one or two games per day and attempt to event-ize each game rather than building a business model based on inventory. The sports that are thriving right now tend to follow the event model, though obviously, the event has to have a certain amount of inherent interest for it to be viable.

That is the obvious drawback to a plan like this. How on Earth could a new basketball league attract enough interest to justify a $5 billion investment?

The easy comparison here would be LIV Golf. That tour, also funded by a group that cannot control a major American professional sports team, managed to create significant interest by luring some of the world’s best and most famous golfers away from the PGA through enormous contracts. Phil Mickelson, for instance, reportedly signed a $200 million contract to join LIV Golf. So, theoretically, couldn’t a league like this just try to lure top talent away from the NBA with similar investments?

Well… maybe… but it would cost a whole lot more. The NBA currently has 23 players on contracts worth at least $200 million. That number is only going to continue to grow. The contract extension Jayson Tatum signed last offseason will pay him more than $62 million per year, and with the salary cap expected to rise by an estimated 10% annually for the next several years, we’re not far away from players earning $1 million per game.

And as a reminder, it’s not enough just to steal away a couple of these $200 million players. Jaylen Brown and Mike Conley have both had stints as the most expensive player in NBA history. Neither of them is fronting a multi-billion dollar league. No, basketball, more than any other sport, is driven by star power. That is a problem the NBA is dealing with right now. For a variety of complex reasons, the league has struggled to develop young, American stars that connect with the public like older ones such as James, Stephen Curry and Kevin Durant have. Right now, those are the only players with the cache to launch an entity like this.

And frankly, they’re way too expensive to be lured out of the NBA. That doesn’t have anything to do with their considerable NBA salaries. No, the problem with stealing the NBA’s best players away from the NBA is that most of their wealth isn’t derived from the NBA. It’s derived from the fame that the NBA grants them. If James plays out his current deal and retires, he’ll have earned $581 million in NBA salary over 23 seasons. That’s a lot of money. It’s barely half of the $1 billion he will reportedly be paid by Nike for his lifetime deal with the apparel company. Durant also has a lifetime deal with Nike, though the amount he will be paid for is unknown. Curry’s Under Armor deal will last into his retirement, and these are just their sneaker deals. Think of how much more they make from commercial and other marketing opportunities.

James, Curry and Durant are such valuable pitchmen largely because they are the faces of the NBA. In all likelihood, a lot more potential Nike customers are watching James play for the Los Angeles Lakers than would watch him play for some new, up-and-coming entity. The sneaker companies are surely aware of this and would likely steer any star meaningful enough to launch a league like this back toward the NBA. When you factor in those off-court earnings, it just doesn’t seem feasible for even a $5 billion league to seriously threaten the NBA’s talent pool.

And remember… basketball isn’t golf. It’s a team sport. Nobody wants to watch a couple of superstars play on a team full of scrubs. Every worthwhile role player is worth nine figures in the modern NBA. Maybe you could justify a billion-dollar investment in a big enough star. Are you really going to pay $104 million for that star to play with Aaron Gordon? Because the Denver Nuggets certainly will.

An American professional basketball league has actually succeeded in doing just this, but only by the skin of its teeth. The American Basketball Association, the original league of the Indiana Pacers, San Antonio Spurs, Brooklyn Nets and Denver Nuggets, struggled to stay afloat in the 1970s in large part because it frequently engaged in bidding wars with the NBA for top talent. It won its share of those bidding wars, but the cost to both leagues was significant enough that the ABA was able to force a merger. But that was against a much weaker NBA, and even then, plenty of ABA teams outright folded. Had the merger not come, it’s not clear how much longer the ABA could have lasted.

Is there a cheaper talent pool this new league could pull from? Yes, but there are caveats. The way to build a league like this would be to siphon talent away from the NBA before it ever gets there. James may be a billionaire, but a 19-year-old draft prospect is not. Every now and then, a promising enough prospect comes along to warrant enormous off-court investment before he ever plays in the NBA, but that’s a rarity. Most draft picks are subject to the rookie scale, which limits their earnings for the first four years of their careers. This year’s No. 1 pick, Zaccharie Risacher, is on a four-year deal with the Atlanta Hawks worth roughly $57 million. 

That’s a manageable starting point for a new league. With $5 billion in investments, it could theoretically lure away a couple of top draft prospects per year to build its talent pool. The danger of doing so, though, is that the American collegiate system is just not as robust as it once was. You might be able to get top talent that way, but you’re not getting the sort of fame it takes to build a league. There’s only so much of a brand a teenager can build in six months at Duke, or even at high school, if this new league wanted to get its hands on players before the NBA was even a possibility. Maybe this league could attract serious attention if it was signing someone like Patrick Ewing off of four years at Georgetown in 1984. Prospects like that don’t really exist.

The most cost-effective approach would likely be to try your luck with top draft prospects but to buttress them with social media darlings. Take two-time defending Slam Dunk Contest champion Mac McClung. He has 1.2 million Instagram followers, more than 10 times as many as Risacher, but is earning only a two-way salary for the Orlando Magic this season of roughly $580,000. That’s plenty of bang for your buck as a startup. College basketball has its fair share of similar players, social media superstars from their prep days that never quite panned out as legitimate NBA prospects but were famous in certain circles nonetheless and capable of bringing some attention to something new. If the league plans to play primarily in foreign cities, adding well-known international players would also make sense.

Maybe a league like this pulls off one major superstar coup. It could potentially add a few significant younger names to hefty deals either when they become NBA Draft-eligible or, more likely when they graduate high school to beat the NBA to the punch. The bulk of the rosters would probably have to be G-League-level players or worse. Maybe it tries to schedule around the NBA by playing the bulk of its games over the summer. Is that going to be a viable long-term business? 

The odds would certainly be stacked against it. There are a lot of reasons the NBA has never really dealt with serious competition. Basketball is a saturated market. Fans like their teams. They are used to the rhythms of the NBA season, though admittedly, many have expressed recent frustrations with the way the league is changing. Getting someone to spend their time and money on a new league when they’ve spent decades rooting for, say, the Kansas Jayhawks and the New York Knicks isn’t going to be easy.

Truthfully, these investors would likely have an easier time focusing their investment on the women’s side. WNBA salaries are substantially lower than NBA salaries. The season is short enough to accommodate players lacing up for a second league, and many already do. Caitlin Clark is worth as much in publicity as almost any NBA player right now, but she doesn’t have a $200 million contract or a lifetime sneaker deal boxing her out of a new league. Unrivaled, a new 3-on-3 women’s league, tried to recruit her under similar grounds. It failed, but maybe there is a high enough price. A number of WNBA stars are playing, though, which suggests that the best women’s talent is more available than their male counterparts.

But when you have or are trying to get $5 billion at your disposal, the idea will likely be to think as big as possible. That would mean building something viable for both men and women. The NBA and the NCAA are the only two entities that have ever really done that, and there are graveyards full of prospective competitors that have failed to properly challenge them. This league is facing a very steep challenge if it hopes to seriously try.