NBA commissioner Adam Silver told reporters on Thursday in Paris that the league has been exploring whether starting a league in Europe is a commercially viable option. Silver clarified that no such agreement is in place; however, the NBA sees an opportunity overseas largely due to existing leagues not fully capitalizing on the sport’s popularity.

“While Europe continues to develop some of the best players in the world — many of our most recent MVPs, of course, are European — we think that the commercial opportunity has not kept pace with the growth of the game,” Silver said before Victor Wembanyama dominated the first of two games between his San Antonio Spurs and the Indiana Pacers.

“What we do at the NBA is we run leagues. We, of course, run the WNBA; we have the [Basketball Africa League]; we have the G League and we have a 2K video [game] league, so we operate five different leagues, and we think it’s an expertise we have.”

A day before that, Silver told French media that the NBA was discussing “a league independent of the NBA,” and that it was “moving slowly because we want to be sure that what we do will be accepted by the existing basketball ecosystem.” It is difficult, however, not to see the potential existence of a new, NBA-branded league as a threat to the EuroLeague.

On Friday, The Athletic’s Mike Vorkunov reported that the NBA indeed intends to start a new league, but, last January, it pitched the EuroLeague on a partnership:

While the exact details of the talks — which occurred over several sessions — are in dispute, the main aspects are not. According to multiple league sources at the NBA and EuroLeague with knowledge of the conversations, the NBA asked the EuroLeague to partner together on a European basketball league; the EuroLeague rejected the idea.

The EuroLeague, a conglomeration of top European basketball teams that is believed to be the second-best competition in the world, had no interest in ceding control of its operations.

“They wanted the heart and the head,” one prominent EuroLeague executive said.

The NBA has no desire for a partnership that offers them no governance powers or merely as a commercial arm for the EuroLeague, though there was no counter-offer, one person briefed on the meeting said.

Is there room for both the EuroLeague and a new league run by the NBA? Would some top European teams defect to the new league? This is unclear, but “European basketball sources have continuously pointed to Real Madrid as a club that could be interested” in doing so, per The Athletic. Real Madrid is a powerhouse in European basketball, having won 11 EuroLeague titles and 37 Spanish League titles. A long list of star players has played there, from Arvydas Sabonis to Luka Doncic.

Silver said Thursday that everything is on the table: “The potential to include existing clubs, absolutely, should there be interest. The opportunity to create sustainable competition, yes. Would we want to have to have a broad base of countries represented? Absolutely. That’s the benefit we have now by coming in and looking at this from a blank canvas.” He also acknowledged that “there’s enormous history and tradition here in European basketball, and we want to respect those traditions.”

The NBA has been meeting with representatives of FIBA, clubs, media companies and sponsors over the past few days, and, according to Silver, the tenor of those meetings has been positive. “It’s not anti-anybody or anti-any other organization,” he said. From a commercial standpoint, basketball is nowhere near the same level as soccer in Europe. Those stakeholders have said that “there’s a desire to connect with consumers, particularly young consumers, which is generally the fan base of the NBA,” and that “the market is ready to do more in this sport.”

Silver added that the NBA brand itself has a cultural cachet that goes beyond basketball: “That something that comes up in many of the meetings, that there’s a strong association with music, with fashion, with culture, with art. I think there’s a real appreciation for that, that the NBA is even something a little bit different than basketball, than just pure basketball. I think the way to grow the sport is to appeal to people beyond those who are hardcore basketball fans, and that’s where our success has come in the United States and elsewhere.

“It’s about the NBA brand. I think that the notion we’ve heard back is that if you can bring those elements of the NBA brand and bring those to Europe as part of some structured league potentially, we think there’s a real opportunity.”

According to ESPN’s Brian Windhorst, the NBA has been talking to potential investors and team owners, including major soccer clubs over the past year. ESPN also reported that NBA team owners have questions about the plan, partially because the other leagues the NBA operates have not always been profitable. Silver said the league would update the owners at a board meeting in March.

Paris, London, Manchester, Berlin and Munich are among the cities in consideration for teams in the new league, according to The Athletic.