Report: Maverick Carter, Investors Seek $5B for New International Basketball League

A group of investors, backed by a number of private equity funds, are "seeking to raise $5 billion to form an international basketball league," according to ESPN's Shams Charania.

Maverick Carter, the business manager of LeBron James, is serving as an adviser to the group. James himself is not involved, per ESPN's report.

Gillian Tan, Matthew Monks and Michelle F. Davis of Bloomberg (h/t Yahoo) reported that UBS Group AG and Evercore Inc. have been appointed to help raise the money, potentially from "wealthy individuals and institutional investors such as sovereign wealth funds."

Backers include investment firm SC Holdings—co-founded by Jason Stein and Daniel Haimovic—Skype co-founder Geoff Prentice and former Facebook executive Grady Burnett.

Per both reports, the goal is to create a league that would consist of six men's teams and six women's teams that play in eight cities across the globe, spending two weeks in each city. Such a rotation would mimic Formula 1's format, and Singapore is expected to serve as one of the host sites.

The basketball ecosystem has harbored a number of different leagues and formats throughout the years, headlined by the NBA, WNBA and the NCAA's men and women's competitions at the college level and the Olympics and the FIBA Basketball World Cup at the international level.

But there are also federations such as the EuroLeague and the various European leagues that feed into it, Australia's NBL and the Chinese Basketball Association, or those with unique formats such as the Big3 and Unrivaled, as basketball continues to grow as a worldwide sport.