Kevin Durant 'Potentially' Open to New International League, Rich Kleiman Says
Rich Kleiman, Kevin Durant's manager and business partner, said Thursday that the Phoenix Suns superstar would "potentially" be open to playing in the international basketball league that Maverick Carter and a group of investors are looking to establish in the coming years.
"If there was an opportunity for Kevin to extend his [playing] career and he wanted to be somewhere—he loves playing basketball—and the economics made sense, and the opportunity made sense... I think the guys putting this together are the right people to do this," he said.
In January, ESPN's Shams Charania reported that Carter and a group of investors, which included "multiple private equity funds," were looking to "raise $5 billion to form an international basketball league."
The league would consist of six men's teams and six women's teams that would play in eight international cities, per Gillian Tan, Matthew Monks and Michelle F. Davis of Bloomberg (h/t Yahoo), spending two weeks in each city. The model would be similar to Formula 1's format.
Other investors in the venture include the investment firm SC Holdings, former Facebook executive Grady Burnett and Skype co-founder Geoff Prentice, while UBS Group AG and Evercore Inc. have been brought aboard to raise the needed funds, with "wealthy individuals and institutional investors such as sovereign wealth funds" targeted.
In February, meanwhile, NBA commissioner Adam Silver said the NBA was exploring its own potential standalone European league.
"While Europe continues to develop some of the very 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," he told reporters in Paris. "And 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, we have a 2K video league. So we operate five different leagues and we think it's an expertise we have. And so we are looking very closely to see if there's an opportunity to professionalize the game to another level here to create a larger commercial opportunity."
EuroLeague is currently the top basketball competition in Europe, featuring a number of clubs that are also prominent in the soccer world such as Barcelona, Real Madrid, Bayern Munich, Monaco and Olympiacos, among others.
It remains to be seen if Durant would be interested in spending time overseas at the end of his playing career. He might have some options if he goes that route, however.
