NBA Cuts Staff to Fund New WNBA and Europe Push

For 30 years Europe sent its best basketball players to America. Now America is sending back the league. The NBA confirmed on Wednesday that it had cut dozens of league-office roles in New York, as Commissioner Adam Silver pledged to hire for expansion projects in Europe and a growing WNBA.

"The changes today are a continuation of the strategy we announced in September," Adam wrote in an internal memo, promising to "invest further, including in new positions and hiring, in key growth areas such as local media, programming and technology, the WNBA and the creation of a new league in Europe".

Reallocate, not just cut

For HR leaders, the memo is a case study in how to frame a cut as an investment. Every eliminated seat, Adam argues, funds a new one in a higher-growth corner of the business. The cuts reached across multiple business and support departments.

Affected staff leave with severance, health cover and outplacement support. The cuts landed in a week when Microsoft and Meta were all clearing out staff to spend bigger on AI.

The reallocation began in September 2025, when the NBA folded its data and marketing teams into a single Global Partnership & Media department. Wednesday's cuts extend that logic. The message to staff matters as much as the maths.

Handled badly, "reallocation" is just a softer word for layoffs, and staff know it. Handled well, it shows the survivors exactly where the company is going, with the freed-up money and headcount pointed at a few clear priorities:

• NBA Europe, the new pan-continental league being built with FIBA
• The WNBA, fresh off its US$2.2bn media-rights deal
• Local media and technology, including a newly created Local Media team.

Betting on Europe and the women's game

The biggest bet is Europe. The NBA and FIBA are building a 16-team league, with 12 permanent clubs and four qualifiers, targeted to tip off in October 2027. Final bids arrived at the end of June and interest has been heavy.

Target cities span London, Paris, Madrid, Milan, Munich, Athens and Istanbul. "The real heavy lift would be creating a new league in Europe," Adam said at the NBA Finals in June.

The league's Chief People Officer, Sabrina Ellis, has cast her remit in those growth terms. On joining in 2023, she said she looked forward to "supporting the league's efforts to attract and retain the very best talent as it continues to reach an ever-expanding global audience".

The WNBA is the other engine. Its new US$2.2bn media-rights deal, since grown past US$3bn, has transformed the women's game. "Remember when I joined the league, we had 15 games on national platforms," says WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert.

"This year we'll have 216 out of 330 regular-season games on national platforms." Cathy calls the deal "monumental and historic". The women's league is expanding its schedule and its franchise count as the audience grows.

Closer to home, the NBA is patching a hole in local television. The collapse of Main Street Sports Group left 11 teams without local TV deals, with training camps only months away. The league has hired Matt Volk as General Manager of Local Media, a role that did not exist a fortnight before the cuts. 

The lesson for leaders

Across a league office of roughly 1,900 staff, the NBA has decided that growth abroad and in the women's game is worth more than overhead at home.

Any executive can announce a cut. The credibility is in the second half of the sentence, the part that says what the savings will build, and Adam is one of the few leaders who arrived with it written.