The Rio Grande Valley Vipers are an American professional basketball team of the NBA G League based in Edinburg, Texas, and are affiliated with the Houston Rockets.

The Vipers played their first game as a franchise on November 23, 2007, where they beat the Austin Toros 104–97 in front of over 5,000 fans at home.

Led by league MVP Mike Harris, and coach of the year in Chris Finch, the Vipers went 34–16 to lead the Western Conference and earned the franchise's first playoff berth.

In the playoffs, the Vipers beat both the Reno Bighorns and Austin Toros in three games each to reach the D League Finals.

In the postseason, they beat the Maine Red Claws and the Tulsa 66ers in two-game sweeps to reach the finals for the third time in four seasons.

[14] Andrew Goudelock won the NBA Development League Most Valuable Player Award and got called up by the Los Angeles Lakers.

In November of that year, the Vipers announced Gianluca Pascucci as the general manager and Nevada Smith as the new head coach.

[15][16][17] Smith's teams received notice for their fast pace and eclectic shooting from the three-point line, continuing a trend set in 2009 (under previous coach Chris Finch) where the Vipers outpaced their NBA counterpart in the Houston Rockets each time, while shooting at a three-point rate higher than them all but once from 2009 to 2014); this reflected the vision of Rockets general manager Daryl Morey in seeing the Vipers as a laboratory for potential strategies to grow in the NBA.

The Vipers would serve as the main tenant and operator (with the City of Edinburg acting as owner of the arena), complete with a 40-by-20 foot jumbotron, the largest in the league.

The arena was half-funded by sales taxes to go with private funding that resulted in an initial estimated cost of $68 million.