In one of their most recent meetings, the NBA and its board of governors voted to pursue something the league hasn’t seen in nearly a quarter of a century, expansion. Although an official vote on the league adding two teams at the start of the 2028 season isn’t expected until later in the offseason, NBA commissioner Adam Silver has indicated the league is already looking for interest from groups of potential buyers looking to buy into the league.
Two cities, one very familiar for NBA fans and the other a new frontier for them, are being considered. Seattle, the home of the Supersonics until 2008 when they re-located to Oklahoma City and became the Thunder, as well as Las Vegas. With the last team added in the league being the 2004 Charlotte Bobcats (now Hornets), many newer NBA fans might not know what to expect from an expansion and how it will reshape the league.
With expansion teams comes an expansion draft, wherein the expansion teams pick from a pool of established players in order to build up their rosters. Pre-existing teams will be able to protect eight of their players from being picked. This fares well for teams trying to get rid of players with bad contracts that they normally wouldn’t be able to move, but fares poorly for teams that have nurtured a great team chemistry, like the Oklahoma City Thunder, for example.
Speaking of the Thunder, if Seattle, especially a team branded the Seattle Supersonics, were to return OKC would face a dilemma. When the Thunder re-located they retained all of the history and legacy gained in Seattle, including various retired jerseys as well as one NBA Championship from 1979.
If the Supersonics were to be reactivated, it seems that all that history that the Thunder took with them would revert back to Seattle. A similar situation like this arose in the NFL, when the Cleveland Browns were reactivated in 1999 and their history reverted back to them from the Baltimore Ravens.
Additionally, adding two teams to the Western Conference would lead to an imbalance between the conferences requiring a league realignment with one existing team jumping to a different conference.
This could greatly impact the shape of the league and the conferences’ playoff pictures for years to come.
The two teams to watch as candidates for realignment are the Memphis Grizzlies and Minnesota Timberwolves, with a reported favorite in the Timberwolves as they’re close to a large grouping of teams including the Milwaukee Bucks in the Eastern Conference’s central division. Minnesota is oozing with young star power on its roster headed by a transcendent talent in Anthony Edwards, so seeing them join the East, the Bucks division, would be less than ideal.
Either way, the prospect of expansion is very exciting. The NBA fans in Seattle have been eagerly waiting for the return of their team, while prospective fans in Las Vegas can only hope that their expansion team would hit the ground running like teams in other sports there recently.