What is an expansion team?
When there is a big enough market that demands a professional sports team the league will create a new team for said market. Most recently in 2004 the NBA introduced the Charlotte Bobcats.
This is what’s happening to the NBA. Basketball is growing worldwide and generating a lot of interest outside of the NBA. CBA in China, NBL in Australia, the Euroleague, and Basketball Africa League which is actually owned by the NBA.
With the growth of interest in Basketball worldwide has come the growth of the NBA.
The league wants to expand because it means more money for the NBA and its team owners. First of all there is the expansion team fee that the new owners will pay which is somewhere around 2.5 billion dollars. After that there is the revenue that comes from the local TV deals from the new market, ticket sales, all the things covered in my “Why NBA players are so rich'' video. All that money gets shared, so all the team owners benefit.
Also 32 is a better number. The NBA has the most teams included in the postseason and the most games played in the postseason. They can afford to have an additional two teams not involved in post season basketball. Literally half of the teams would still be in the playoffs and that doesn’t even include play in teams.
The only drawback to this is if the NBA adds two new teams now revenue sharing is split 32 ways not 30 ways, but ultimately it’s more likely that adding two new teams will generate more revenue for the league as a whole and not really affect the teams share of the revenue. If anything, it will be an increase in revenue making the pie larger.
Also the less wealthy owners are looking for an influx of cash from the expansion fee (the 2.5 billion dollars) because their earnings were hurt by the pandemic seasons.
THe first team that is most likely to be added is a new version of the Seattle Supersonics. I say new version because the old supersonics franchise is in OKC and is called the thunder.
In 2008 the seattle supersonics didn’t secure public funding to build a new arena in Seattle so the team left. Sonics fans have been yearning for a team ever since.
This would be an easy addition because you’d be adding an NBA team to a city that already has fans of that team. They probably still got their old jerseys. Seattle also has the rebuilt climate pledge arena, a perfect home arena for the sonics.
The other location is Las Vegas. A lot of expansion teams from other leagues have ended up in Vegas. The Golden Knights, The Aces, The Raiders just move there and they all are doing extremely well. Even if this team doesn’t have real fans and people come to watch their favorite team play the Vegas team, that will make for an incredibly valuable sports franchise. The golden knights are already the 13th highest valued NHL franchise. Lebron has mentioned multiple times about bringing an NBA team to Vegas and history shows Lebron typically gets what he wants.
Show the jerseys

The Way an expansion draft works is every NBA team gets to protect 8 players on its roster which seems like a lot to me.
The expansion team picks at least 14 unprotected players from all 30 teams, but they can only pick one player from each team. If the team picks a restricted free agent from another team, that player becomes a restricted free agent on the expansion team. Bird rights are the same way. If you select a player you maintain whatever bird rights the previous team had. If you don’t know what bird rights are, checkout my other video.
During the draft the team isn’t bound to the salary cap.
The expansion team can also participate in signing free agents.
The expansion team gets a draft pick that year that is selected by the commissioner and the commissioner gets to choose it.