NBA expansion: A way-too-early mock draft of how Seattle and Las Vegas could build their rosters

For the first time in more than two decades, the NBA appears to be on the verge of expansion, with the league’s Board of Governors voting to explore the potential addition of new franchises in Seattle and Las Vegas, reportedly in time for the 2028-29 NBA season.

On one hand, there’s still an awful lot that needs to happen between now and then to arrive at a point where Teams No. 31 and 32 tip off an actual, honest-to-goodness NBA game. On the other … thinking about what those teams might look like seemed like it could be fun. And, as luck would have it, the fine folks at Spotrac recently launched an Expansion Draft tool to help facilitate said fun.

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So Ben Rohrbach and I decided to kill a little time this week — Lord knows there isn’t much else going on in the NBA at the moment! — by engaging in a mock draft to see what the rosters of the as-yet-still-theoretical teams in Seattle and Las Vegas might look like. Ben drafted for the Seattle team, which he creatively named “the SuperSonics.” I drafted for Las Vegas, and while there were just so many wonderful names to choose from …

… I decided to call my team the Las Vegas Neon, in honor of the spellbindingly gaudy lights that dominate the Strip, and also in recognition of the fact that — as you all surely already knew — neon is the official element of the state of Nevada. Hit the bricks, Strontium! This is Neon Country!

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How exactly an expansion draft will work in real life remains, for the moment, unclear. The 2023 collective bargaining agreement between the NBA’s teams and its players doesn’t deal with the nuts and bolts of expansion in any great detail, beyond laying out that expansion teams will operate under lower salary cap, minimum salary, tax, first apron and second apron levels than other teams for their first two seasons in the league. (In Year 1, expansion teams can spend up to 66.6% of the full salary cap; in Year 2, that increases to 80%.)

Past that, though, specifics are scarce — and, potentially, outdated. The last expansion draft the NBA…

Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/nba/article/nba-expansion-a-way-too-early-mock-draft-of-how-seattle-and-las-vegas-could-build-their-rosters-190128140.html

Author : Dan Devine,Ben Rohrbach

Publish date : 2026-03-26 19:01:00

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