NBA Expansion: What Will it Mean for the League and Fantasy Basketball?

In comments NBA Commissioner Adam Silver made on the Pat McAfee Show recently, he referenced expansion in the NBA to 32 teams, something that has been bandied around for a while. The main takeaway is that it’s going to happen, and the timing just needs to be right.

According to the first article linked above from The Athletic, the process will start once the league finalizes their new media rights deal within the next year.

That’s soon. Most people reading this surely have lived through a few expansions, but things seem settled after the NHL’s latest addition to an even 32 teams. Each major American sport has either 30 or 32 teams; I like it this way.

Money drives everything, though, and Major League Baseball might be inclined to start their own expansion process once the other three all have 32 teams. More teams means more money, after all.

NBA expansion last happened in 2004, when the Charlotte Bobcats were added as the league’s 30th franchise. (From 1980-2004, the NBA had an odd number of teams, even while expanding three times…WHY???)

It got me thinking about what expansion will mean, both for the league and fantasy basketball. I was in high school when the Bobcats entered the league and vaguely remember my excitement around the idea of creating a team and roster from scratch. (NBA video games have had the expansion option for a while, so we can all live that dream.)

Let’s run through the rules of NBA expansion, what it has looked like in the recent past, and how it could affect fantasy basketball.

 

Rules of Expansion

Spotrac did a great job recently of explaining the process of expansion and the guidelines of the Expansion Draft. Read those articles if you have time, as they include a lot of good information, but I’ll give you a summary:

• When two teams are added at the same time (as would presumably happen in the next expansion), a coin flip determines which team makes a decision: To take the first pick of the Expansion Draft or the higher selection in that year’s NBA Draft, with the loser of the coin flip getting the other option.
• Each non-expansion team protects up to eight players on their roster from the Expansion Draft while making at least one player available. 
• The expansion teams alternate selecting from the unprotected players. On past occasions, the teams continued until one player from each existing team was chosen; no more than one player can be selected from any team.

There are convoluted rules around the contract statuses of the players selected, which the Spotrac articles dive into, but the basic premise is that the expansion teams start their history by choosing from the bottom of the rosters of the rest of the league.

Unavoidably, that leads to expansion teams generally struggling and taking years to become competitive, especially as they have extra rules related to the salary cap for the first few seasons.

Disaster Draft

Just a quick aside: Each major sport has a contingency plan for the possibility that one of the teams would suffer “death, dismemberment, or disability” to a portion of their roster. This is likely a plan in case of a tragedy during team travel on a bus or airplane when players are grouped together. There are elements of an expansion draft to the plans.

In the NBA’s case, the unaffected teams would be able to protect five players, while the team that suffered the incident would choose a maximum of one player from each team until they reached the number of players that were lost. For instance, if the Lakers’ team plane went down and lost 12 rostered players, the franchise would pick 12 players from the rest of the league while not taking more than one player from any team.

Not to sound like George Costanza, but there is a lot of travel in every sport, and it’s possible we might have to face such an event at the highest level. Here’s to hoping it doesn’t happen any time soon, though.

 

Recent Expansions

Two teams were added before the 1988-89, ‘89-90, and ‘95-96 seasons; those will be our best comparisons for what to expect when two franchises form at the same time again.

1988-89 and 1989-90 Expansion

First, the Charlotte Hornets and Miami Heat entered the league. After that season, the Minnesota Timberwolves and Orlando Magic were added. I was interested to see if scoring, high win-loss totals, or anything else stood out in the first few seasons after the league expanded by four teams.

Comparing the three seasons prior to expansion (1985-86 through 87-88) to the three seasons post-expansion (90-91 through 92-93), the average top and bottom records in the league were only separated by a few games, showing that more teams existing didn’t allow the top units to increase their win totals by feasting on weaker units.

1995-96 Expansion

With just two teams entering in the mid-90’s, the Toronto Raptors and Vancouver Grizzlies, would there be any difference versus four teams being added over two seasons? The outcome was the same from a team perspective, as the three seasons prior to expansion and three seasons after expansion saw the best and worst records within two games. Again, teams weren’t regularly feasting on the new additions.

The expansion season of 1995-96 is worth mentioning, because it’s the year the Chicago Bulls won 70 games to set a record. It’s reasonable to think that Chicago got more easy wins because of the expansion teams, but the reality is that the Bulls were steamrolling everyone.

Chicago was 5-1 (83% win percentage) against those two teams and 67-9 (88%) against everyone else, actually performing slightly better against the non-expansion teams. Again, this is a case of the Bulls having three Hall-of-Famers and maybe the best player in league history, not beating up on expansion rosters.

Scoring During Expansion

There is a steady drop in team points per game from the 1985-86 season through 1998-99, so it’s worth investigating whether expansion was part of that trend. With more players in the league, the overall talent pool is worse because 12-15 players per expansion team wouldn’t be on a roster with less space available.

That probably means worse overall offense, but it would also contribute to worse defense. I think that averages out to the point that it wouldn’t affect overall scoring too much. Instead, the pace of play slowed to a snail’s pace over that time, naturally bringing down scoring.

Pace of play is measured as the number of possessions per team per 48 minutes (the length of an NBA game). The slower the pace, the less shots taken, the less points scored, and math never loses. Here are the points-per-game and pace numbers for every season in question:

Season	Average Team Points Per Game	Average Pace
85-86	110.2	102.1
86-87	109.9	100.8
87-88	108.2	99.6
88-89	109.2	100.6
89-90	107.0	98.3
90-91	106.3	97.8
91-92	105.3	96.6
92-93	105.3	96.8
93-94	101.5	95.1
94-95	101.4	92.9
95-96	99.5	91.8
96-97	96.9	90.1
97-98	95.6	90.3
98-99	91.6	88.9

There’s a clear trend showing that scoring was brought down because of teams playing much slower, not because of more teams in the league. The 1998-99 season was a 50-game strike-shortened year, and both scoring and pace hit the lowest marks the league has seen since the 1950s. For reference, this season’s averages are 115.5 points per game and a pace of 99.1 possessions per game.

 

Fantasy Impact

So, what impact will expansion have on fantasy basketball? Volume is the most obvious example. With 164 more games on the schedule, there will be thousands of extra opportunities for points and other statistics to occur.

Even with a lesser average talent pool, there will be more fantasy options because even the worst teams will have players racking up stats. Four teams have less than 15 wins currently (Charlotte, San Antonio, Washington and Detroit); those teams combine for three players among the top 50 fantasy players by ESPN head-to-head points and 10 players in the top 100.

My favorite saying with fantasy players on bad teams is, “Someone has to shoot the ball,” and that’s true of all statistics. More of those numbers will inevitably rack up.

As far as the top players getting more opportunity against inferior talent, there is some merit in that thinking, but it’s hard to make any conclusions without a super deep dive into the numbers. The average top scorer during the expansion time we looked at actually had less points as the seasons went on, feeling the affect of pace much more than any bump from more teams.

The leader in total Win Shares, an advanced statistic that tries to apply wins to players by their impact on each game, didn’t change much during this time either, ranging from 15.7 to 21.2 with an average of 18.3 over the 14-year span. Prime Michael Jordan throws the numbers for a loop at times because of his sheer dominance, but expansion doesn’t seem to have had much affect on the impact of the best players in the league.

 

Conclusion

Expansion is coming, and there will be a lot of talk about its positives, negatives, and potential impact over the next few years. This exercise showed that there wasn’t a big change in the top records, bottom records, or individual performances of the best players.

The drop in scoring seems to be more connected to the pace of play and style of game changing than having anything to do with the number of teams. Maybe worse players mucked up the game a little and slowed it down, but that seems unlikely, especially as the worst teams tend to play at faster paces.

From a fantasy perspective, the top players will still perform at the top level, but there will be more mid-to-high-level fantasy guys because of the expanded opportunities; two more teams means two more top scorers, top rebounders, etc.

There won’t be huge changes, but fantasy basketball’s middle will see a jump.