SQ14 #15 NBA Expansion?

A few days ago I used an expansion draft as a driver for rank-ordering the current roster.  That got me thinking about the likelihood of the NBA actually expanding again (the last was in 2004); and which cities might be considered.  That might not just be limited to this country, or even this continent.  The league has been casting it$ eye$ toward Europe, and farther, for decades.  So far this has been to the extent of exhibition games abroad during the preseason including Europe, Asia, and South America; and last year scheduled regular season games in London and Mexico City.  At this point the league has played a total of 18 regular season games abroad dating back to 1990 on three continents.  Hey there are more than six billion potential jersey customers and less than 300 million of them are in the U. S., do the numbers.

Now admittedly 30 is an awkward number for a league.  Split it in two and you have fifteen teams in the East and another fifteen in the West.  Now you have odd numbers so further splits are no longer even--sixteen playoff teams but only fourteen in the lottery.  With divisional splits in groups of five, the playoff groups have three automatic berths and a hodgepodge of the five best records, that fails to recognize that a weak division (Atlantic recently) may have a second place team whose qualifying record may have been inflated by a lot of wins against bottom-dwellers in their own division. 

I think most would agree on the disgust arising from this whole con game of franchises blackmailing municipalities into huge debt, with tax breaks on top of it, or the owners will scurry away in the night to some client that will pay their sports-whores better.  Certainly, scorned Seattle deserves another team but setting this whole owner coercion aside for the moment, aren’t there a number of localities that could make a legitimate argument to join the club.  Las Vegas is the next most mentioned but that plays more toward the City of a Thousand Entertainments and wheelbarrows full of cash, than a full-time population large enough to merit a team on size alone.

Let’s look at the numbers.  The largest U. S. cities (2013) without NBA teams:
San Diego 1.36M
San Jose  999K
Austin  885K
Jacksonville, FL  843K
Columbus, OH  883K
Fort Worth 793K
El Paso  674K
Seattle  652K
Nashville  634K
Baltimore  622K
Louisville 610K
Just in passing it seems strange to note that adding all 10 (not that I suggest adding all 10) largest U.S. cities currently without NBA teams, would place five teams in California and six in Texas.  I’m pretty sure that the league would balk at a quarter of the teams located in just two states.  It might pass in the House but the Senate would put a bill on the floor demanding a team in every state regardless of population.  (Yeah like league infighting isn’t Machiavellian enough without getting Congress involved--although league activity looks downright efficient and effective compared to the Legislative Branch, but that‘s a soapbox for another day.) 

Heck if we are going by size alone, should we not add these North American metropolitan areas:
Montreal  1.65M
Ecatepec de Morelos, 1.66M
Havana 2.14M
Mexico City 8.85M
And if we are talking basketball (and shouldn’t we be?), then it seems obvious that Brazil and Argentina (each already well represented in the NBA roll of players) deserve consideration.  That would bring these million-plus inhabitant South American cities into the conversation,
from Brazil:
Sao Paolo  11.32M
Rio de Janeiro  6.36M
Salvador 2.69M
and from Argentina:
Buenos Aires  13.08M
Cordoba 1.43M
Rosario  1.17M

Yeah, let’s double the size of the league and make LeBron’s tampering-up a SuperTeam more of a challenge. 

O.K. perhaps sixty is too many; and that is just the Western Hemisphere Conference.  Remember London and Tokyo?  Say maybe one per country in Europe and Asia, are we really ready to toss up the opening tip between the NY Knicks and the Mongol Horsemen?  How about those away games with the sixteen-hour flight to Melbourne?  Will Anartica want to get in on the expansion rush?  At least we know that there are some really tall guys in Africa, just not any NBA teams.  Just a minute, back away from the ledge, maybe we are going a little overboard here.  Let‘s just leave it at, If we start expanding, it might be best to not allow the rolling ball to gain too much momentum and get away from us.

So how many is just right?  At what point do the obvious issues of travel time, jet lag, and travel expense start to become prohibitive?  And then there are the less obvious issues like security, political stability, and war (or plague) zones.  Just in case you thought I had answers to all the conundrums, nope, not even close.

So let’s simplify the problem and try to bite off a small enough chunk to chew and digest.  Let’s start with two more teams.  Certainly makes the numbers work better--for playoffs, for lottery, for divisions, for geographical rivalries. Speaking of geography, if you look at a U.S. map with all the NBA teams marked, there are two glaring holes.  Apparently there should be a team with the arena straddling the tri-state lines of Montana, Wyoming, and South Dakota.  The problem is that to have a sellout crowd, unless they travel 500 miles to attend a “home” game, you are going to have to admit antelope and cattle in addition to people.  You have a similar problem filling the other geographic hole with an arena in a center spot somewhere in the 100-mile stretch of Route 66 between Tucumcari and Santa Rosa in New Mexico.  If they close down the cities, and the dog catcher isn’t busy, and every single citizen makes it to the game, you are still twenty-two thousand shy of filling even a modest 30K capacity venue.  OH my, I’ve drifted off again, haven’t I?

What was it?  Yes, two more teams, and Seattle and Las Vegas have been the most widely talked about.  The last expansion draft, teams got to protect eight players.  This obviously favors LeBron’s hand-picked super teams because by the time James and his posse get paid, players seven through the end of the bench are minimum wage workers and the new teams are welcome to any one of them that they want.  Rebuilding teams, or even a prudent blend of veteran starters supported by up-and-coming youth and a bottom five of promising development projects--well the better the GM has done his job of setting up the future, the more they will be hurt by an expansion team plucking their ninth, and unprotected, player.  Just as Philadelphia is whining right now, “No, wait, hold it, don’t change the lottery rules until we’ve conned the system for one last year!,” so will healthy rebuilds decry the timing of an expansion draft.  And Cleveland, they will be saying “I don’t think we even have an eighth player, give us five minutes and we’ll sign someone from China for you.”

Yeah, expansion discussions are like Brer Rabbit’s tar baby, or like visiting relatives.  Once you get engaged, you just can’t extract yourself, and after three days, they really start to stink.

Just 50 more days until training camp.[Discuss on CG Forums!]