Expansion is a beautiful chaos baby for the NBA

The NBA Board of Governors will reportedly vote to explore expansion in Seattle and Las Vegas next week. It will create an explosion of intrigue and energy all over the league for the next 18 months.

Good morning. Mexico City was robbed. Let's basketball.

ESPN's Shams Charania reported on Monday that the NBA Board of Governors will vote next week on whether to explore expansion teams for Seattle and Las Vegas. Commissioner Adam Silver said last month that the league would take further steps in 2026, and left the door open to expanding the NBA zero, one or two teams. He didn't specifically highlight that Seattle and Vegas would be pre-selected as the target markets, and Monday's news is bad news for advocates in Mexico City, Louisville, Kansas City, Vancouver and other communities that have been trying to get into the conversation. By asking the Board's permission to explore Seattle and Vegas specifically, Silver is cutting out an important, expected step that expanding leagues go through in which markets compete against each other to win favor. Instead, and perhaps unsurprisingly given skyrocketing franchise values, the NBA will have ownership groups compete against each other for rights to an expansion market.

Cutting out the market determination also does speed things up considerably. To wit: Charania reports that the franchises would begin play in 2028-29. That's only two full seasons away. Based on how leagues typically do this, that would mean franchises would be awarded to new ownership groups no later than next summer, giving those teams a year to build up the business-side infrastructure to support participating in an expansion draft in the summer of 2028, the 2028 NBA Draft and 2028 free agency.

As an avowed supporter of expansion – the NBA should have awarded Seattle an expansion team in 2013 when Chris Hansen was standing there with a half-billion dollars and an arena plan – this is all great news. But this is also an all-consuming development that will impact every bit of NBA business over the next couple of years. The tentacles are enormous and plentiful. Let's talk about them.