NBA Talent Show
Does the NBA have the Star Power to Support Expansion?
This post was written in collaboration with Iconic Sonics! They’re doing some fun, amazing work, leading the coverage on NBA expansion and basketball in Seattle. Check out their Spotify feed for the podcast version of this post to hear Danny Ball and I talk expansion and break down the NBA’s talent pool.
The WNBA recently announced three more cities - Detroit, Philadelphia, and Cleveland - will host women’s basketball teams by the end of the decade. That’s in addition to upcoming teams in Toronto and Portland, and the feel-good story of the year Golden State Valkyries, who are currently sitting at 0.500 in their inaugural season.
Now the attention shifts back to NBA expansion. While NBA Commissioner Adam Silver has stated that expansion is not a foregone conclusion, he does expect the owners to vote for a formal exploration at the Board of Governors meeting this month. Now that the Collective Bargaining Agreement deal has been signed, media rights are locked up, and the Celtics (and Lakers) sale price has been agreed to, there are no remaining milestones needed to be hit.
One of the only arguments left against expansion is that there aren’t enough stars in the league to support one or two more rosters. It’s a fair question to ask. Despite the numerous stories of talented college players failing to make the WNBA due to lack of roster spots, there’s still concern that league is expanding too quickly. The Athletic’s Sabreena Merchant recently opined “for years, players and fans have clamored for more roster spots because of the surfeit of talent in the college system and international play, but adding three more expansion teams, in addition to Portland and Toronto, is overcorrecting.”
“With expansion, superstars will be spread throughout the league, resulting in fewer truly great teams.” - Sabreena Merchent on the WNBA’s expansion
And of course, the WNBA currently has significantly fewer roster spots than the NBA does. With 13 teams and 12 players per team, the WNBA only employs 156 full-time players vs the approximately 540 in the NBA.
So does the NBA have enough star-power to support additional teams? How many players are there that could be the face of a new team, and what does that mean for depth on the existing teams? Let’s explore.
Star Power
There are two downsides to expansion related to talent cited by opponents. First, is that the expansion team(s) won’t have a high enough level star player to compete on the court or draw interest and support from fans in the city. There are a few reasons this may not be applicable in 2025:
Building depth down the bench is becoming more and more valuable over landing the big names. No teams have exhibited this more than this season’s Suns and Pacers squads. The Suns took the 2010s “Big 3” model, attempting to follow the Durant-Westbrook-Harden Thunder and the James-Wade-Bosh Heatles path to the Finals by bringing Kevin Durant, Devin Booker, and Bradley Beal together in Phoenix. It did not work. The Suns finished 36-46 and couldn’t even catch the depleted Mavericks for the final playoff spot. The Pacers, meanwhile, didn’t have a single player at the level of Durant or Booker, and before the season even Bradley Beal may have been considered more of a star than Tyrese Haliburton or Pascal Siakam - he’d made more All-Star games than either of them for instance. Of course, the Pacers stormed through the playoffs playing hard, fast basketball and came within one half of winning the title.
The Golden State Valkyries are one of the best stories in the WNBA despite having 0 stars.1 Before the season started ESPN, and many others, picked the Valkyries to finish last in the league. The biggest concern? A lack of star power: “The Valkyries' roster consists of players who have been role players and strong second or third options, but none had been tasked with carrying the majority of the load on their previous teams.” They’ve proved everyone wrong, with a 10-9 start that has them in prime playoff position. Of course, this may be an aberration, but like the Pacers the Valkyries have proved that modern teams can win despite lacking the best player on the floor.
On fan interest, I can’t imagine Seattle (the most likely NBA expansion destination) fans will care whether or not the team is good in the first few years. After their Sonics moved to Oklahoma City 17 years ago, Seattle fans just want to be able to go watch live NBA basketball in their home town again. Climate Pledge arena will be sold out and bumping every home game, regardless of star-power or record. Of course, once the novelty factor wears off Seattle fans will be expecting some level of contention - the Kraken in the NHL are going through this now. Typically expansion teams make the playoffs within ~five years in the NBA, though it took the Grizzlies nine years (and a move to Memphis). That said, The Athletic’s senior NBA columnist David Aldridge recently stated he believes expansion teams should be able to compete more quickly in today’s NBA because of the new CBA and second apron rules that make it harder for teams to hold onto talent, and therefore easier for other teams to swoop in and pick them up. We’re already seeing this play out in free agency with the stretching of Damian Lillard’s and Bradley Beal’s contracts.
Anyway, the NBA likely does have enough stars to support at least one, if not two new teams. There are a number of ways to define a “star” including on-court stats, league awards, and popularity amongst fans, so let’s look at all three.
Starting with the stats, there were 32 different players2 who had a great season last year, as measured by a win share per 48 minutes3 above 0.15 (the league average is ~0.1). LeBron is 32nd on that list, and I think we can all agree he is a star player capable of keeping a franchise competitive, even at 41 years of age. Conveniently, two new expansion cities would put the league at exactly 32 teams.
Austin Cornilles at Butterflies ran the numbers to show that more and more players have been clearing that statistical hurdle over the last 30 years. Notably, there are 15-20 more great statistical players now than in the seasons prior to previous league expansion in 2004 and 1995.
Winning Players ✅
That list of 32 players with great win share seasons doesn’t even include some players who are currently playing the “star” role for their teams. Guys like Anthony Edwards in Minnesota, Devin Booker in Phoenix, Trae Young in Atlanta, and both Ja Morant and Jaren Jackson Jr. in Memphis.
But these guys are All-Stars, ergo star players. If we add all the guys who’ve made multiple All-Star teams in the last five years, we get up to 51 stars.
Separately, Henry Abbott and Coach Thorpe over at TrueHoop came up with their own list of “game changers” from the 2015-2022 drafts. Their list includes 19 additional players that are not yet recognized amongst the best by the stats or voters, but who are clearly the top one or two players on their teams. Guys like Jamal Murray, De'Aaron Fox, Tyler Herro, Lauri Markkanen, Tyrese Maxey, Cade Cunningham, Paolo Banchero, and Chet Holmgren.
That brings us up to 70 stars in the league.
All-Stars & Game Changers ✅
But there’s one more component: the fans. According to the site Popular Basketballers, 37 NBA players have at least 3 million followers on Instagram.
Six of those most followed accounts are for older vets (Russell Westbrook, Kevin Love, Draymond Green, Klay Thompson, Tristan Thompson, and D'Angelo Russell) who won’t be carrying their teams anymore, but that does leave seven six4 more players fans could be excited to see leading their teams.
Fan Favorites ✅
So in total, that’s 76 stars in the NBA. Enough for each team, including the expansion teams, to have two each, and then some left over for the Thunder to hoard. The star power is there.
Bench Depth
The other concern with expansion is diluting talent on the existing teams. After all, I (and the 2025 NBA Finals matchup) just told you how important depth is in the NBA.
Well, once again Austin ran the numbers and found a similar trend: a consistent uptick in production from the average player since the late 1990s.
He concluded that “the overall production and efficiency of important players have improved and that the depth of talent in the NBA is probably at an all-time high.” While nobody is asking for a return to ‘90s basketball, I think it’s fair to say that there are enough players out there who would’ve been good enough to make it in the league in many prior seasons who could fill one of the additional 18-36 expansion roster spots.
There are plenty of examples of players homing their skills in international leagues before making the move to the NBA, and expansion teams would open up these pipeline opportunities further. Stories like that of Nigel Hayes-Davis leaving EuroLeague to play for the Suns, which people seem to be excited about, would become more common. We’d also likely see more G-League players converting to full-time NBA contracts, which has a mixed history but has produced winners like Pascal Siakam, Alex Caruso, Danny Green, Kris Middleton and more.
It might take a few years to adjust to the expanded pool of players, but the NBA will find a new talent equilibrium. And in the meantime, all the teams would still be constructing their rosters in an equal environment.5
Broken Records
No, I’m not talking about how Adam Silver sounds like one when discussing the possibility of expansion. I’m talking about another interesting question that is often brought up in the expansion conversation. During the period while the league is finding it’s new equilibrium, you might expect more records to be broken as the best teams and players have more opportunities to play against, by definition, worse teams and players.
Neil Paine looked at a similar question with the historically bad Wizards in February. He found that “the average NBA team has seen its points per game margin improve by 0.5 because games against Washington are included in its season-long record.” But even excluding the Wizards the top teams were still really good, and in the end Neil concluded “the Wizards being this bad doesn’t change that the best teams of 2024-25 are extremely good in a historical context.”
I found something similar in looking for examples of broken records following past expansion. In the 1995-96 season the Raptors and Grizzlies joined the league and won a combined 36 of their 164 games. So were more records broken around then? Well, the 1995-96 and 1996-97 Bulls did post two of the top three win-loss records in NBA history to that point, but they went 10-2 against the Raptors and Grizzlies, an 83% winning percentage, which is actually below their 86% winning percentage against all other teams.
Michael Jordan averaged 30.4 points per game, the highest the league had seen since his 1992-93 season, but he averaged exactly 30 against the expansion teams. There aren’t significant differences among the leaders in rebounds, assists, blocks, or steals either.
More broken records is still a possibility, which may lead to some asterisk placing and generational debates, but is ultimately fun for the NBA, and anyway not a reason to stop the natural growth of the league.
Expansion Draft
Ultimately, the talent question depends on which players move teams. So how might all these NBA stars and role players be distributed after expansion? Which names can Seattle fans expect to wear on the back of their jerseys? One way to predict that is by looking at which players went to the new teams in past expansion drafts, ranking them amongst their peers, and then pulling in today’s players that are ranked similarly. Here’s where that would get the reborn SuperSonics:
Of course, this approach ignores all rules about how expansion drafts work (notably one player per team and protected players) as well as any consideration of team building strategy or cap space. A more thorough evaluation and mock draft is required. Stay tuned …
I concede Kate Martin has a lot of followers on TikTok, but in her only WNBA season prior to this year she averaged under 3 points in 12 minutes per game, not exactly who you’d pick to lead your team.
Minimum 1,500 minutes played.
An all-in-one stat that estimates the fraction of a win contributed by a player per 48 minutes. It considers the output offensively and defensively of a player adjusted for the pace of the league, the team, and the scoring rate of players in the league.
The seventh is Bronny James.
Now I’m looking forward to an expansion team or two. Do you think Gary Patton will be a part of an expansion team? Love the shout out and you.
Great piece, thanks for the shout!