Expansion appears to be coming to the NBA.
On Wednesday, the NBA's Board of Governors approved the league to explore possible expansion in Seattle and Las Vegas.
This is a preliminary step and does not actually guarantee that two new teams will join the league. But the writing has been on the wall for several years. The league seems eager to expand to two new markets (Seattle is not new, but a market they need to return to) and split the expansion fees among the owners.
It seems inevitable.
The timeline many suggest is that the teams will begin play in the 2029 season, giving the league two more seasons to prepare for their arrivals.
The Orlando Magic hope that by the time the Seattle Supersonics and the Las Vegas join the league that they will be competing for championships. But as they plan their future, they must now consider the expansion draft in their plans.
Yes, figuring out who the Magic would protect in a hypothetical expansion draft is a fun offseason exercise. Pretty soon, it will be something eatch team actually needs to think harder about.
Expansion drafts are a funny thing. There have been some notable players who have been exposed in the expansion draft and taken by the incoming teams. There have been some impactful transfers -- the defending champion Detroit Pistons losing Rick Mahorn was a big deal.
The Magic themselves did well in their expansion draft. They got a near-All-Star-level anchor in Reggie Theus from the Atlanta Hawks to give their inaugural team a little bit of star power.
Scott Skiles was a fan favorite in Indiana and became a fan favorite in Orlando when the team took him, becoming the league's Most Improved Player Award in 1991 and setting the league's single-game assists record. Skiles was a critical piece for the early Magic teams.
Orlando has gone through only two expansion drafts in its relatively short franchise history.
The Charlotte Bobcats took a rookie Zaza Pachulia in the expansion draft and immediately traded him to the Milwaukee Bucks. Pachulia had a 16-year NBA career that included Playoff runs with the Atlanta Hawks and Golden State Warriors, winning titles in 2017 and 2018 with the Warriors.
But the biggest expansion draft story from the Magic's history is about a player who was not taken at all. Orlando nearly lost one of its most beloved players in the 1995 Expansion Draft.
Almost no Heart & Hustle
The expansion draft's rules are pretty simple. Each team is allowed to protect eight players. The teams entering the league then get to make selections from the unprotected players. Teams can only lose one player to the expansion draft.
That always leads to difficult decisions. Do you expose a high-priced player hoping the expansion club will not want to take on the contract? How many young players to do you leave open or protect?
The Orlando Magic were facing a lot of those questions in the 1995 expansion draft. The Magic were just coming off their NBA Finals appearance. Their core players were all set and protected -- Shaquille O'Neal, Anfernee Hardaway, Horace Grant, Nick Anderson, Dennis Scott and Donald Royal.
Most of the players the Orlando Magic left exposed to the Toronto Raptors and Vancouver Grizzlies were rookies and young players on the fringes of the rotation. The biggest name was backup forward Anthony Avant.
But the unprotected list included a late-season addition who had clearly made an impression: Darrell Armstrong.
Looking back at that expansion draft, Darrell Armstrong, a player virtually on a minimum contract after joining the team late in the season and not even on the Playoff roster, was the perfect expansion player. He was a try-hard player who would fit in well with an expansion team. He just needed a chance to play.
The Magic knew this too and desperately worked to protect Armstrong even if they still needed to leave him exposed in the expansion draft.
As the story goes, the Magic negotiated with the Grizzlies for them to pick second-round rookie Rodney Dent and then sent a second-round pick to the Grizzlies as a sweetener.
Dent was the fourth pick in the expansion draft that year. He never played in the NBA, missing his rookie year in 1995 because of knee injuries and never fully recovering.
Armstrong went on to be one of the most critical players in the Magic's post-Shaq era. He played in 13 games in the 1996 season, but took a major role for the team in 1997. He played 502 games in nine seasons, averaging 11.7 points per game.
He peaked in 2000 with 16.2 points per game to lead the ragtag Heart & Hustle team. Armstrong was the face of a group of cast-offs as the Magic prepared to make a bid in free agency the following summer, as they rallied to go 41-41 and nearly shock the league and make the Playoffs. He finished 13th in MVP voting that season.
Armstrong won both Sixth Man of the Year and Most Improved Player in the lockout shortened 1999 season.
He is one of the most beloved players in franchise history and one of the members of the Orlando Magic Hall of Fame.
It is incredible to think that the Magic had to pay the Grizzlies not to take the spark-plug point guard. Losing Armstrong would have greatly changed Magic's history.
But the Magic cut a deal to stay invested in Armstrong, and the rest is history.
It will be interesting to see who the Magic try to save when the next expansion draft occurs.