Who would the Orlando Magic protect and expose in a 2025 expansion draft?
NBA commissioner Adam Silver has all but confirmed what everyone around the league knows. He continued to dance around the subject when he met with the media after the Board of Governors meeting in New York earlier this month. But everyone has to acknowledge what is already on the table.
For the first time since the summer of 2004 when the Charlotte Bobcats joined the league, the NBA seems set to add teams to its league. It is long-rumored Seattle and Las Vegas would be getting franchises. There is some reporting that Mexico City could sneak into the competition too. And other cities are surely preparing bids to bring the NBA to town.
None of this is official, of course. The league has openly talked about expansion, but the league is going to wait for the new TV deal to start next year before they more seriously engage in the process. There is some thought they are waiting for the Boston Celtics' sale to set a baseline on what they should charge for the expansion fee.
The point remains that expansion is coming and the teams around the league have to begin preparing for it as part of their future planning.
That means that whenever expansion comes—certainly not in 2025 and probably not until 2028 or 2029 at the earliest—teams have to have the expansion draft at least somewhat in their mind. It is a good exercise to undergo to see how teams strategize and game out their roster.
That is what ESPN's The Hoop Collective did with Bobby Marks selecting the players each team would protect and a pair of their analysts going through the process of the expansion draft.
The expansion draft allows the incoming teams to take one player from existing rosters to fill out their own roster.
In the past, teams have been able to protect eight players from their roster, leaving everyone else "exposed" to the expansion draft. Teams can only lose one player to the expansion draft—so in a draft with two teams, each existing NBA team can only lose one player to the expansion draft.
What does an expansion draft look like for the Magic right now? That is not an immediate concern. But it is a good exercise to evaluate the current roster and determine how the team would react.
Taking the roster as it is now, let's go through the exercise of issuing the protection list for the Magic as if the expansion draft were being held today.