NBA expansion is coming, with the league reportedly planning for two new teams in the 2027-28 season. With the NBA going to a 32-team setup, it’ll need to change the structure of the conferences and divisions. Here are some likely options.
Cities
The two leading cities competing for the newest NBA team are Seattle and Las Vegas. Seattle lost the Supersonics to Oklahoma City in 2008, but has remained a basketball hotbed, with the Storm winning four championships in the WNBA. The city has a new NHL franchise, the Kraken, and a newly renovated arena that hosts the Kraken and Storm. Meanwhile, Las Vegas has added NFL and NHL teams in the last seven years, and already hosts NBA Summer League and the finals of the Emirates Cup in-season tournament.
The NBA has talked about other cities, namely Mexico City and Vancouver, but those feel less likely. Basketball do didn’t so well in Vancouver when the NBA added the Grizzlies there, plus it’s only three hours from Seattle. As for Mexico City, it boasts a huge population, but like Vancouver, it adds an added impediment of international travel, exchange rates and tax differences.
Conferences
Given the likelihood of adding two teams in the West, one existing Western Conference team would have to move to the Eastern Conference to keep them at 16 teams each. There’s three logical candidates: The Memphis Grizzlies, the New Orleans Pelicans and the Minnesota Timberwolves. While the Pelicans and Grizzlies are almost the same distance to the east (the arenas are .0315 degrees of longitude apart), further than the Timberwolves, it might make more sense to move Minnesota.
After all, the Pelicans and Grizzlies proximity to one another is a reason to keep them together. Minnesota is far from its Northwest Division neighbors — Portland and Minneapolis are over 1,400 miles apart — while the Milwaukee Bucks, Chicago Bulls, Indiana Pacers and Detroit Pistons are all within 600 miles. It seems easier for travel purposes to make the T-Wolves an Eastern team, saving the players travel time and the teams money.
But it also depends on what the NBA decides to do with their five-team, six-division structure.
Divisions
The NBA has de-emphasized the importance of divisions in recent years. In 2007, division champions were no longer guaranteed a top-three playoff berth, only a top-four position. In 2016, the NBA did away with even that, seeding the playoffs solely by win-loss record. Aside from the ability to hang a banner, divisions now only matter because teams play their divisional opponents four times every year, while there’s four conference opponents each year they play just three times.
Essentially, teams play divisional opponents two more times than non-divisional teams every five years, an extremely small schedule difference. While it’s been an advantage that the Miami Heat get to play the Charlotte Hornets four times a season, over five years, every Eastern Conference team still plays Charlotte at least 18 times, compared to Miami’s 20.
So would the NBA switch to four-team divisions like the NFL, or go back to the pre-2005 days when each conference had two divisions? If it’s eight-team divisions, the new Western Conference would be fairly straightforward, adding the two Pacific Northwest teams to the four California teams, plus Las Vegas and Phoenix. Denver, Utah and OKC would join Memphis, New Orleans and the three Texas teams.
The Eastern Conference is slightly more complicated, given the teams are concentrated in the Midwest, Northeast and Southeast. Adding Minnesota and Toronto to the existing Central Division makes sense geographically, as does grouping Washington and Charlotte with the New York teams, Boston and Philadelphia. But would Atlanta and Charlotte have to join the Midwest teams, while the Florida teams stayed with their Atlantic brethren? Each variation on that alignment has its issues, as does trying to create eight four-team divisions, which invariably makes some team’s travel a nightmare.
What’s the answer? As much as Memphis and Atlanta are natural rivals, moving the Timberwolves is probably the easiest call. But the NBA could so something far more radical.
While geographical groupings matter for the purposes of travel and rivalry, what if playoff seeding was leaguewide? We’ve seen countless NBA Finals where one conference was far stronger than the other, leading to blowouts. Last season, five of the top six records belonged to Western teams — and seven of the top 10. Meanwhile, a 39-win team and a 36-win team each made the play-in tournament in the East,
Realignment is going to happen when the NBA adds new franchises in three years. But it’s also a great opportunity to revamp the playoffs and make sure that the most important part of the season actually features the NBA’s best teams.
