The NBA is hoping to undertake a move we haven’t seen in over 20 years, as the league is looking to add two expansion teams after years of speculation. The NBA Board of Governors are expected to vote on the addition of a Las Vegas and a Seattle franchise into the league in time for the 2028-29 NBA season, with great excitement around the future of a bigger league given the dearth of basketball talent in the world.
However, not everyone is excited for this change. Former NBA scoring champion Tracy McGrady, who saw the NBA go through it’s last expansion, declared that the league doesn’t have enough talent to support an expansion. The same was said by Golden State Warriors forward Draymond Green. However, Bill Simmons has raised a different concern.
On the latest episode of ‘The Bill Simmons Show’ on Netflix, the longtime podcaster shared his take on how the NBA’s current tanking problem makes expansion a bad idea. Instead of adding to the league with competition atop, Simmons is worried this will add two more teams to the league’s yearly tanking strategies.
“We have nine teams that don’t give a s— right now in a 30-team league. The last thing we need right now is to add two more teams that don’t give a s—. Either you fix the ‘I don’t give a s—‘ part of the 82-game season or they need to relocate two teams and do that as an expansion.”
“As somebody who loves basketball, I cannot accept having 11 tanking teams three seasons from now instead of nine. I just don’t see how that’s a good product or helps anyone. If they do this, it’s a money-grab so they can say more jobs for everybody. It is a money-grab, and it’ll make the league worse. I’ll plant my flag in that because we’ll just have more teams doing all the same s— that we hate now, this tanking stuff.”
“The only way you can do expansion is if it’s tied together with some real rules to make these teams actually care about competing and not be an embarrassment.”
The 30-team NBA currently has nine teams that are openly tanking to maximize their draft pick in the stacked 2026 NBA Draft. This leads to really poor competitive actions such as teams resting their best players while healthy or strategically altering rotations to intentionally lose games for extra odds at getting the No. 1 pick in the Draft lottery.
The NBA has addressed the tanking epidemic this season and is expected to make rule changes to impact team’s intentionally trying to lose at the end of the season. European sports leagues have competitive incentives such as relegation and standings-based television payouts to keep teams competing till the final game, but the NBA has no such safeguard in place.
The potential of expansion and the NBA coming to the 32-team model is exciting for a number of reasons, like the jobs it’d create. However, it might have. a negative impact on the basketball product if teams are intentionally throwing games to try and get high draft picks over multiple seasons.
This season’s tanking wars will continue over the last month of the season. But the NBA has a two-year window to enact competitive changes that would disincentivize current and future NBA franchises from intentionally losing games. That would counteract Simmons’ biggest concern and potentially add a huge boost to the quality of basketball fans get to enjoy from February to April.
