With NBA expansion looming, teams like the Sacramento Kings need to start thinking about which players they want to protect. Stop laughing. The Kings have good, if not potentially great, players on the roster, some of whom will be in their prime once that expansion draft hits.
Next week, the NBA Board of Governors will meet to vote on the expansion of the league. The likely outcome is a new franchise in Las Vegas and the return of the SuperSonics to Seattle. To be clear, the OKC Thunder, the former Sonics franchise, will remain exactly where they are.
There are a few interesting side effects to this. Being that the two new teams will be in the Western Conference, either the Timberwolves or the Grizzlies are likely to move to the East to balance everything out. Additionally, all of the Sonics' franchise history will no longer be part of the Thunder.
An expansion draft is coming to the NBA
The most wide-spread change will be the expansion draft. Each new franchise will get to select current players from existing teams. While there are rules in place from the last expansion draft 20 years ago, the Board of Governors will also decide on what the new rules for this draft will be.
In the past, teams have been able to protect up to eight current players from being selected, with a few caveats. One of them is that a new franchise can't select more than one player from an existing team. How that plays out with two new teams in the mix should be interesting.
Based on the current roster, there is a group of eight players the Kings should protect. That includes Maxime Raynaud, Nique Clifford, Dylan Cardwell, Killian Hayes, Malik Monk, Precious Achiuwa, Keegan Murray, and Devin Carter. Rusell Westbrook, Isaiah Stevens, and Daeqwon Plowden are runners up.
This isn't a "right now" problem for the Kings
Neither team will start playing until the 2028-2029 season, so this won't be an issue for a couple of years. But young players like Raynaud, Clifford, and Cardwell will have three seasons under their belts by then, and hopefully playing even better basketball for the Kings as the core of the rebuild
At the same time, a lot can change in a year or two. There will be trades, at least two regular NBA Drafts, contracts that aren't renewed, and potentially retirements. Plus, Zach LaVine and Domantas Sabonis should both be gone from the franchise by the end of the 2027-2028 season.
Sacramento will likely look a lot different by the expansion draft than it does now. That will change the math on who gets protected and who doesn't. But if any of those previously mentioned eight players are still on the team by then, the Kings need to make sure they hang onto them.