3 takeaways from The Step Back’s NBA expansion draft (and why KCP??)

Here at FanSided, we recently conducted an NBA Division-wide expansion draft. We’ll take a look at three takeaways from this exciting project.

If you’ve been keeping up on the newest developments here on the FanSided network, you’ll have seen that the NBA Division has just concluded an expansion draft on The Step Back. Each site expert for 29 teams (and our own Lucas Miller for the Utah Jazz) selected three players to protect for their teams, and myself and former Hoops Habit editor-in-chief Gerald Bourguet drafted from the remaining player pool.

Gerald’s team took shape as the Seattle Sea Lions and my team was the Kansas City Burnt Ends. We are currently looking for ways to market and sell these KC uniforms:

https://twitter.com/The_Step_Back/status/1281400747888975872

They’re pretty slick, and FanSided graphic designer Anthony Guagliardo deserves the credit for these beauties.

A typical expansion draft would likely protect a larger number of players, like six or seven (if not more), but for the purposes of our exercise it was decided that in order to have a more interesting variety of outcomes, we would expand the player pool. It certainly did provide for a wild draft, and I think that both Gerald and I did a good job of taking advantage of the talent at our disposal.

I’ll take the opportunity to explain some of my thought process in this piece. I did lay out my basic strategy in the drafting process in the piece, which I’ll quote below:

"Building an expansion team from a pool of players made up of the fourth-and-lesser players on each team in the NBA made for a unique challenge. First off, you don’t have the opportunity to select any game-changing stars, but you do have the opportunity to construct for depth and versatility by selecting players who might flourish when made a first, second or third option on offense rather than a third, fourth or five option. My main goal was to not constrain my team to certain mediocrity as an expansion franchise. I wanted to embrace some variance in the hopes that a team constructed in this fashion could at least make top teams work for their eventual wins."

Ultimately, since I’m not constructing a franchise that could compete for an NBA championship in year one, I wanted to build a team that could to some degree uncap its own ceiling, make life hard as hell on opponents, and have a core that could compete for a championship around a group of youngsters down the road.

I’ll explain my thought process in building the Kansas City Burnt Ends.