2029 expansion teams in real players leagues
If you create a new real players league in BBGM, you will now see expansion teams in Seattle and Las Vegas before the 2029 season, since that is what is now planned to happen in real life. However not all the real life details are finalized, so I had to make some guesses about how things will work.
First, if LV and SEA are added to the West, that means someone needs to move East. Who will it be? Memphis is the furthest east, but Minnesota seems more likely to be the one chosen due to all the nearby cities already being in the East. So I picked Minnesota.
Then, how should divisions be organized? 6 divisions no longer works evenly. You could have 4 divisions of 8 teams or 8 divisions of 4 teams. I went with 8 divisions of 4 teams, but that is kind of arbitrary and I'm not sure what will actually happen. Then there are many ways to assign team to divisions and name the divisions. This is what I came up with:
Eastern Conference
- Northeast Division: Boston, Brooklyn, New York, Philadelphia
- Midwest Division: Chicago, Detroit, Milwaukee, Minneapolis
- Mid-Atlantic Division: Cleveland, Indianapolis, Toronto, Washington DC
- Southeast Division: Atlanta, Charlotte, Miami, Orlando
Western Conference
- Northwest Division: Golden State, Portland, Sacramento, Seattle
- Pacific Division: Las Vegas, Los Angeles x2, Phoenix
- Southwest Division: Dallas, Houston, New Orleans, San Antonio
- Central Division: Denver, Memphis, Oklahoma City, Utah
My goal was to try to group them close geographically while minimizing changes from the current divisions, to maintain existing rivalries and also because I think that is likely a goal the NBA will have as well.
The only division I'm not happy with is the Mid-Atlantic Division which spans a very large area and isn't really very "Mid-Atlantic". But I couldn't figure out a better way to do it. Maybe swapping Toronto and Philadelphia would be worth it, but as a New Jerseyan I feel like it'd be weird to have Philadelphia and New York in different divisions.
Team history is a tricky issue. When the team in Seattle is created, it will reclaim all of Seattle's past history from OKC. This is also what happened with Charlotte in the past. BBGM doesn't handle this well currently, there is no way to just change a past season from one franchise to another. It's not an impossible thing to implement, just kind of messy and unpleasant. I'll probably do it at some point though because I'm sure a lot of people will be asking about it now with the new Seattle team in the game.
And then in terms of what draft picks the expansion teams will get and how the expansion draft will work, I just left it how it normally works in ZenGM. If the real life situation winds up being different, it may motivate me to add some settings for those things.