The Evening Dynasty Challenge #1: The Cheapskate Owner
 

I love doing dynasties but it get harder to do them for a long period of time as life gets in the way. So I'm trying to do a short dynasty thing where I just work on something for a night. Sometimes, using an existing league -- so I don't waste all night building it out -- and other times, not.

My NBA league is in 1997, it has real NBAers coming in during their draft years, along with players from my college league(s) though for this purpose I'm not going to import anymore because I take too much time to sift through all of that.

So with that backdrop...here's our story.

INTRODUCTION
NBA has 26 teams currently, the league opts to expand by one to a 27th team. The owner of the new club is a coal billionaire by the name of Zeb Kotche, whose network is somewhere around $14 billion dollars. He's not a huge basketball fan, but wants a team as part of his empire and the NBA is happy to oblige.

The Eastern Kentucky native acquired an expansion team that he hoped to put in his home state, but the city of Louisville tried to amend the deal at the last minute and instead, he opted to put the team in Pittsburgh, which is a much bigger market anyway and has the side effect of capturing all of western Pennsylvania, parts of western New York.

But ol' Zeb is ol' school and he didn't get rich paying entitled basketball players. So here are our house rules for tonight:


The problem is, Zeb is delusional and thinks the team should be able to make the playoffs within ten years. He's promising championships, while keeping his miserly ways a secret to anyone but management.

ZEB'S GOALS
- Team must make the playoffs at least five times in the next decade.
- A NBA championship

I won't edit any ratings for the entirety of this story, so you don't have to worry about that.

1998-99
The expansion Pittsburgh Condors are about to begin their first NBA season as the league's 27th team.

SALARY CAP: $52.54 million (Condors spend: $26.27m)

The owner has instructed us in the expansion draft to go for talent, but without breaking the bank. We're not allowed at any point in this dynasty to break any of the house rules or to amend them. We're stuck in this binary come hell or high water.

I'm almost certain we'll trade our 1st round draft pick this year, because I'm not interested in this draft class. That said, we're slotted with the 4th overall pick in this draft.



EXPANSION DRAFT:
With the rules being how they're setup, we have to find the best value we can. That said, technically according to the house rules we just can't sign any free agents who are 26-34, so if I wanted to expansion draft people in that age group we could. But the other consideration is our salary cap and not wanting to bust that. We only have $26m to spend and I'd prefer not to spend it on guys unwanted by their own teams.

In some cases, you won't know who these guys are or care. So I'm just gonna do my thing since it's an evening dynasty and then just report back after each year with whatever interesting stuff I find worth sharing. We gotta get through 10 seasons and I haven't even done one yet.

I didn't realize 1998 was the Dirk draft. All of a sudden, I'm a lot more interested in the 4th overall pick.

Clearly an evening dynasty turned into "several evenings" dynasty but...so it goes.

Took Paul Pierce in the 1st round of the draft, after trading to move up hoping I could get Dirk.


As for salaries, it wasn't hard to achieve that goal. As for trying to build a winning team on the other hand? That's a bit more difficult with the constraints in place.