NBA Expansion Saga: New York Rens (FBB3)
 

The NHL Expansion Draft hubub and NBA Draft have left me in the mood to build a team. So I'm going to do parallel expansion drafts for both baseball and the NBA because I don't think I could write an especially convincing hockey draft dynasty yet.

So first, the NBA.

My NBA sim has a parallel college league that it pools from, but that league is 20 years ahead, so we're gonna sim the next 20 years to catch up and stick with our expansion team for those 20 seasons and see if we can turn them into a winner with whatever we've got.

My only requirements so far for expansion teams is putting teams in non-real life NBA/MLB markets because it makes for a more interesting story for me.

We have a league of 32 teams, with 8 teams in 4 divisions.

For the purposes of my story, I'm just going to expand the league to 33 teams and take over this team for whatever reason.

NEW YORK RENAISSANCE

The Harlem Rens are the 33rd team to join the NBA. They'll actually play in Queens at an arena built next to the home of the Mets.

We get the 4th pick in the draft, but before we can do that, we'll have to expansion draft.

My goal is to field a competitive team from the start, so we're going to go after dudes who can actually play and go from there. That said, we'll want to be careful and not spend so much that it limits our ability to be competitive later. It's not like this team is going to win a championship out of the expansion draft.

To make it more realistic, we're going to operate similar to the NBA expansion draft that the expansion team's salary cap is 66% of the NBA salary cap. Our current cap is $80m, so that'd $52.8 million. We're not going to spend to that, but it gives us a good benchmark to work with in terms of how not to go too insane in the expansion draft.

Here were our selections


Our top pick is probably the best guy we got in this whole thing. We went cheap and young deliberately, I avoided paying $ for overrated washed up guys, though it was tempting if it was going to get us a few extra wins. Instead, we have a lot of young guys and we'll be bad, but it won't cost us a ton of money. Our payroll is about $35.9m right now. We'll need another big in FA, but besides that, we'll play the trade market and leave it at that.

1 SG Kaan Koprulu (Miami Heat)


My logic: He's a team friendly deal as a veteran FA who came over from China. He's productive and if he has anything left in the tank, could be a useful starter for us. If not, it didn't cost us the bank.

I have ratings turned off, so it makes it a bit more difficult to scout using stats only, but I prefer it.4

POST EXPANSION DEALS
Sent PF Brock Abbott to the 76ers along with a future 2nd round pick in exchange for C Billy Dew



Dew is a 7 footer, not a star, but he can fill space and gives us an interior guy that we lacked.

Just going to do season recaps. You won't know any of the players, but it shouldn't matter. I'm mostly just reporting on how the team did and noting anything interesting I might have done during that particular season acquisition wise worth noting.

I've never had a lot of NBA luck for whatever reason, maybe because I want to build a team like NBA teams play now, but the game still plays in the old NBA way. I have a custom file that tries to replicate a similar type of NBA basketball that we see now that's positionless and up tempo and it mostly works, but teams still use players the old ways.

Anyway, I'm kind of excited about this first Rens team. I made a few deals at the draft that give us some exciting young talent, coupled with a few veterans on contracts that are ending, so it won't be a terrible boring team in its first year in New York, but we're also not anything close to a playoff team.

I'm simming through free agency entirely for this first year, after doing trade deals at the draft we have about $3m left in cap space but two of those contracts will expire after this year so it won't matter much.

I have a lot of foreign leagues in my game, so it runs a bit slow on the sim side during the off-season. Once it's done, I'll take a look at our regular season roster and we'll go ahead and dive into the year. I won't play out games or anything, but I'll likely recap the regular season for a bit because I'm intrigued to see who these dudes are, get a sense of the league itself and so forth.

Uncharacteristically, I probably won't be doing a lot of trading early on, because I don't know many of these players and also, I'd kind of just like to see how the team does with whatever talent we have/get through the draft and while we'll likely be bad for a while, it'll help me get my bearings rather than spending all of my time just acquiring the best players like I usually do.

2033-34: THE FIRST SEASON

We went 3-3 in the pre-season but it doesn't matter.

Here's our contract situation for this first season. We took on Giannopolous and Amos from Vancouver in exchange for a first rounder this year and some other stuff that went on in a four-team deal during the draft. That said, we don't have any long-term contracts of major value, by design.


As for who I'm actually excited about on this roster? Romeo Jackson, who I got from Tampa during the draft, but he's not willing to sign an extension right now.

I feel like he's the kind of guard we could build around, but we'll just be happy to have him for this year and go from there. If Amos and Giannapolous have anything in the tank, it'll be a fun team to watch.

I am interested to see how the younger guys develop, too.

NOV 1, 2033
Rens lose their first game in franchise history to the Indiana Pacers.

Much more competitive in the home opener, but similar result. I'm going to make a change to the depth chart, we're going to play small the rest of the year and if it works or not, be damned, I just want to see how the experiment plays out. If we're gonna be bad anyway, it might as well be interesting.

Valiant effort and my new lineup surely wasn't worse than the previous night, but a loss to Montreal nonetheless.

NEW YORK RENS ROSTER

We lose a close one to the Celtics. Getting closer, but not translating to Ws yet.

We lose and reserve forward Sammy Swafford gets injured and is out for the year.

Okay after losing another one, I give up on my depth chart and let the AI take over. We'll see if they can manage our personnel better.

We lose a winnable game to the Wizards and fall to 0-7 on the year. Tomorrow night we face off against the hometown Knicks in a battle for New York. They're undefeated though, so...it's not gonna be much of a contest.

We played the Knicks a lot closer than I anticipated, but the end result is the same.

STANDINGS AS OF NOV. 15, 2033