Appreciate the follow! This one should prove to be fun, it's really coming easy to me writing-wise.
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Ch. 3
The NBA hadn’t had an expansion franchise since the Charlotte Bobcats got into the league, back in 2004. It’d been over a decade since any NBA team had thought about an expansion team and the NBA, for the most part, was pretty damn sure they were done with it. 30 teams worked perfectly for them — five per division, six divisions total. Nothing got messed up.
But that changed when the Flight and Knights entered the scene. Immediately, things got shifted around in the divisions.
The Thunder and us, we got shifted to the Southwest, while the Knights went to the Northwest division. The Grizzlies earned the lucky ticket out of the Western Conference and went to the Southeast. The West was given the expansion teams and, overall, that was just a thing the NBA had to do: the East was
clearly the easier conference to operate in, but *hit if the owners were going to gift an expansion team one of the 16 playoff spots. Now only half the league would make the postseason and that meant that the odds weren’t quite as good as before.
(Laughs) Oh, the odds. Fortune smiled on us during the draft lottery, though. Expansion teams didn’t have a shot at any of the top-3 picks, but were guaranteed either the 4th or 5th pick. 2016 had a draft class that was deeper than people predicted and the draft lottery threw out an all-time result.
The 76ers — the league’s tanker team of the last four years — got utterly crushed. They ended up 6th, while the Celtics, thanks to the hapless Nets, grabbed the 1st overall. The Bulls and Lakers followed, but Philly fans were furious, screaming at the top of their lungs how the draft was rigged and how they had gotten screwed.
Maybe they did, I don’t know for sure. I just know that the Celtics landing 1st overall made our lives much better. It was basic math that the Celtics were taking either Simmons, Ingram, or were going to trade for someone who would. The Bulls were fixated on Kris Dunn and would unload Rose to the Knicks for Robin Lopez and junk. The Lakers would take whomever was left between Simmons or Ingram, which meant that we, the St. Louis Flight, would be able to grab anyone else.
And we free and clear to take anyone we wanted, it wasn't like the expansion draft had given us any stars. The expansion draft had yielded us a decent crop of players — our strategy was pretty simple: take the cheap, young players and hope we grab one that develops into a long-term starter for us. A lot of the roster was filler, frankly, and we dropped a good amount of players from the initial draft — we kept only Lauvergne, Dunleavy (veteran leader), Thompson (ace shooter from the wing), Mickey, Young, and Adams. Everyone else we waived goodbye to. We could grab better in free agency and I was confident our coaching staff could get more out of the team than experts would predict.
For the role of HC, our first coach was none other than Kevin McHale. McHale was a veteran coach, a long-time Boston Celtic, a guy who knew how we East Coast guys worked. He kept his head down, did his job, and kept the players focused … something every young team, especially an expansion one, needed. We were babies out there that first year and McHale, being a former player on multiple championship teams, knew what it took to win. Houston was *ucking stupid for letting him go, the players on that squad got full of themselves and shut their coach out — the record after he was let go proved that in spades.
It wasn’t long till we got to the real show, the NBA draft, and by God, it didn’t disappoint.