[Bubbler]

I don’t think there’s a perfect bullet solution for filling out the seven teams that didn’t exist, but here’s one idea.

Protect six players on the existing teams, maybe the top six in win shares. The next two best in win shares per team go into a pool, a sort of expansion draft pool, and they’re distributed among the seven empty teams.

You could even assign which players go from which teams. For example, the Raptors get the Celtics, Bulls and Pacers’ reps. It should amount to eight players per team.

Then you could fill out rosters for both existing and non-existent teams with recently retired players or even a select few international players. If there were seven added teams in 1983, chances are, some retired players or ones whose career ended in 1983 would have played slightly longer anyway.

The goal would be to have at least 10 “real” players per team. Then fill out the remaining slots with dummy players.

Is it flawed solution? Yes. Will it dilute existing teams? Definitely. Might it rob realism? Of course. Might the filled out expansion teams still suck and hog the draft picks? Distinct possibility.

But the way I see it, having seven teams with dummy rosters isn’t any more realistic, so why not at least use real players?

It’s a shame 2K doesn’t allow customization of league size. I actually think it would be fun to go through the years with the league set at, say, 24 teams to see how the talent would coalesce from the years where there were more teams.