Four Ways NBA Expansion Could Impact the Boston Celtics

After years of speculation, the NBA is finally about to take its first step towards expanding. 

According to ESPN, the league will vote next week on whether to move forward with adding two teams, exclusively in Seattle and Las Vegas, for the 2028-29 season. 

Here’s how it could impact the Celtics

They could lose a player

We still don’t know the “if” or “when” for sure, so right now any expansion draft is more speculation than anything. If both teams start in 2028-29, the expansion draft will likely take place between the end of the 2027-28 regular season and the 2028 NBA draft. This way, the two teams can have some semblance of a roster before entering the draft and free agency. 

In a standard expansion draft, a team will have to protect a certain number of players, maybe eight, while leaving the rest available for Las Vegas and Seattle to poach. 

As of right now, the Celtics will have Jaylen Brown, Jayson Tatum, and Sam Hauser under contract for sure. Derrick White has a player option for $34 million that he’ll probably pick up. And Hugo Gonzalez will be in the final year of his rookie deal. By then, he might have already signed an extension. Baylor Scheierman will be a restricted free agent that summer. 

The Celtics will undoubtedly have a more complete roster by then, but at this point, everyone else will be an unrestricted free agent. 

The question at that point is not only who gets protected, but what chances are the Celtics willing to take. For example, Jaylen Brown will be 32 years old and making $65 million, so do they leave him unprotected thinking an expansion team won’t want to spend that kind of money on a player that age? Seattle and Las Vegas could also want to bring in a culture setter, and Brown will have at least one championship at that point, maybe more if things go well. 

Those are the kinds of decisions the Celtics will have to make depending on how the rest of their roster is constructed. Protecting him might be a no-brainer (it certainly would be if it was this summer), but if certain things work out certain ways, they might choose to protect younger players and roll the dice on Brown. Maybe they play that game with White instead, since he’ll be 34 and on a big contract. 

Either way, there's a chance someone will get picked off their roster, so that's something to watch for. 

The East will probably get tougher

Adding teams to Seattle and Las Vegas mean a Western Conference team will get pushed to the East to balance the conferences. 

There is speculation that Minnesota might be the team to move, which would put a hot young star in Anthony Edwards into the weaker Eastern Conference. So on top of all the other competition with great young players, like Cade Cunningham in Detroit, a new challenger would likely emerge to balance things out. 

Teams like Memphis and New Orleans are also candidates because of their geography, but the NBA would probably prefer to create more competitive balance with this move, adding bad teams to the West through expansion and moving a good team East. 

Their path to the playoffs could change

This is not just because of a new good team at the top. With 16 teams in each conference, the NBA could opt to go with four divisions of four instead of three divisions with an extra team in one of them. 

This will make for an interesting decision for the NBA competition committee. Do divisions carry the same weight with a new configuration? Will that serve as a tiebreaker in the same way? Will there be more games against division opponents?

The answers to these questions, in addition to a conference reconfiguration, could change playoff paths and seeding. Or it will lead to a reevaluation of how tiebreakers are calculated. Either way, we could see a scenario where Boston would have been a particular seed under the old system, but a better or worse seed under the new one.

They’ll get a massive payout (at a time where they might be able to spend a lot)

The massive expansion fees could lead to payouts somewhere around $500 million for NBA franchises, and that's not shared with the players. 

The Celtics, meanwhile, are on a path of potentially getting under the tax this year and next, which would reset the repeater tax heading into the 2027-28 season. 

Despite some chatter on sports talk radio, this doesn’t mean the Celtics are afraid to spend money. They’ll do it if they need to. But a half-billion dollar influx right smack in the middle of that kind of financial situation wouldn’t be a bad thing at all. 

We all splurge a little when we get some extra cash, don’t we? 

There's a lot to figure out still, but expansion looks to be a foregone conclusion. There may be other ways the C’s are impacted, but they, like the rest of the teams, will feel the effect of it, good or bad.