Let’s talk about expansion.
Of the known pro basketball universe, but also our own, a little, because the only reason I’m thinking about expansion is that it’s come up a few times over the last week, unbidden.
I was invited by two separate friends to one movie screening. The film, a documentary called The Grizzlie Truth, about director and Vancouver Grizzlies super fan Kat Jayme’s search to figure out why the Grizzlies were packed up and shipped out of Vancouver in 2001, is really good. It’s tender, funny, doesn’t shy away from tracking down the people necessary to the story even though in doing so, the story expands out past the tidy bounds Jayme was initially aiming for. As Jayme traces the collectively held reasons for the Grizzlies being moved to Memphis — mismanagement by Stu Jackson, a dismal record season over season, Steve Francis’ refusal to play there, the Canadian vs. American dollar, Michael Heisley’s subterfuge — each one slips out from the pin of blame and presents its own story. Without spoiling too much of the movie: Stu Jackson was trying his best with one hand tied behind his back, the team was getting better, Francis credits the Grizzlies picking him for his entire NBA career thereafter, the same exchange rate didn’t shutter the Raptors, and Heisley financially black-and-whited a very shades of grey situation.
The best parts, to me, were Jayme tracking down nearly every former player the Grizzlies ever had (I haven’t watched Jayme’s previous doc, Finding Big Country, where some of the footage of her rolling around Bryant Reeves’ cattle ranch came from, but it’s here and I’m going to). She approaches them earnestly, not trying to downplay her nerves, but her intentions are clear and because of it their responses are genuine and joyful, unfurling in real-time that gets captured on camera. It’s awkward and charming, tense and sincere, beautiful. She does the same when sitting down with Jackson and not soft-balling him, asking him the straight on questions with a smile on her face, and she goes even further when she finally makes a begrudging trip to Memphis to see what the team, her team, has become.
It’s there that Jayme (and anyone watching) cracks right open watching her meet her super fan counterparts in Memphis, Antonio Braxton and Antonio Braxton Jr. There’s a sense of suspension in the film as the three wade through rooms of memorabilia. Jayme’s world, up to then rooted firmly and stubbornly in the past, seems to click and connect with the present and finally ease into the future. There’s an ease to it. A breath coming out. The documentary is still about expansion — the highs, lows, hurts, pitfalls and ultimate failures of — but it expands out beyond its own objective into something simultaneously full-circle and open-ended. Like the universe, like life.
Seattle and Las Vegas, those are the options.
Seattle, like Vancouver, with a team then without one (there's also been a doc about this), the reasons less steeped in win records than building permits and securing the funding to construct a new arena — at the surface, anyway. It’s bizarre to me, or maybe just totally transparent, that an Oklahoma City investor bought the Sonics and promised not to move them (even got the Mayor of Oklahoma to promise they weren’t moving?), then reneged when municipal government refused to foot the $500-million bill for a new arena. It’s bizarre to me that any arenas — especially as they get bigger, loaded with more expensive AV equipment, concourse and team features — are publicly funded, but there’s a long history of it.
I like that Seattle sued. That even if the NBA Board of Governors essentially voted to expedite the franchise’s relocation to avoid a looming legal quagmire the team’s new ownership had to settle with the city, Seattle had the SuperSonics name stripped from them.
It does nothing for fans, but there’s at least the feeling of fists clenched.
I like that the city kept fighting after it came out that there were plans to move the team as early as 2006. It gets murkier after that. Hints of the same kind of league cannibalization that hurt Seattle so much when different potential ownership groups in the city went after then-ailing franchises — first the Kings, the Bucks, then the Hawks — with the intent of soft obliteration. Because no matter how a relocated team comes to honour its roots, there’s a certain amount of willful amnesia and forced erasure to get the team to take in its new surroundings. A polite acknowledgement of where the club came from before citing its current era the most golden.
Las Vegas I grapple with, and then push back against my own reasons. It’s a city solely concerned with entertainment — but then, what’s basketball? It’s a city that seems tenuous, transitory, encroaching — that’s life. It’s fickle, lacks history (or the automatically barring notion of a storied history within sports) — everything starts somewhere. I look at the Aces, look at what can form fast out of a heat-mirage of hope and emerge a whole and thriving and electrifying proof of concept — my reasons wither.
Seattle and Vegas are also the options because they have been the most persistent and recent, and those tend to be the things that garner and maintain the most attention. What about another team in Canada? Or Mexico, that saw the return of the CDMX Games this weekend and welcomed them back with a frenzy that had patiently bided its time? Expansion came up in a conversation I had at my kitchen table with Raul Zarraga, the VP and Managing Director of NBA Mexico, when he called me during halftime of Friday night’s Capitanes game. It was 9pm my time and I just had the lamp on table on, otherwise in the dark, watching headlights flash across fresh banks of snow, picturing the purple jacaranda frothing in tandem with all the fountains in public squares at seemingly every other cross-street in Mexico City as Raul warmly and candidly shared with me all that he was proud of in the growth of basketball in Mexico. He didn’t so much hedge at expansion as outright say a polite no thanks, not now, that’s not what they’re concerned with. The onus there is on grassroots growth through the sport, on figuring out the most meaningful way to connect via basketball, engage people with it on a 1:1 level for education and jobs rather than landing a big franchise only those most immediate to it might get to see right away. How expansion, in that instance, could come to stall or stomp out something still taking shape.
Past place, wherever and whenever it ends up, expansion is compelling because of its duality. Success and failure balanced on a knife’s edge no matter the conditions. The Grizzlies fell to one side, Raptors the other. Another reason I’d been thinking about expansion is because when I had a very long and winding conversation with Raptors’ broadcaster Jack Armstrong earlier this week he at one point uttered the phrase, “And thank god for Vince Carter” like a quick under the breath prayer. We were on a video call — he was in Florida — so I know he didn’t do this, still I could picture him crossing himself as he said it, full Irish coming out.
We’d been talking about the growth of the NBA, from the coaching pipeline to the evolution of talent, longevity of careers and the management of teams, and he was candid about the initial rooting against the Raptors succeeding from the old guard hockey crowd of the city. The team shifted ownership three times, the first two in two and one year stints, respectively, until MLSE took over in 1998, so I assume Jack meant those three initial years of the team trying to find its footing, playing games on a hardwood court set up over the turf of Toronto’s baseball arena. In 1997 the team moved into its current arena, in 1998 they chose Carter — the momentum had started to shift. The market was also bigger, but like the Grizzlies the team’s early record was atrocious, and like Jayme talked about in her film, it didn’t matter. That the team was here, playing, sort of competing, existing, was all that mattered.
I was talking to Seerat this week and she asked if I was in a soft girl phase. Besides knee-jerk making a joke about it (Isn’t that me all the time?) I admitted Yeah bro I’m soft rn.
Maybe it’s an end of the year thing, and the end of a big, at times bursting lucky and at times destabilizing one, but I have been feeling very arm’s length about the completion of anything. With work, this is a problem. With the year itself I understand my compulsion: it’s speeding to completion, very quickly, on its own.
It feels good right now to spend an extra hour in the morning over making coffee, slicing a grapefruit, listening to three different morning news briefs before I sit down to work. To treat, like I said to Seerat, my Christmas tree like a SAD lamp as I zone out on the book I’m reading to stare at it. Work doesn’t always cooperate. The only full-time thing about being full-time freelance is the inability to say no to much of anything, so my evenings and mornings and afternoons in this decompressive time have still been snagged by opportunities to talk to my friends and perfectly kind perfect strangers about basketball, but those, too, have turned out languid. Something about unwinding, in this time, has drawn out conversations and made the mood easier. A trick of expansion as I try to draw inward, go figure.
Expansion, however it happens next, has a better shot because the talent, and the volume of talented people, in the league and clamouring to enter it has exploded. Development has proven to be a viable tool for small or middle market teams figuring out footholds on how to compete if the superstars don’t want to shine on them, and G Leaguers want stable pro careers. It also has a better shot because of the same sting of past failures that made the idea a non-starter for so long. Hypothetical new teams shouldn’t be barred from high picks in the NBA Draft lottery, because to assume a brand new team wants to bide its time denies it the very propulsion it needs to lift off, and a new team expected to pay its dues to established franchises feels a little like colonial taxes.
The crux of expansion is the part I have the hardest time with. The expansion draft marries together the two worst things about failed expansion and abrupt team relocation. While I get the necessity of team ownership delegating its protected top eight players, athletes should have the choice to opt-in, protected or not. Maybe there’s a contract stipulation, like a bonus, for boldly going and then winning in some far-flung new location, like six blocks off the Las Vegas Strip, but enthusiastic buy-in seems like a no brainer.
I think why league expansion keeps coming up is the same reason it has for me, repeatedly, over the last short stretch of time — possibility. As a reality, even with LeBron James and other people with the means sizing up new markets, it’s just as far off. The league has spent the last two seasons losing money, and trying to make some up in this one, expansion helps in the longterm but the present would be all about promotion. Still, it’s been long enough since the last bad-faith and failed expansion relocations, with enough good faith and fruitful outcomes in their recovery, that potential, which is, in essence, hope, has come back around. Why else spend a whole newsletter outlining and planning for the imaginary?
Why not?