Everything you need to know about expansion drafts

Professional sports leagues are always looking to grow, and sometimes that means adding new franchises. In North American pro sports, expansion drafts are one of the easiest ways leagues populate new teams.

The NFL and MLB held the first-ever expansion drafts in the same year — the newly-enfranchised Dallas Cowboys selected their inaugural roster in March 1960 followed by MLB’s LA Angels and the now–Texas Rangers in December.

So what is an expansion draft? Just like a traditional entry draft, an expansion draft involves a team’s front office hand-selecting players to join their roster.

However, expansion drafts differ in two key ways: First, only the new franchise(s) select players, and second, the athletes chosen already play in the league, unlike in entry drafts where players are, you guessed it, entering the league.

Here are some expansion draft basics:

1️⃣ Protected players: Because the new franchise is choosing players from existing teams, those already-established teams can protect their top talent from being picked. Teams submit their protected player lists ahead of the draft, so the drafting team can plan ahead.

Another added wrinkle? In some leagues, like the NWSL, teams can use trades and allocation money to protect players. This gives existing teams greater control over which of their players are available for selection.

2️⃣ Selection process: Depending on the number of incoming teams — the NWSL’s 2023 expansion draft had two, but Friday’s WNBA expansion draft only had one — a team’s front office will select players like a traditional draft, either taking turns like in the NWSL’s most-recent case or making their picks all at once.

Some leagues require teams to choose at least one player from each team, while others opt to limit the number of players that can be chosen from one squad.

3️⃣ Roster building: Usually an expansion draft is a team’s first opportunity to fill out their roster, but once that’s done and dusted, the team can take part in additional roster building like the rest of the league, whether that’s through free agency, trades, or the entry draft.

For example, the Valkyries can add to their roster with the No. 5 pick in the 2025 WNBA Draft next April — and that draft class is chock full of talent.

The details of an expansion draft vary from league to league and are often based on the intricacies of the sport itself. For example, the NWSL allows incumbent teams to protect nine players while the WNBA allows a maximum of six protected players — this discrepancy can be attributed to the difference in roster size between soccer and basketball.

A league’s unique collective bargaining agreement (CBA) can also add complexities to the expansion draft process, with aspects like salary caps and no-trade clauses influencing the way a new team drafts and functions over its first few seasons.

In the NHL, new teams must spend a minimum amount of their salary cap during the expansion draft, meaning they’ll have less cash available to build out their roster with trades and free agent signings.

Because CBAs are negotiated between the league’s players’ union and the league itself regularly, what was true for a league’s most recent expansion draft, might not be in the next iteration. Stay alert.