Expansion draft

An expansion draft, in professional sports, occurs when a sports league decides to create one or more new expansion teams or franchises. This occurs mainly in North American sports. One of the ways of stocking the new team or teams is an expansion draft. Although how each league conducts them varies, and they vary from occasion to occasion, the system is usually something similar to this:

Each existing team is told it can "protect" a certain number of its existing contracted players by furnishing their names to the league office on or before a certain date. The expansion team(s) then are allowed to select players not on the protected lists in a manner somewhat similar to an entry draft. There are generally a maximum number of players that can be selected from any one team, at least without the team losing the player receiving something in compensation such as a future entry draft pick.

The teams subject to losing players are going to put all of the players they truly need on the protected list. This means that the expansion franchise is usually left to choose among players who are old, injury prone, failing to develop as the teams had intended, or perhaps so highly compensated that a team wishes to remove them from the payroll. For this reason, expansion teams are often noncompetitive in their early years in a league, although the advent of the free agent system has modified this somewhat.

Most teams seem to try largely to make a team which will serve until it can begin to develop its own talent, although occasionally players discarded by their old teams benefit from the change in environment and become stars, either again or for the first time.

A similar process occurs when an existing franchise is disbanded and the players contracted to it become available to the remaining teams; this process is referred to as a dispersal draft.

Baseball
Baseball expansion was initially hastened by the threat of a competing league, known as the Continental League.
 * 1960 Major League Baseball expansion draft
 * 1961 Major League Baseball expansion draft
 * 1968 Major League Baseball expansion draft
 * 1976 Major League Baseball expansion draft
 * 1992 Major League Baseball expansion draft
 * 1997 Major League Baseball expansion draft

Basketball

 * 1961 NBA Expansion Draft
 * 1966 NBA Expansion Draft
 * 1967 NBA Expansion Draft
 * 1968 NBA Expansion Draft
 * 1970 NBA Expansion Draft
 * 1974 NBA Expansion Draft
 * 1980 NBA Expansion Draft
 * 1988 NBA Expansion Draft
 * 1989 NBA Expansion Draft
 * 1995 NBA Expansion Draft
 * 2004 NBA Expansion Draft

Football

 * 1960 NFL Expansion Draft
 * 1961 NFL Expansion Draft
 * 1966 NFL Expansion Draft
 * 1967 NFL Expansion Draft
 * 1976 NFL Expansion Draft
 * 1995 NFL Expansion Draft
 * 1999 NFL Expansion Draft
 * 2002 NFL Expansion Draft
 * 2012 CFL Expansion Draft

Hockey

 * 1967 NHL Expansion Draft
 * 1970 NHL Expansion Draft
 * 1972 NHL Expansion Draft
 * 1974 NHL Expansion Draft
 * 1979 NHL Expansion Draft
 * 1991 NHL Expansion Draft
 * 1992 NHL Expansion Draft
 * 1993 NHL Expansion Draft
 * 1998 NHL Expansion Draft
 * 1999 NHL Expansion Draft
 * 2000 NHL Expansion Draft

Soccer

 * 1997 MLS Expansion Draft
 * 2004 MLS Expansion Draft
 * 2006 MLS Expansion Draft
 * 2007 MLS Expansion Draft
 * 2008 MLS Expansion Draft
 * 2009 MLS Expansion Draft
 * 2010 MLS Expansion Draft