Warriors might lose Jimmy Butler for shocking Joel Embiid pairing, although not with 76ers originally appeared on The Sporting News. Add The Sporting News as a Preferred Source by clicking here.

It’s been a long time since the NBA had an expansion draft. In the age of social media and debate shows, it has the potential to create incredible content.

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If teams do indeed land in Las Vegas and Seattle, they’ll need players. And the players they may end up with will be guys on overbearing contracts that are past their prime, and if they’re coming off injuries, all the more reason for teams to leave them unprotected.

“The league will generally allow every team to protect a certain number of players on their roster,” Sporting News’ Stephen Noh wrote in a new expansion mock draft. “In the past, that number has been eight.”

Teams will have no choice but to leave certain players unprotected, and one of the most fascinating combinations in play is presented by Noh as landing in Las Vegas.

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In the newly released expansion mock draft, Noh has Vegas land Joel Embiid from the 76ers with the second pick (after Anthony Davis to Seattle), then take Jimmy Butler from the Warriors with the fourth pick (after Kyrie Irving to Seattle).

While they would no longer be in their prime, that’d be a fascinating pairing to begin a team with.

Of course, they did once play together in Philadelphia, but Butler didn’t stick around too long.

“You should be sensing a theme here by now,” Noh writes. “The types of players that are going to be available to these new expansion teams are going to be past-their-prime future Hall-of-Famers who are coming off big injury concerns. Butler will be 38 at this point. Like Irving, he should be fully recovered from an ACL tear that he suffered in January of 2026. And like Irving, he can reunite with a big man that he had a good relationship with. Embiid and Butler had a good run in Philadelphia, which ended on a sour note when the franchise picked Tobias Harris over him. They get a second roll in Las Vegas.”

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There’s still much to be learned about what expansion might look like.

But the possibility of Davis, Embiid, Irving and Butler all being available in an expansion draft is fodder enough to ponder for a while.

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