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 the following:
Each existing franchise must make the majority of their roster available to the expansion teams, who will draft from the exposed players. The exact number of players each existing franchise can protect and the maximum numbers of players any one team can lose varies, usually according to the number of teams entering the league that offseason.
