Expanded NBA Draft and Rosters?

On Monday (12/21/2015), the Lowe Post released a podcast episode between Zach Lowe and NBA Commissioner Adam Silver. If you have not had the chance to listen to it, it's definitely worth listening to; it's not that long and yet  informative. Of the topics covered, one that stood out was a two-step move of adding:

(1) a third round to the NBA draft, and

(2) the addition of 2 "two-way" roster slots for NBA teams

While there is no timetable or probability of the likelihood of this move, it does seem plausible and something that both team owners and players could agree to on the next CBA.

The first portion is pretty straight forward: enable teams to have another round to draft players and hope they pan out. Or, depending on how Doc Rivers is feeling, another round for the Clippers to sell, trade, or buy a draft slot that becomes essentially a lottery ticket for a productive player. This additional round will also let teams have another chance to claim dibs on players that would otherwise attend a different team's training camp.

The second portion is more radical: it adds two roster spots that can be used by teams to send (or bring up) players to/from the D-League. The goal of these 2 slots would be to incentivize teams to have and develop young players. Currently there are teams in the NBA that would be happy to develop young players that are otherwise on the fringe of the NBA. However, with 15 man roster constraints, these teams may find it difficult to do so. Thus these "two-way" roster spots would enable teams to develop youngsters without the feat that a player in the D-League would be called up by another team in the Association. Additionally, these roster spots would cost teams less money than the NBA minimum; it's undetermined yet, but some numbers thrown around range from $80,000 to $100,000 a year.

In theory, the second proposal sounds good. It may encourage teams to spend money on D-League teams and their developmental process. The Clippers are already pondering about getting a D-League team of their own. Yet another possible outcome of this 2-step proposal is teams like the Clippers hoarding up more veterans. It's relatively easy to envision the Clippers in the future using this set up to sign players like Branden Dawson or C.J.Wilcox to cheaper two-way contracts while spending the veteran minimums to sign more "proven" veterans from the free agent market. The Clippers right now are in a win-now mode.as the clocks on Blake Griffin and Chris Paul's primes are ticking. But without the flexibility of letting young players get both D-League reps AND some (scarce) NBA playing time, it's hard to envision that any improvement to the D-League being that impacting on the development of young fringe players. Playing against inferior competition can only do so much for development.  Thus it remains to be seen how exactly two new "two-way" roster spots would impact the Association.