The old one was misbehaving and this is easier than figuring out how to fix it.
People like to say “Just award an expansion team.” “Just buy a team.” “Just get an arena built.” like adding the word “just” makes it easy.
I never realized how big, complex and hard these things are. You are talking about billions of dollars, thousands of employees, hundreds of related contract obligations.
The league is not offering expansion because they can’t. They cannot promise it because they are a long way from delivering it. They may be able to say “we’d love to take a try” but they run liabiltiy risks even doing that.
So maybe they want to award a franchise somewhere as a result of this and maybe ultimately they do. There are still HUNDREDS of incremental steps to get it to the point where you could tell someone exactly if and how it is possible, let alone guarantee it.