It’s still the NBA offseason, but the 2025-26 season is slowly starting to rumble into gear.
The new national TV calendar is taking shape. The season schedule was unveiled this past week. Training camps open in just over a month.
So, let’s take stock of where all 30 teams stand before the heavy season preview content arrives. Here is one defining number that explains each team’s position as the 2025-26 season approaches, and what key factors might determine their outcomes over the next 10 months.
There are plenty of reasons for Hawks optimism this season, from Dyson Daniels‘ Most Improved Player breakout to the best offseason for any team in the Eastern Conference. But the Hawks’ chances for another conference finals run, half a decade after their surprise trip in 2021, might rest on how high Jalen Johnson rises this season. The oft-injured forward played just 36 games this past season, but when he was available, few players did a better job stuffing the stat sheet.
Johnson averaged 10 rebounds and five assists per game this past season, joining Nikola Jokic, Giannis Antetokounmpo and Domantas Sabonis as the only players to reach those round numbers. Over the past four seasons, the only other player to hit those benchmarks is Joel Embiid. That’s not to say Johnson is an MVP contender — but he could be a lot closer to an All-NBA spot and true stardom than anyone realizes.
0:58
Bobby Marks: Celtics going through ‘ultimate reset’
Bobby Marks joins “NBA Today” to break down how Jayson Tatum’s absence and the trades of Jrue Holiday and Kristaps Porzingis can key the Celtics up for long-term success.
The Celtics’ biggest absence this season will clearly be Jayson Tatum as the six-time All-Star recovers from an Achilles tear. But don’t sleep on just how drastically Boston’s big man rotation has changed: This past postseason, the Celtics gave 99.5% of their center minutes outside garbage time to Al Horford, Kristaps Porzingis and Luke Kornet, per Cleaning the Glass. Now, all three are gone.
They’ll be replaced by some combination of Neemias Queta, Luka Garza, Chris Boucher and Xavier Tillman, who all bring various strengths and play styles to the team, but are also worse than Horford, Porzingis and Kornet. That’s a major adjustment for Boston and coach Joe Mazzulla, and another reason to doubt the Celtics’ ability to compete in their Tatum-less gap year.
According to GeniusIQ tracking data, six players averaged at least three minutes of possession in their games with Brooklyn this past season. Five of those six — Dennis Schroder, D’Angelo Russell, Ben Simmons, Killian Hayes and Trendon Watford — are no longer with the organization; neither is Cameron Johnson, who ranked second on the team in points.
New Net Michael Porter Jr. should fill some of Johnson’s shotmaking duties, but he’s not much of an initiator, which means there will be ballhandling opportunities available to the Nets’ young backcourt. Expect lots of rookie growing pains, after Brooklyn drafted a record five first-rounders. Additionally, expect Cam Thomas (assuming he re-signs with the Nets in restricted free agency) to post a ludicrous usage rate, after he put up a 32.6% mark this past season — just behind Paolo Banchero and Cade Cunningham in the league’s usage rankings.
LaMelo Ball led the league with a 35.9% usage rate this past season, the 23rd-highest single-season mark ever. Typically, players with such heavy workloads are superstars putting up big numbers; 19 of the 22 players ahead of LaMelo made an All-NBA team in the season in question. (The exceptions are DeMarcus Cousins the year that he was traded from the Kings to the Pelicans, Jermaine O’Neal the year that he was suspended following the Malice at the Palace and Michael Jordan in his first Wizards season.)
But even if Ball had played enough games to qualify for All-NBA consideration, he wouldn’t have come close. His PER was the worst for any player with a 35% usage rate in NBA history. Factor in his frequent injury absences, and it’s unclear if Ball is still a franchise player the Hornets should build around, or rather a ball-dominant entertainer who doesn’t win games.
The Bulls have been the embodiment of NBA mediocrity for years and they have the record to prove it. Over the past four seasons since they added DeMar DeRozan, Lonzo Ball and Alex Caruso to start a new era for the franchise, the Bulls are 164-164. And while DeRozan, Ball, Caruso and Zach LaVine are all off the roster, they still show no signs of embarking on a true rebuild — they sought players in trades for Ball and Caruso instead of draft picks — meaning they’re poised to end up right back near .500 in 2025-26.
In three seasons with Donovan Mitchell, the Cavaliers have a 163-83 record in the regular season (66% win rate), which is third-best in the NBA over that span. But in the playoffs, they’ve gone just 11-15 (42%).
Injuries have played a role, as Mitchell, Darius Garland, Evan Mobley and Jarrett Allen have all missed at least one playoff game in that span. But Cleveland hasn’t even come close in any of its playoff defeats, falling in five games in each of the past three years.
Following a 64-18 showing this past season, expect many more regular-season wins from Cleveland in 2025-26. But the Cavaliers have now reached the same point as the Milwaukee Bucks at the start of the decade: It doesn’t matter how impressive they look in the regular season because they’ll have to wait until the playoffs to prove that anything is different this year.
For the Mavericks to seize on their competitive window before 33-year-old Kyrie Irving and 32-year-old Anthony Davis reach their mid-30s, they’ll primarily need Irving to recover from left ACL surgery this year. Only slightly secondary, though, is a need for No. 1 pick Cooper Flagg, at 18 years old on opening night, to be an immediate high-impact contributor.
Flagg is one of the best NBA prospects in decades, so he certainly has that potential. But it’s a tall order for any player with his age and experience to contribute to winning basketball, no matter his talent. Only five teenagers have ever been regular starters on the perimeter for a team that made the playoffs according to Stathead: Jayson Tatum, Luol Deng, Carmelo Anthony, Tony Parker and Stephon Marbury. Only Tatum has done so in the past two decades.
There’s a fun stat at Basketball Reference called MVP award shares, which measures the percentage of possible votes that a player received, then adds up each season’s figure. In other words, it rewards players who not only win MVP, but do so decisively, and finish high in the balloting year after year.
With three resounding MVP wins and two runner-up finishes in the past five seasons, Nikola Jokic is zooming up this leaderboard. With his second-place finish in 2024-25, he moved into seventh place in career MVP award shares, passing Wilt Chamberlain, Shaquille O’Neal, Karl Malone, Tim Duncan, Kobe Bryant and Giannis Antetokounmpo. With a similar showing in 2025-26, he would pass Bill Russell and Magic Johnson. With two more top-tier seasons, he could pass Larry Bird and maybe even Kareem Abdul-Jabbar to move into third place all-time, behind only LeBron James and Michael Jordan.
There’s a lot at stake for Denver as a team this season as the Nuggets try to win another title after a strong summer. But there’s also a lot at stake for Jokic individually as he continues to make his case as one of the best players in NBA history.
Even as the Pistons made a leap this past season from a league-worst 14 wins to 44 wins and a hard-fought playoff loss, Cade Cunningham, Jaden Ivey, Ausar Thompson and Jalen Duren played together in just two games for five minutes. Because of various injuries and rotation decisions, Detroit’s four most important building blocks, all 23 or younger, essentially went an entire season without sharing the floor. Add in No. 5 pick Ron Holland, and the quintet of recent lottery picks never played together.
So even as Detroit makes some substitutions in the veteran portion of its rotation in 2025-26 — Malik Beasley, Tim Hardaway Jr. and Dennis Schroder out; Caris LeVert and Duncan Robinson in — there is still plenty for the Pistons to discover about their hoped-for long-term core. Is Ivey’s small-sample 3-point improvement real? Can Ivey and Thompson help lift some of Cunningham’s heavy offensive burden? Where does Holland fit in after a quiet rookie campaign?
1:01
Steph Curry confident Warriors can compete for title
Stephen Curry tells ABC’s Larry Beil that he isn’t worried about the age of the Warriors’ roster.
The Warriors’ problem for the majority of this past season was that their offense completely collapsed when Stephen Curry rested. Golden State scored just 104.2 points per 100 possessions when it was without both Curry and Jimmy Butler III, according to Cleaning the Glass. That figure ranked in the 5th percentile of all lineups leaguewide. For comparison, Golden State was up at 120.1 points per 100 possessions (85th percentile) with Curry.
However, Butler’s presence solved that problem after the trade deadline. The Warriors had a perfectly respectable 113.9 offensive rating when Butler took the floor without Curry, ranking in the 47th percentile. Average is just fine in those circumstances, because the Warriors are so great with Curry that they just need to hold serve without him. Add in phenomenal, 99th-percentile defense in those Butler-without-Curry minutes, and it’s easy to see why Golden State went 23-8 with the third-best net rating in the league after Butler first suited up.
Granted, the Warriors’ offense did fall apart in the second round of the playoffs when Curry was injured. But Butler was also banged up at the time.
The Rockets were an excellent team in almost all facets this past season, but one weakness cost them dearly. Houston ranked just 22nd in half-court scoring efficiency, per Cleaning the Glass, which was the worst of any playoff team, and proved particularly unable to get buckets in one-on-one matchups.
Houston scored 0.91 points per isolation play, according to GeniusIQ, in both the regular season and postseason; only the Jazz, Wizards and Raptors scored at a worse rate from their isolations. None of Houston’s perimeter players could create consistently good looks against set defenders, as Fred VanVleet (15th percentile among players with at least 100 isos), Amen Thompson (15th percentile) and Jalen Green (12th percentile) struggled.
Enter Kevin Durant, who isn’t just better than the Rockets’ previous options, but led the whole league in isolation efficiency this past season, with 1.21 points per iso. The Rockets had one weakness, and they solved it. With Durant taking control of the offense in late-game scenarios, they’ll be a force to be reckoned with in the West.
The Pacers’ primary job this season is to position themselves to vault right back to contention when Tyrese Haliburton returns from a right Achilles tear in 2026-27. There are two main steps to accomplish before then. First, they need to find Myles Turner‘s long-term replacement at center, whether that’s Isaiah Jackson, Jay Huff or an external candidate. Second, they need to determine which of the team’s young reserves recently picked in the first round — Bennedict Mathurin, Ben Sheppard and Jarace Walker — is a long-term keeper.
Mathurin, a former No. 6 pick, is the most intriguing option because his downhill scoring is unique on Indiana’s roster. But Mathurin hasn’t evinced much development since an impressive rookie season. Both his traditional and advanced stats have been very similar across his first three NBA seasons; for instance, his PER (a stat where 15 is average) has barely bounced from 13.1 as a rookie to 13.0 as a sophomore to 13.6 in his third year. If Mathurin can stretch his wings in Haliburton’s absence, rather than remaining on this statistical plateau, it would be a boon for the Pacers in the long run.
1:01
Perk: Clippers’ aging roster can’t afford slow start
Kendrick Perkins details why the Clippers’ aging roster faces urgency to avoid a slow start in the Western Conference.
The Clippers were dominant for large stretches of this past season — as long as their stars were on the floor. Things changed when they rested. The Clippers were 14.5 points per 100 possessions better with center Ivica Zubac on the court, per Cleaning the Glass, which was the third-largest margin for any player with at least 1,000 minutes (behind Nikola Jokic and Dorian Finney-Smith). Kawhi Leonard‘s on/off differential was 10.5 points, which ranked ninth.
In other words, the Clippers needed to upgrade their bench, and they spent the summer working on that problem. They signed Brook Lopez, a perfect backup center for Zubac. They signed Bradley Beal and Chris Paul on cheap contracts to provide more playmaking in the backcourt. And they traded for John Collins, adding a new, multipositional dimension to the frontcourt between Zubac and Leonard. The Clippers are old and face intense competition atop the West, but they’re a legitimate contender.
With Luka Doncic and LeBron James on the roster, the Lakers have access to a theoretically unguardable play; picks between James and a talented guard have long forced mismatches and worked wonders. Yet the Lakers didn’t run many pick-and-rolls between their two lead creators after this past season’s blockbuster trade: In the regular season, James set 3.8 picks per 100 possessions for Doncic, per GeniusIQ, while Doncic set 0.6 for James, for a total of 4.4 picks per 100 possessions.
For comparison, James and Kyrie Irving set 15.1 picks per 100 possessions for each other across their last two seasons together in Cleveland. James and Austin Reaves have set 11.3 per 100 for each other across their shared Lakers tenure.
To be fair, the Lakers were adjusting to a novel situation on the fly this past season, and the star duo’s pick rate rose dramatically in the playoffs, from 4.4 to 9.2 per 100 possessions (though that was almost all James setting for Doncic, rather than the other way around). It unsurprisingly produced plenty of points, as the Lakers averaged better than 1.2 points per play when a Doncic-James pick led directly to a shot, foul or turnover. But they should utilize it a lot more in 2025-26 to get the most out of this unique partnership.
The Grizzlies are in a strange spot on their competitive timeline: They took a step back this summer by trading Desmond Bane, but they still boast a deep, balanced roster led by a couple high-paid stars. But they’re not going to make any playoff noise if Ja Morant can’t fix his rickety 3-point jumper.
Over his past three injury- and suspension-riddled seasons, Morant has shot just 30.5% from distance, which is the worst mark among all point guards in that span (minimum 500 attempts). Over his entire career, Morant’s made only 31.6% of his 3s, which is the second worst among active point guards (minimum 1,000 attempts); only Russell Westbrook is less accurate. Morant has other standout skills, but that’s simply not a winning formula in the modern, space-obsessed NBA.
2:10
Why Udonis Haslem is excited to watch the Heat this year
Udonis Haslem is confident the Heat will bounce back with a successful season.
Entering this past season, there was reason to expect Bam Adebayo‘s long-awaited offensive leap, as he had started taking and making more 3-pointers. But even as Adebayo showed meaningful improvement from distance — he made 79 3-pointers this past season, versus just nine in his entire career before March 2024 — he suffered a drop-off across the rest of his offensive output.
Adebayo’s true shooting percentage fell to a career-low 56%, marking its fourth straight decline since his career-high 63% in 2020-21. He generated a career-worst free-throw rate, didn’t get to the rim and was one of the league’s least efficient post-up scorers. With Norman Powell — who led the NBA in points per touch this past season — joining Tyler Herro, the Heat will have more offensive juice in the backcourt in 2025-26, but they need a Bam bounce-back in the frontcourt to contend in the East.
The Bucks controlled the NBA in 2021. Giannis Antetokounmpo was a two-time MVP and a newly awarded Finals MVP in the prime of his career at age 26. A strong complement of veterans surrounded him. And … they’ve won a total of one playoff series in four years since:
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2021-22: Lost in second round to Celtics
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2022-23: Lost in first round to Heat
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2023-24: Lost in first round to Pacers
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2024-25: Lost in first round to Pacers
Injuries have limited Milwaukee’s stars — Damian Lillard, Khris Middleton, Giannis himself — in those playoff losses, so bad luck has played a role in this lackluster stretch. But no matter the excuses, the results represent a massive disappointment for a team in Milwaukee’s position, and they’re the impetus for the Bucks’ big financial gambles this summer.
Anthony Edwards keeps creeping up the rankings of best players in the NBA. In 2022-23, he made his first All-Star team as a third-year player. In 2023-24, he made second-team All-NBA, finishing seventh in the voting. In 2024-25, he made second-team All-NBA again but did one spot better by finishing sixth in the vote.
On a related note, the past 21 NBA champions have had a current or recent first-team All-NBA honoree; every title-winner since the 2004 Pistons has needed a top-5 player to lead the way to the promised land. Edwards isn’t quite there yet. But at 24 years old, he’s certainly capable of making that jump.
Coming off consecutive conference finals losses, the Timberwolves have much to work out this season — replacing Nickeil Alexander-Walker, managing Mike Conley‘s workload in his late 30s, incorporating youngsters — but the most important development would be for Edwards to take one more step forward. He needs to become a bona fide All-NBA first-teamer, which is the proven path for the best player on a championship team.
What is the realistic best-case scenario for New Orleans this season, with injury risks across the roster and Dejounte Murray already recovering from a torn Achilles? The Pelicans last finished in the top six in the Western Conference standings in 2018. That was so long ago that players on New Orleans’ roster included Tony Allen, Josh Smith, Emeka Okafor, Omer Asik and Jameer Nelson; it might as well have been a different era of NBA basketball.
With apologies for piling on the Pelicans for the strangest trade of the summer — when they sent an unprotected 2026 first-round pick from either themselves or the Bucks to Atlanta, in exchange for moving up from No. 23 to No. 13 in the 2025 draft — there’s simply way more downside than upside in 2025-26. Even when Zion Williamson played this past season, the Pelicans went 10-20, a 27-win pace that would have given them a top-10 pick.
2:06
Can the Knicks get over the hump this year?
David Dennis Jr. and Kendrick Perkins believe this season will be the New York Knicks’ best shot at a title.
The five-man lineup of Jalen Brunson, OG Anunoby, Josh Hart, Mikal Bridges and Karl-Anthony Towns played 940 minutes in the regular season, by far the most in the NBA. Only one other lineup (the Timberwolves’ starters at 714) reached 500 minutes. That was to be expected given ex-coach Tom Thibodeau’s preferences.
But contrary to expectations, the Knicks’ starters didn’t mesh all that well, despite their Villanova connections and theoretical positional balance. The group finished with a plus-3.2 net rating, which sounds OK but is actually below-average for a high-usage lineup; the 50 five-man units with the most playing time this past season finished with an average net rating of plus-5.0, according to an analysis of NBA Advanced Stats data. Then in the playoffs, New York’s starters had a minus-6.2 net rating, as the team relied on lineups with reserves Mitchell Robinson and Miles McBride to reach the conference finals.
Under new head coach Mike Brown, with two more reliable reserves (Jordan Clarkson and Guerschon Yabusele) in the fold, New York’s starters probably won’t spend quite so much time together this season. But they can’t just play less often; they also need to play better in their second season together for New York to reach its first Finals this century.
The best team in the NBA is running it back. Dillon Jones is the only Thunder player who received any playing time this past postseason who’s gone now, and all 46 of his playoff minutes came in garbage time. Put another way, the 2024-25 champions are returning players who accounted for 99.2% of their playoff minutes in 2025-26.
That continuity should only help the Thunder as they attempt to mount the NBA’s first repeat campaign in eight years: They know how to play together, their young players have another year of high-stakes experience and they’re still deep, tough and balanced. The Thunder set the NBA record for point differential this past season, and it’s possible they’ll be even better this year.
I’ve been performing this exercise for years, and Orlando’s defining number has been 2012 in every edition thus far. That’s because 2012 is the last year in which Orlando ranked in the top half of the league in offensive efficiency. Since trading Dwight Howard that summer, the Magic’s offense has ranked, per Cleaning the Glass: 27th, 29th, 27th, 17th, 28th, 25th, 22nd, 21st, 29th, 30th, 26th, 22nd and 26th.
Maybe this will be the year; Orlando’s stars could hardly be less healthy than they were this past season, and Desmond Bane is the shooter the Magic have long needed. A lineup built around Bane, Jalen Suggs, Franz Wagner and Paolo Banchero should be able to score at a decent clip, and Orlando’s defense should be so strong that even an average offense would be enough to contend.
Over the past two seasons, Joel Embiid has played just 58 total regular-season games for the 76ers. More specifically, since he was improperly mocked for missing Philadelphia’s trip to Denver in 2024, Embiid has appeared in 25 of a possible 121 games (21%), and he didn’t look like his peak self even when he played.
With a healthy Embiid, Philadelphia could be one of the best teams in the East this season, but at this point, it’s impossible to count on such a massive hypothetical. Instead, the 76ers will enter the 2025-26 season with perhaps the largest gap between floor and ceiling for any team.
No team has mortgaged more of its future for less in the present than Phoenix, which is an underdog to finish even in the top 10 in the West next season. But it’s not as if the Suns can realistically pivot to a tanking posture, because they don’t control their first-round pick until 2032. That’s six more years of other teams feasting on Phoenix’s lottery possibilities after the Suns gave Houston the No. 10 pick this summer (only to reacquire it in the Kevin Durant trade).
Portland is a team on the rise after a strong finish to the 2024-25 season and a go-for-it summer that brought Jrue Holiday and Damian Lillard to Portland. With a frontcourt of Deni Avdija, Toumani Camara and Donovan Clingan, the Trail Blazers could boast one of the best defenses in the league.
But will Portland score enough to push into the playoff picture? One underrated concern is Portland’s penchant for turnovers: The Trail Blazers coughed up the ball on 16% of their possessions this past season, which ranked 29th; for context, the other teams in the bottom five in turnover rate were the Jazz, Nets, Hornets and Wizards, arguably the four worst teams.
Making matters potentially worse is that the Blazers traded Anfernee Simons, who had the best assist-to-turnover rate on the team. With Lillard unlikely to return this season, the Blazers will have to rely on Scoot Henderson to generate a lot of their offense. Out of 30 point guards with at least 1,000 minutes and an above-average usage rate this past season, Henderson ranked 29th in turnover rate, according to Stathead, ahead of only Russell Westbrook.
In more than 1,000 possessions together this past season the Kings’ new big three of Domantas Sabonis, DeMar DeRozan and Zach LaVine was outscored because of a defense that allowed a whopping 120.9 points per 100 possessions, per Cleaning the Glass. That ranked in the 11th percentile among all lineups leaguewide. When Malik Monk joined that trio, Sacramento’s defense got even worse, falling to the 3rd percentile with a 124.8 defensive rating.
There was some bad 3-point luck baked into those numbers, but it’s not as if the Kings have a roster full of high-caliber defenders who can boost them back toward respectability in 2025-26. After a brief competitive window, Sacramento is back in limbo, with a talented offense but no way to overcome one of the worst defenses in the league.
1:20
Shams: De’Aaron Fox gets full-max with Spurs
Shams Charania breaks down De’Aaron Fox’s four-year extension with the Spurs.
The most important development for San Antonio this season is how Victor Wembanyama returns from the deep vein thrombosis that sidelined him after the All-Star break this past season. If he remains healthy, Wembanyama could make first-team All-NBA and win Defensive Player of the Year in his third season.
But the second-most important development is how the Spurs’ contingent of talented guards meshes — and if they provide enough spacing around Wembanyama to make sense in the modern NBA. As a group, De’Aaron Fox, Rookie of the Year Stephon Castle and No. 2 draft pick Dylan Harper made just 30.4% of their 3-point attempts this past season (counting Harper’s stats from college). Fox made 31% this past season and has a career 33% mark. Castle made 28.5% as a rookie and 26.7% in his lone college season. Harper made 33.3% in college.
San Antonio has a long runway to build around Wembanyama, but with the 27-year-old Fox now signed to a large extension, the Spurs might have some tough personnel decisions in the years to come if that trio continues to struggle to space the floor.
The Raptors are expensive: They project to finish $1.1 million above the first apron, according to Spotrac, which makes them one of just six apron teams. The Raptors are also unusual: The other five apron teams have made at least the conference finals or won the No. 1 seed in the past two seasons, while Toronto hasn’t even made the playoffs in three years.
In other words, teams in this financial range are comfortable incurring the various apron penalties because they’re attempting to maximize a win-now window. The Raptors, however, have assembled one of the priciest rosters in the league (Brandon Ingram for $40 million per year! Immanuel Quickley for $32.5 million!) despite no indication that they’re close to contention, or that their well-remunerated starting lineup can play together. That investment gives the Raptors sneaky upside, especially in the weak Eastern Conference, but also an abundance of downside if the pieces don’t come together quickly.
Three years into their rebuild, the Jazz are still getting younger. Out of 11 Utah players who reached 800 minutes this past season, only four were older than 23 years old — and they dumped three of them (Collin Sexton, John Collins and Jordan Clarkson) in the offseason. Only Lauri Markkanen, now 28 years old, remains from Utah’s small veteran contingent.
While it remains to be seen how much the likes of Jusuf Nurkic, Georges Niang, Kevin Love and Kyle Anderson play for Utah this season, after they arrived in offseason trades, it seems more likely that Utah will give even more playing time to youngsters in 2025-26. Two new first-round picks arrived, and former lottery pick Taylor Hendricks, now 21 years old, needs more playing time after surgery on his leg and ankle limited him to just three games this past season.
The Washington Wizards have lost 64 or more games in a season just twice. The first was in 2023-24, when they went 15-67; the second was in 2024-25, when they went 18-64 (with a worse point differential). Given how much the Wizards will rely on youth this season, there’s no reason to expect much more success in year three of the rebuild, even after the worst two seasons in franchise history.
