Wow! They're bringing the NBA back again! Who could have imagined this would happen? No one. There was no reason to expect, nor even to theorize, that it would or could ever happen. Kind of a jerk move when you think about it.
Here at Defector, we do not let the caprice of various sports leagues give us an excuse for failing in our blog duty. If the NBA is going to have a 2024-25 season—if the powers that be are going to announce this many hours after the first games, with no warning—then we will have to "pre-view" it, for the sake of our beloved public, who can learn nothing about any of this except what we provide. From our own loins!
Below you will find a list of some things that some Defector bloggers are excited about in the upcoming NBA season, in no particular order. If you're looking for some stuff to follow in the coming season, or just some stuff to gab about down in the comments, or some basis for complaining that we are not paying enough attention to the team or player you like the best, please read on. Or read on for any other reason at all.
Rethinking Kawhi Leonard Again
It's hard to say with any certitude when Kawhi Leonard was transformed into a cliche about ability vs. availability, and you are all welcomed to pick your own starting date. But the new NBA season is nigh and he is not—as the owner of the worst knees in all non-football-related sports, he begins his 13th season in civilian clothes, to the increasing dismay of those people who believe the Los Angeles Clippers are finally due some good fortune.
Any game Leonard plays at this point is probably free money, as he is available for roughly two thirds of any schedule. This has been true since the turn of the decade, or the year after he cajoled the Toronto Raptors to their only championship. He has become the code word for the box score line "Inactive," all because his body has been smack-talking him for years.
He doesn't deserve this, of course, unless you think he wants to spend the rest of his career sitting next to Tyronn Lue and looking mopey faced. He didn't invent load management any more than the Clippers invented bad luck through good intentions. Of course, the Clippers once deserved all the bad luck they got because Donald Sterling was their cartoonish oaf of an owner, but it's been a decade now, and whatever curse dogged them should have run its course.
But they are aligned with Leonard, and his curse is that bodies don't actually regenerate after so much wear, and on occasion tear. He is the New Clipper, the face of a franchise that has a new arena but the same old plot line. There would not be anything untoward about wanting the Clippers and Leonard to have one big year together like the one he gave to the Raptors, but that's not the way to bet. It's never the way to bet. As everyone who follows basketball even cursorily knows by now, Kawhi Leonard is what he is, and the Clippers are what they are—all because the best ability is not availability, but cold, hard luck. – Ray Ratto
The Anthony Edwards Show, Now With More Anthony Edwards
Anthony Edwards is extremely cool. Karl-Anthony Towns is less cool, but his perimeter skills opened up a lot of runway for Edwards, to say nothing of keeping the lane clear for Rudy Gobert. I obviously do not personally know either Edwards or Towns—though they certainly call me for basketball advice ALL THE TIME—but I've had the idea in my head for a while that they have personality differences that might eventually have come to a head as teammates. Possibly I imagined it! Edwards strikes me as a somewhat lustier competitor; it would not have surprised me if eventually he became annoyed with Towns in precisely the same ways that Jimmy Butler once did. On the other hand, Towns deserves a ton of credit for so readily handing over the job of Top Dog to a much younger player, improving defensively, and making himself into an absolute killer of a second option. It was the right choice, and the space this created for Edwards to cook—both in terms of latitude and literal three-dimensional space—made the Timberwolves into a buzzsaw and a title contender.
Anyway, they're no longer teammates. I will be interested to see how this works out for Edwards in Minnesota. He and Towns were the only two Timberwolves players who averaged more than 25 minutes per game and more than 16 percent usage; Naz Reid was the only other regular in Chris Finch's rotation who topped 20-percent usage on the season. Julius Randle and Donte DiVincenzo will get opportunities, but this is now more than ever Edwards's team. This might be cool as hell right off the bat, or possibly the Wolves just made themselves much easier to guard. Either way, I'll be watching. – Chris Thompson
The Oklahoma City Thunder Growing Up
It's the 2024-2025 NBA season, and I'm going back for more Thunder. Before last season, I wrote in our Defector preview that the Thunder were well set up to make a deeper playoff run, provided everyone stayed relatively healthy around Shai Gilgeous-Alexander. Well, everyone stayed relatively healthy around Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, and the Thunder improved on their play-in exit from 2023 with a second-round exit to the eventual finalist Mavericks in 2024. While that may seem like a disappointment in what turned out to be a very winnable Western Conference, given that the Thunder walked into the playoffs with the top seed, this is the typical path for young teams in the NBA. You arrive on the scene earlier than expected, you make some noise, you make a reasonable progression, and then you hit the crossroads.
That crossroads has finished many more teams than it has sent onward to glory. It's hard to go from the darling of the league, full of potential and youthful exuberance, and into the true top tier of teams who can and will compete for a title. The Thunder have arrived at that crossroads and made two moves this summer to strive for the latter outcome. If there was one knock on the team heading into the playoffs last year, it was simply that they were not all that experienced. The Mavericks exploited some of the naivety that comes from a core's first playoff run, but now the Thunder have both the internal experience and two new pieces meant to ramp up the maturity when the team needs it most.
The first of those moves was to upgrade at the wing, as OKC somehow swindled the Bulls for Alex Caruso, for the low, low price of Josh Giddey. While I might question what Chicago was doing here, the Thunder come out of this deal with a genuine difference maker of a guard. Caruso might have gone a bit under the national radar after leaving the Lakers, but his numbers have actually improved with more game time. Last season, he played nearly 29 minutes and averaged double-digit points for the first time in his career on 46.8/40.8/76.0 splits. On top of the increased offensive role, Caruso was often tasked with guarding opponents' best wing players, and he did so as well as anyone in the league. He should be a plug-and-play upgrade on Giddey, who disappeared in the playoffs even with opponents playing way off of him.
The second addition, and the more interesting one, was signing former Knicks big man Isaiah Hartenstein to a three-year, $87 million contract. Hartenstein was an integral part of New York's ride into the second round, showing up on the boards against the Sixers in the first round, notching almost four offensive rebounds per game in the Knicks' 4-2 series win. That number held steady in the next round, even as the Knicks lost to the Pacers in seven, and so Hartenstein won himself a big contract with the Thunder. If he can show up in a similar fashion in the playoffs this season, he will shore up one of the Thunder's weaknesses: size and rebounding prowess in the paint.
This isn't to say the Thunder are now the favorites to get out of the West. Health will remain an issue. Chet Holmgren didn't miss a single game last season after missing an entire year upon entering the league, and Hartenstein is already out for a month with a hand injury before the season even starts. Gilgeous-Alexander played 75 games last season, and any dip in that number might be enough to drop the Thunder from the top half of the West rankings, ensuring a tougher route back to the second round and beyond. Still, though, the Thunder are deep, they have tools at every position now, and there's no one weakness for opponents to target like there was with Giddey last postseason. If the goal for any young team is to grow up, the Thunder's brain trust accelerated that process by bringing in two adults who perfectly complement the young guys already set up for making another leap. – Luis Paez-Pumar
Victor Wembanyama
To some extent this is the "Citizen Kane is my favorite movie" of this exercise. Oh wow, you're excited about the 7-foot-3 20-year-old who flies around the court as if unmoored in space and time and just posted one of the greatest rookie seasons in league history? Amazing! Next you'll say you also like kittens and having lots of money.
Well you can go to hell! I'm excited about Victor Wembanyama. Indulge me for a minute.
I recall the years around and immediately after Michael Jordan's final decline and retirement as a sort of sludgy, murky, frustrated period for the sport; what was best and worst about the NBA during those years were the unsettled questions of where basketball was going, what Jordan's true successor would look like, who would next wrench the sport into some bizarre new form and how they'd do it. For me, it really wasn't until LeBron James and then Steph Curry came along that the post-Jordan NBA really took a clear, defined, satisfying shape, and then they both stayed impossibly great for much longer than anybody could have hoped.
But now they're both kinda old, and while they're both still great in their ways, the sport has largely absorbed what can be learned from both of them. We've quietly been slipping into a new sludgy, murky, interstitial period for a couple of years, in my opinion, where post-LeBron and post-Steph stars—James Harden, Luka Doncic, Giannis Antetokounmpo, Kawhi Leonard, great as any of them are or were—haven't ever quite satisfied in part because they represent what, say, Kobe Bryant and Tracy McGrady and Vince Carter represented in the post-Jordan years: iterations, rather than true transformation. Adaptations to the existing world, rather than the imposition of an all new one.
Victor Wembanyama seems to me like the genuine next thing: not a player optimized for the sport as LeBron and Steph have made it, but the next guy otherworldly enough to make it into something new. There will have to be all new strategic frameworks for dealing with him. He will revalue whole entire archetypes of player. What type of player will be made all but unusable in the Wembanyama Tactical Universe? What will the Wembanyama Neutralizer look like? Who will be the first miserable all-elbows golem to get wildly overpaid by the search for that template? What rat-bastard coach will most shamelessly embrace whatever awful anti-basketball approach best addresses the Wembanyama Problem?
I'm so excited to find out! The San Antonio Spurs might be the only team I watch this season. – Albert Burneko
The Kentucky Rookies
The number of functional-to-very-good guards that have come out of Kentucky in the recent past is staggering. I count 11 in the past 10 drafts, at least five of whom are legitimate franchise cornerstones. The phenomenon of one institution producing so many valuable NBA players at two positions interests me less for its potential developmental lessons and predictive value than for the simple fact that I find it cool when buddies play together or against each other in the pros. Also, they pretty much all do cool stuff. This year's two new additions, Reed Sheppard and Rob Dillingham, have spent their debut preseasons doing cool stuff, and both look to have small but meaningful roles on teams with serious ambitions.
While Zacharrie Risacher was the number one pick in a relatively (if so far only in theory) weak draft class more for his ideal modularity than for his talent, Sheppard is, to me, the incoming prospect who is most suited for the modern metagame. The word that comes to mind, watching him nimbly slalom through screens and pull up without warning from all over the court, is "operator." Sheppard's high-end skills are what got him to the league and will keep him there; he can shoot from what feels like a dead sprint and can already make all the bread-and-butter five-out passes. But the thing that makes him pop off the screen is his supreme confidence. In Summer League and the preseason, I've seen a rookie with a veteran's ability to warp possessions, on both ends but mostly on offense, to his will by surprising opponents. He manipulates space to create little advantages with the ball, and he's such a knockdown shooter that he applies pressure by his presence alone.
Houston's backcourt rotation is somewhat crowded; with both Fred Van Vleet and Jalen Green ahead of Sheppard, there's no path to a starting spot. The Rockets and their defensively inclined hard-ass coach will also be trying to win. None of that is exactly conducive to a rookie playing big minutes, though Sheppard seems to have earned coach Ime Udoka's trust, and he's shown in his limited minutes that he can at least hang on defense, while also coming up with a bunch of pesky steals. Furthermore, the idea of Sheppard on that particular bench unit is exciting. He'll get to run with cool athletes like Amen Thompson and Tauri Eason, and Dillon Brooks is maybe the ideal backcourt partner to cover for him.
Like Sheppard, Rob Dillingham will be scrapping for minutes on a good team, though unlike Sheppard, he does not have a bunch of guards in his way. In fact, Dillingham is the only true point guard on the Wolves' roster besides Mike Conley, who absolutely needs to play as little regular-season basketball as possible if the Wolves want anything out of him this spring. (Minnesota is going to get weird with lineups featuring, like, Donte DiVincenzo at de facto backup point guard while Julius Randle does all the initiating.)
The Wolves shocked the NBA when they traded an unprotected 2031 first-rounder for Dillingham this past Draft, taking a pretty serious risk because the tiny guard fills two important niches in their ecosystem. For one, he's an accurate shooter, hitting 44 percent in college. Just as importantly, he's a willing shooter. The Wolves hit 38 percent of their threes last season, which is nice and would have been way nicer if they'd attempted more than the 23rd-most most in the league. With both Karl-Anthony Towns and Kyle Anderson (who shot only 48 threes last year but opened up a ton of shots with his passing) gone, they will play some truly cludgy lineups. DDV is a premier gunner, and Dillingham will have the greenest of lights.
Secondly, Dillingham is fast as hell, a demon in transition and a speedy pick-and-roll ballhandler in the halfcourt who can unzip the defense on his own. Minnesota's potentially impacted spacing is much less of a problem if Dillingham can help get them an extra half-dozen points or so by the power of pure sprinting. – Patrick Redford
One Last One Last Run For The Golden State Warriors
It was safe to say the Golden State dynasty was dead in 2020 when the Warriors had no players and won 15 games. Their run of titles had ended the year before when Stephen Curry could not hold off the insouciant, younger, and hungrier Toronto Raptors, and surely their dynasty had been laid to eternal rest.
Then they stuck a finger in history's eye and confiscated the 2022 championship from not-quite-ready-for-a-duck-boat-parade Boston Celtics, and reset their historical odometer.
They have been a fringe team ever since, lasting to the second round in 2023 by beating the new-to-the-party Sacramento Redfords and then getting excised from the play-in round a year later. Now, with the Western Conference seemingly tougher than it usually is, the Warriors look left behind—too small like always, and without magic enough to overcome it.
Anyone unwilling to place Stephen Curry among the special few in the game's history ate their poop sandwich when he seized Olympic gold by being Currytastic, but that was months ago, and the Warriors are now Curry, the greying Draymond Green, the ghost of Klay Thompson haunting the rafters, and a support group of reputation-free young'uns who are neither good enough to give the Warriors their new reaper-defying push to glory nor good enough to trade for ring-chasing old guys. And other than Curry, everyone seems satisfied to close the book on their decade, because nobody thinks 2022 is coming up Broadway ever again.
Thus, it seems safe to finally make up our minds about what the Warriors were before we have to behold what they are. Curry is the standalone, the guy who changed the way the game is played until it changes again. Green is the supreme defensive wizard/offensive irritant who made a career out of excelling at those two metric-defying categories. Steve Kerr is the coach who reinvented the notion of building around a small guard with unlimited range, adding a defensive conscience, most notably Green and Thompson, and a way to play the game that convinced Kevin Durant to make them all dynastic.
Logic says that should have ended in 2019 when Durant and Thompson both blew out their legs. 2022 not only lengthened but changed the debate about them. They are now more like the Tim Duncan Spurs than any other dynasty, but they have not yet found the Wembanyama to triple back to the glory days, the way San Antonio did with Kawhi Leonard in 2014. Or at least it does not seem so; we were saying all the same things back in '22, when Curry was still Curry but with three since-spent years of tread and engine life.
Maybe Curry can steal one more before he finally becomes his own version of Owner Tom Brady, and he will be a hoot to watch even if he fails at that improbable task. Indeed, if the rainbow emits one more lottery ticket, it will be the most improbable victory of them all, and the sunset they all ride into will be all the more unsettling for those who keep trying to close the book. – Ray Ratto
The 76ers
I am eager to see how Joel Embiid and Paul George work together. I think the Sixers have made a major upgrade for this season in the frontcourt. I can't wait to see them together on opening night! – Dan McQuade
The Reputational Rehabilitation Of Trae Young
It’d be strange for any basketball fan, including a not-insignificant chunk of the Atlanta Hawks fanbase, to cite the Atlanta Hawks as a thing that specifically excites them about the upcoming NBA season. It’s difficult to envision a fate much richer than the play-in tournament.
You’d think that lucking into the first overall pick in the NBA draft would have added some sparkle to this season, but when you’re picking from the thin gruel of the 2024 draft class, the prize is just Zaccharie Risacher, a luxury 3-and-D wing who might not even start for the team on opening night. But one thing did happen to the Hawks during this offseason that I found encouraging. They abandoned their Dejounte Murray project and shipped the weird, disappointing co-star out to New Orleans. There’s no longer any ambiguity: This is Trae Young’s team again. And I think the public opinion of the tiny, inarguably twerpy point guard has soured a little too much; there’s no way he is only the 30th-best player in the NBA. Perhaps he’s not quite the guy he once seemed on track to become when he was carrying them to conference finals, but the overcorrection has gone too far.
My case is simple. Young lives in the tiny intersection of two incredibly valuable skills. He can pull up from 30 feet; it’s only him, Steph Curry, and Dame Lillard who consistently command attention from that far out. He is also one of the five most creative passers in the league. That combination of shooting gravity and playmaking is, I’m sure, still one of the best half-court offensive engines in the world. Yes, he is also a teeny 6-foot-1 guard who activates that primordial urge to stuff someone in a locker, and he will be targeted accordingly on defense, and that will always demand some care in assembling the right players around him. The Dejounte Murray that the Hawks thought they were getting in the trade might have been such a player—a vicious perimeter defender and able secondary ball-handler— but the one they got—an embarrassingly limp defender and decent volume scorer—didn’t make much sense alongside their superstar. The whole point of having Trae Young is his ingenuity as a decision-maker; keep the ball in his hands and let him cook.
Shedding Murray should clarify the team’s identity, and I think Quin Snyder is too good a coach to not carve something more promising out of this roster. While the present-day Hawks don’t have the team-wide shooting of the truly good Trae Young offenses of years past—Danilo Gallinari, Kevin Huerter, and John Collins sure were hucking lots of threes—there are still some intriguing pieces. Jalen Johnson emerged abruptly last season as a slasher and transition wrecker, and his athleticism is a nice complement to Young’s game of craft and deceit. Bogdan Bogdanovic is coming off a wonderful season that should’ve won him Sixth Man of the Year. Risacher is a bummer of a top overall pick, but if he’s willing to rip threes that way he did in preseason, and actually starts hitting some, that’s another good theoretical wing alongside Young. The newly acquired Dyson Daniels is wildly bricky, in the storied tradition of tall Australian guards, but he does undoubtedly give Young a solid defensive partner in the backcourt, which he’s never really had. The bigs are just bigs, but all Young needs is someone who can catch a pocket pass and go up. Clint Capela might barely be that anymore, but Onyeka Okongwu is trending up.
I’m loath to bang the drum for a guy who so thoroughly pantsed the team I root for, but oh well. I’ve witnessed firsthand the devastation this bozo is capable of. He might not have added much to his game since those 2021 playoffs, but getting back to that level would be more than enough. It’s unclear why we’re supposed to be so low on him after a couple down seasons with a woefully miscast co-star. What was his crime? Being a sort of Weird Little Guy who can get too candid and lacks stereotypical leadership qualities? Yawn. Having a vaguely unpleasant personality is not a disqualifying trait for an NBA superstar. Go prove the world wrong, you vile scamp—I believe in you. – Giri Nathan
Zach Edey
I am not the type of person who tends to get excited about a 22-year-old rookie center, no matter how large he is. But here’s the thing: Zach Edey is very large.
Listed at 7-foot-4 and 300 pounds, Edey is precisely the sort of player who was chased out of the league around the time the Golden State Warriors started winning titles. He's big, he's slow, he can't shoot, and his preferred method of scoring involves glacially paced post-ups. We don't do that stuff so much these days.
But Edey might be entering the league at a particularly advantageous moment. This guy would have probably been the No. 1 pick in the draft 15 years ago, only to end up following Roy Hibbert to the scrap heap. Five years ago, he might not have been a lottery pick. This year, Edey landed at No. 9, and was drafted by the Memphis Grizzlies. This is not a team that's bad enough to place any real expectations on Edey, but it's also not good enough to have no use for him.
The league is suddenly in a place where it can be quite useful to have a rock golem who knows a few post moves on the roster. The last decade of downsizing and spacing has sucked certain concepts out of the game, such as frontcourt players who can defend on the block. The last four MVP awards have gone to centers who, in addition to being mega-skilled geniuses, understand how to throw their weight around. Edey's rookie season will be fun to monitor as a test case: Will the low-block advantages that Joel Embiid and Nikola Jokic have been exploiting be there for a lesser but no less bruising player? Can this big fucker spend a few minutes every night dragging us back to 1998?
I hope so, if only because it's nice to see different things on the TV. By New Year's, we're all going to be coming to terms with the fact that the Boston Celtics are once again going to five-out their way to an NBA title while shooting 47 threes per game. You'll get tired of watching that at some point, and that's when it will be nice to flip over to a Grizzlies-Pelicans game, and hope to catch 10 minutes of Edey putting Herb Jones into the basket. – Tom Ley
The Return Of Kenny Atkinson
Kenny Atkinson is back! I always thought he got a raw deal in Brooklyn. He took over at the absolute nadir of a particularly long and hateful rebuild, made something fun and frisky out of a goofy and underpowered Nets roster, and then got the ol’ heave-ho in favor of Steve Nash, who had no coaching experience and was not better suited for the gig at all. The Nets were done with rebuilding; they had a chance to put together a superstar trio and went for it. This worked out insanely poorly, which I will spend the rest of my life chuckling about.
This is supposed to be about Atkinson. His Nets did lots of three-bombing, and they dared to run entirely different stuff to suit the dramatically different playing styles of Spencer Dinwiddie and D’Angelo Russell. And Atkinson put a lot of faith into a collection of deeply goobery guards, and that faith was rewarded. I feel very confident that a few years working under Tyronn Lue and Steve Kerr will not have made him any worse at coaching basketball.
It’s a bummer that J.B. Bickerstaff was cut loose in Cleveland, after all the work he did to build a tough regular-season team out of what initially seemed like a bizarrely unbalanced roster. It’s hard to feel excited about a coaching change when the coach being replaced very definitely deserves to be holding a clipboard someplace. But if the Cavaliers needed a change, I’m glad they settled on Atkinson as their next guy, and I’m eager to see what he’s got cookin’. – Chris Thompson
The Rebounding List
As I wrote last year, I love board-getters. A certain sort of cynic rolls their eyes at the modern NBA, spaced-out and slimmed-down, and wonders what the difference is between a regular-season NBA game, where you can't even play defense anymore, and a random number generator, what with all these three-pointers. To them I would say, spend a game paying attention to who gets rebounds, and how. There's still a place for effort, unquantifiable wildness, and the lost art of beating the shit out of a guy, and it's under the rim. Here are some players I am excited to watch on the glass this year.
- Isaiah Hartenstein (Oklahoma City): One of the only centers who is truly dedicated to pounding the offensive glass. The Thunder signed Hartenstein specifically for his rebounding, and while he's good for the expected reasons (big thick barrel chest, a love for contact), it's his work on the offensive glass that makes him so special. The Knicks earned so many free possessions last playoffs thanks to Hartenstein, and the key is extremely simple: He is so big and persistent that he is hard to box out. He'll push back, gain two feet of space, and all of a sudden, his man is too close to the hoop to get the carom.
- Brandin Podziemski (Golden State): Podz averaged almost six boards per game last season, which is super impressive for a small guard who played 26 minutes per game. He's a particularly fun rebounder to watch because he has to operate in so much space, being forced to box out a guy sprinting in from the three-point line, or look around and simply find someone to hit when a shot goes up. His timing is great, and he loves to fly in and steal rebounds. As we've seen with Russell Westbrook and Ben Simmons, having a skilled ballhandler and passer grab defensive rebounds is a recipe for instant transition offense. The Warriors will play a bunch of weird small lineups this season, and Podz's rebounding will matter in those groups.
- Tari Eason (Houston): This guy is mega nasty.
- Aaron Gordon (Denver): Like Eason, this one is simple. Aaron Gordon is the king of the putback dunk. Opponents have to pay so much attention to Nikola Jokic, that Gordon is often left unchecked if he starts out a defensive possession too far out. Short of stuff that would earn you a suspension, I don't know how you box him out if he has a running start, and he has the touch to jam it back with authority.
– Patrick Redford
Russell Westbrook
Ha ha ha ha. Heheheheh. Hoo hoo hee hoo.
That's me. That's me laughing about the fact that Russell Westbrook, one of the coolest, most thrilling, and most self-destructive players I have ever seen has now landed on my favorite team, at the precise moment when that team appears to be approaching a cliff's edge. I'm laughing because I'm soooooo happy about this. And calm! I'm very calm, and not at all worried that Westbrook, a guy I have spent my entire career as a sports blogger viciously defending from criticism, is going to put both hands on Nikola Jokic's back and push.
The good news for you, the neutral, is that the Nuggets are guaranteed to be entertaining this season. Through Door No. 1, we have a sunny reality in which Westbrook brings a nightly burst of back-court energy and playmaking that the Nuggets were so clearly missing as they got bullied out of the playoffs last season. In this version of the future, Wesbrook spends the season running the second unit, pushing the ball on the fast break, getting to the foul line, not shooting threes—no threes! Please don’t shoot any threes!—and cutting for easy dunks from Jokic. Ahh, that would be nice, wouldn't it? Let's just sit quietly and ponder those possibilities before we venture through Door No. 2.
Oh god, here is the cloudy, sad, but no less entertaining potential future. Here we have Westbrook deciding within the first week of the season that he is better than Jamal Murray. We have Michael Malone, understanding that his job might be on the line and growing more unhinged every day, deciding that Christian Braun and Julian Strawther can't be trusted to replace Kentavious Caldwell-Pope in the starting lineup and handing the job to Westbrook. The most three-point averse team in the league suddenly has a shameless and inaccurate chucker in the starting five. He's going nuts out there. He’s shooting the ball 17 times a night, he's freezing Jokic out of the offense, and he's openly feuding with Murray. Every time Malone is asked about why he's letting this psychopath destroy his championship roster, he just says, "We need that fire. We need that energy." The Nuggets struggle to win 45 games and then get the absolute shit kicked out of them by the Thunder in the playoffs.
You're laughing at me now? I just laid this nightmare scenario out and you're laughing at me, like it's funny? – Tom Ley
Brandon Miller
Did you watch much Hornets basketball last year? Probably not, because without LaMelo Ball playing his brilliant, frustrating brand of basketball, all that was left was the shameful presence of Miles Bridges, a couple of overrated centers running around and falling down, and a real stinky Steve Clifford offense. But there was a pretty serious bright spot, a player I am extremely excited to pay much closer attention to this season: Brandon Miller.
Miller is one of the most gifted bucket-getters to be drafted this decade. He can do other stuff, but mostly he can score. That's not a knock at all: Nothing matters as much as scoring, and Miller is already super advanced as a scorer. He's everything you want in a jumbo-sized wing: total knockdown shooter off the catch and the bounce (more going to his left than his right at the moment, though he's improving), three-point range, and an explosive athlete in transition. His rookie highlight reel is populated equally with smooth half-court operation and bombastic dunks, and he is completely fearless against any defender.
The Hornets surely will be more normal this season. Rookie Tidjane Salaun looks incredible, Vasilije Micic should help keep the ball moving, and there's always a chance Grant Williams helps them win instead of making everyone annoyed. But Miller is the key piece for them, as we know who LaMelo is and how good a team with him as its best player can be; it's strange to think about now, given how young he is and how stinky the Hornets have been for a few years, but they made the play-in the last time LaMelo was healthy. He's not an unserious player, he's just been hurt a lot. Miller is the theoretically perfect complement to someone like that, and I'm excited to see him develop this year. – Patrick Redford
Jordan Poole
Jordan Poole was the worst player in the NBA last season. Naturally, the Wizards traded away the other guy at Poole’s position, freeing up more opportunities for Poole to slip around in his own slime trail and do Fortnite dances about his own airballs. Washington’s roster is abominable, and it will be Poole’s job to run the show. It’s going to be so bad. – Chris Thompson
