On Friday morning, when the barista at my local coffee shop leaned over the counter, wrinkled his face into a hideous demonic leer, and hissed "Ennnnnn ... Beeeeee ... Ayyyyyy" at me, I will confess, dear Reader, that I had no idea what the hell he was getting at (and my tip reflected as much!). A few minutes later, when a grotesque gnarled sewer rat, dripping with rank nameless effluvium, poked its one-eyed head out of a storm drain's black shadows and chittered "NBANBANBA" at me as I strolled by with my quadruple espresso, I did what any sensible pedestrian would do: hitched up my pants legs and ran screeching for a rabies booster and an ampule of Holy Water. And when Defector's own Patrick Redford messaged me in Slack later that afternoon to say, insanely, "Hey man, don't you think we should probably put together a 2025–26 NBA preview some time soon, for the sports and culture website we co-own and operate," I did the only advisable thing: crushed the ampule of Holy Water on my laptop's screen and frisbeed the whole accursed thing into a river.
Unrelatedly, later it occurred to me to wonder whether the folks over at the National Basketball Association were planning on staging another one of their "season" exhibitions this year, and whether, if they were, we at Defector mightn't write up some thoughts and expectations ahead of that, for the edification and entertainment of our loyal paying readership. As it turns out: No! They are not having a season this year. Alas, we will never get to see the Washington Wizards win the 2026 Finals, for that reason alone. But here is what the basketball enthusiasts at Defector might have produced in advance of the season, if there were going to be one, which there is not—a rich and thoughtful list of some teams and players and storylines we're excited or intrigued by, and looking forward to following as the season develops—presented here for your enjoyment. – Albert Burneko
The Reputational Rehabilitation Of Trae Young (For Real This Time)
OK it's 2:41 a.m. and I'm coming back for more Trae Young. I was just a little premature at last year's preview. Young's emergent co-star Jalen Johnson did make the leap I expected of him last season, but he also wrecked his labrum and missed 46 games.
With very little offensive creation around him, Young himself wound up having a dud 2024–25 season, with respect to his three-point shooting, rim finishing, and overall scoring efficiency. But this is the rebound year for this overlooked basketball gremlin. I'd cite pretty much all the same reasons I did last year, plus some compelling new reasons: the added shooting provided by offseason pickups Kristaps Porzingis and Nickeil Alexander-Walker. The Hawks finally seem to have built something sensible in Young's image. Around him they've gotten bigger, more athletic, and defensively versatile—addressing all his most glaring deficits—and now they've finally also given him a floor-spacing center who can shut down the rim on defense.
You can no longer double-team Young and expect to get away with it. I remain very high on Johnson and I'm eager to see what these two visionary passers can do with Porzingis around to finish the plays.
Oh YES pic.twitter.com/B4lJQa5SUV
— Atlanta Hawks (@ATLHawks) October 12, 2025
But I'm also not ruling out the possibility that Johnson and Porzingis miss a combined 114 games and Young winds up in the dumpster again. Onto next year! – Giri Nathan
The Unction In Golden State
Few things tax the minds of NBA knowers quite like trying to pre-solve the question, "When will the Golden State Warriors be too old to be tolerable?" They are not actually the oldest team in the current league (that would be the hilarious Clippers, followed closely by the decomposing Lakers), and they are not one of the 25 oldest teams ever, but one look at the roster tells you, these guys belong under glass in a museum. They've been old for a while now, but not quite like this.
Al Horford is 39. Stephen Curry is 37. Jimmy Butler is 36. Draymond Green is 35, and Gary Payton and Buddy Hield are 33. Only Jonathan Kuminga among their top-end guys is below 30, and we're not sure how much longer he will be a top-end guy in San Francisco, either by minutes played or by actual location. Surely at some point this must all collapse like a mummy exposed to air, all bandages and bone dust in a sad heap.
But a funny thing about the NBA is that time moves oddly, and age is not the predetermining factor in a team's usefulness. Four of the top 25 teams on the AARP target list have won titles ('69 Celtics, '97 and '98 Bulls, '07 Spurs, and '11 Mavericks) and two more ('14 Heat and '18 Cavaliers) have reached the Finals. Only two ('98 Magic and '99 Sonics; ask your parents about that last one) have missed the playoffs entirely, and none of them have lost more games than they have won in any season. In other words, the Golden State strategy of shoveling veteran help at Curry The Elder (Seth Curry was waived Saturday, possibly because he was too young at 35) until he can go no more has at least some historical justification.
But they still feel prohibitively old, and therefore fragile, and the great reservation about them is their fragility. Whatever the size of your heart re: Curry The Elder, you know you're not playing the short odds. In fact, what you're probably doing is waiting for a single moment when it all becomes rehab bait. It won't work that way, of course, and in fairness the Warriors did shed some age since last season, most notably Andrew Wiggins (30) and Kevon Looney (29, but who you would bet is 56 years old just watching him walk).
Rather, this will probably erode slowly, one extended injury at a time. It seems cruel to look at them this way, but the era of old teams as the preferred method of roster construction is now 15-plus years past its peak, and age is now considered a deep and abiding negative. The Warriors are at that point—nay, a couple of years past it—and while they will remain stubbornly cheeky in their advancing senescence, they are probably in mid-air now in terms of jumping the twig. The Miracle of '22 seems even less likely in '26 than it did then, and the defending champs in Oklahoma City are six years younger on average than these Warriors. This is reasonably Golden Years ... er, Golden State's last last-gasp gasp as a potentially impactful team, and the one gratifying qualifier for their fans in watching it happen is that it's probably happening to the Clippers and Lakers at the same time and the same rate. – Ray Ratto
What The Shit Is Portland Going To Be?
The point at which any bad team decides to really compete and begins compounding its present at the expense of its future is a fascinating one. Sometimes this is an obvious, almost natural process (e.g. Orlando's kids all being good enough to get the Magic into the playoffs twice before even making the Desmond Bane trade); sometimes it happens seemingly on accident (e.g. De'Aaron Fox turning into a knockdown midrange shooter in the same season his coach had the idea to apply transition principles to the halfcourt); and sometimes a team decides that it is time to start winning despite little to no evidence that any of the supposedly load-bearing players on its roster are up to bearing any loads. That is why I am fascinated by Portland.
The whole thing with the Trail Blazers is defense. The team finished in a tie for 11th place in the West last season at 36-46, which might not seem like a trustworthy foundation, a 23-18 second half notwithstanding. During that second half, the Blazers had the third-best defensive rating in the league, an upsurge attributable to Toumani Camara terrorizing the ball, Deni Avdija running around and causing problems, and Donovan Clingan sliding into the starting lineup. If a defense has one great defender, it hardly makes a difference, but if it has three, everything becomes a pain in the ass for the opposing offense, because virtually any given action will involve at least one of the destroyers. The theory of this Portland team is essentially an expansion of the philosophy that led the Blazers to their improved second half last season: Anfernee Simons, goodbye; Jrue Holiday, hello. Other teams, good luck dribbling.
Unfortunately, the other party to Blazers games who will have trouble scoring will be the Blazers themselves. Clingan is an intriguing offensive rebounding talent, but that's the one thing he's good at on that end. Scoot Henderson quietly had a good second half in 2024–25, but he is down with a hamstring tear for a while. Yang Hansen is really fun to watch on offense; he is going to get eaten alive on the other end and cannot be relied upon as a rookie. Holiday doesn't really beat guys off the dribble anymore. While Jerami Grant, Camara, and Avdija are all league-average shooters, there is precisely one guy on the roster who can both create and make a shot: Shaedon Sharpe. He also happens to play basically the same position as Portland's roster of wing terrors, which puts coach Chauncey Billups in a fascinating position. Portland will not be a serious team without Sharpe going nuts on offense, but can it still be a fearsome defense with him playing 38 minutes a night?
The Blazers still grade out as the 11th- or 12th-best team in the West, and every team except the Jazz is trying to win. I think the difference between eighth and 13th will not be all that significant. You do need to score some buckets every now and then, though Portland's whole deal is intriguing. – Patrick Redford
The Weird Mavericks
The Dallas Mavericks are the most interesting team in basketball. I am excited to watch how the Cooper Flagg era begins and also I want them to fail miserably. I would not call myself a Luka Doncic fan, merely a respecter, and I have no personal issues with the Mavs. I want Kyrie Irving to succeed. I like Anthony Davis. Klay Thompson is dating the ultimate baddie in Megan Thee Stallion. How can I want them to fail?
What I do not like is bad management and executives who get rewarded for failure. It's happening with the Sam Altmans of the world, it's happening with Bari Weiss, and it's happening with Dallas general manager Nico Harrison. Harrison traded away a generational talent for peanuts because of his own ego and because he is another sycophantic follower of the Kobe Bryant mythology—the tired idea that a franchise player must above all else be a monomaniacal gym-rat fanatic. And his penance for that was months of an entire city turning on him and his team, but his job was in no real danger, because he had the support of ownership in his idiocy. And just as the Mavericks were headed to the NBA dregs, doomed to live out their own curse of the Bambino, they failed ass-backward into the number one pick and the Cooper Flag quirked-up white boy revolution. And now we all have to pretend this was all part of Harrison's master plan in getting rid of an MVP-level talent just entering his prime.
What is a hater like me to do? The Mavericks are suddenly one of the hottest teams in the league. They've got four guys who can swat your shot out of the building and they've got Megan Thee Stallion going to their games. There's no way this team won't be fun to watch and root for. The only real saving grace, for those who'd like to see Harrison receive his richly deserved comeuppance, is that his team is stuck on a win-now track, which is a ton of pressure to put on even the best rookie superstar.
Kyrie is hurt and Davis will be hurt at some point in the early part of the season. From the reports within the building, it does not seem like they have the highest quality medical team taking care of these guys either. And the Mavs are already making the classic mistake of making their rookie star the point guard and in charge of the offense, before they even get a real feel for his strengths and weaknesses. It's not much to worry about in the grand scheme of things—but why should Harrison worry at all? Everything has worked out grand for him. He even got Luka to finally lose weight after all these years. – Israel Daramola
The Tank-y, Janky Brooklyn Nets
Michael Porter Jr. and impressionable young men … what could go wrong? So much! Literally everything could go wrong. There are many teams whose basketball games I'd rather watch, but no team stokes my curiosity quite as much as this young, tanking Brooklyn team does. Incompatible people and high-pressure environments have long powered the world's reality TV.
Burdened with an NBA-record five first-rounders, crafty head coach Jordi Fernandez will oversee (if perhaps hamper) this unmistakable tank. The Nets' best hope is 6-foot-8 Egor Demin, a slick passer with only the faintest outlines of a jump shot. Also a slick passer is 7-footer Danny Wolf, a late bloomer who parlayed two seasons at Yale into a transfer season at Michigan, where he became the principal source of anguish in my life. Drake Powell inspired scouts with his 43-inch vert at the combine. When the Nets took Ben Saraf at 26, Jonathan Givony asked ESPN viewers to "think of an Israeli version of D'Angelo Russell." Nolan Traore is, unfortunately, a guard from France. In these formative years of their NBA careers, the rookie season's crucible, the young Nets will have the example of MPJ and Cam Thomas. – Maitreyi Anantharaman
Can The Rockets Be Really Huge And Really Good At The Same Time?
The Houston Rockets' 2024–25 campaign was a smashing success. Coming off a .500 season, Ime Udoka's fellas won 52 games in a hyper-competitive Western Conference, forged one of the league's most athletic and effective defenses, and saw their young core continue to develop in encouraging directions. And yet, it all ended in a bit of disaster: A first-round playoff exit suffered at the hands of Golden State's grumpy pensioners, highlighted by some of the clunkiest offensive possessions ever produced by a 52-win playoff team.
Houston's playoff performance was dispiriting enough to convince the front office to pull the trigger on an offseason trade for Kevin Durant. There are few offensive de-gunking agents more effective than Durant, even at age 37. His impact will be made greater by the fact that he's going to be soaking up all the offensive possessions vacated by Jalen Green, whose style of basketball can be described as "not what we needed there."
That first-round loss also brought another revelation to the Rockets: They really like to play big, as in, "Let's play Alperen Sengun and Steven Adams at the same time." And so the 2025–26 Rockets will be fashioning rotations out of Durant (6-11), Adams (6-11), Sengun (6-11), Jabari Smith Jr. (6-11), Clint Capela (6-10), Tari Eason (6-8), Dorian Finney-Smith (6-7), and Amen Thompson (6-7). The original plan was to have Fred VanVleet (tiny guy) run the offense while all those big lads went wild around him, but he's going to miss the season with a torn ACL.
Which raises the question: Who is going to do point-guard stuff on this team? Which can be followed by: Does it even matter if the answer is "nobody"? Reed Sheppard, whom Houston picked third overall in the 2024 draft, is an obvious candidate to take over VanVleet's responsibilities, but Udoka barely played him last year and did not give the impression that he views Sheppard as a trustworthy member of the rotation. Already Udoka has announced that the team will be going Huge Mode on opening night, starting Thompson, Durant, Smith Jr., Sengun, and Adams and kicking off what could be a season-long attempt to break basketball.
The Rockets do have a potential trump card in their possession, in the form of Thompson. He's shown some capability as a playmaker, and if he can become a player the Rockets can rely on to bring the ball up and initiate offense, they will have a much better shot at being both huge and offensively functional at the same time. If you see Thompson dicing up defenses as a pick-and-roll ball-handler at any point during the first few weeks of the season, start worrying for the rest of the Western Conference. – Tom Ley
Who Dribbles For The Spurs?
San Antonio has a weird roster. Victor Wembanyama could be the best player in the NBA within the year, yet the Spurs' roster below him is pretty compromised. They don't have much shooting, and their wings are all either too old (Harrison Barnes), too young (Carter Bryant), or too Jeremy Sochan (Jeremy Sochan) to be two-way difference makers. Adding Kelly Olynyk and Luke Kornet is great, but both of those guys are most useful at center, which is where Wembanyama plays. Most notably, there is a curious though not necessarily bad disjointedness to their point-guard situation.
The Spurs made a big move by trading for and then extending De'Aaron Fox. He basically did not play with Wembanyama last season before the big man got hurt, which is a bummer, because their fit together is as intriguing as it is strange. Fox is sort of a shooter, but not really, just as Wemby is capable of hitting one-legged threes and nobody will be happier than opposing defense to see him shoot those. Their pick-and-roll partnership will produce some amazing highlights, and teams will defend those two players with their best wings. Fox and Wemby can both punish big and little guys who get switched onto them, though Fox has trouble with rangy wings. Wemby has gotten stronger and will certainly try to cram Mikal Bridges–type guys under the hoop, but that's still not an automatic bucket, especially since the Spurs won't have good spacing.
Making matters more complicated is number-two pick Dylan Harper, who looks like he could maybe be better than Fox in a few seasons and is on a similar career timeline to Wemby's. With Fox out for the first few weeks of the season, Harper will get chances early, and I can't wait to see what he makes of them. Perhaps the Spurs could play Harper and Fox together, though neither is a good enough shooter to really be a weak-side killer, especially with reigning Rookie of the Year Stephon Castle around. Castle played both guard spots last year, though he is more like a wing than a guard, mostly because he can't shoot at all, but in any case he will have to play.
Maybe this is not actually a problem, since Fox is one of the best transition players in the league, and if you have the best defensive player in basketball (Wembanyama) generating a million fast-break opportunities, Fox and Castle's abilities become additive instead of duplicative. But the good teams will make the Spurs play in the halfcourt, and that's where I want to see how they respond. – Patrick Redford
Body Sculpting
The three most compelling off-season tales had to do with body sculpting, and in two cases the power of the formerly frowned-upon tactic of fat-shaming.
But it is safe to say that Luka Doncic has decided to pare a couple of stone from his jiggly frame as a direct challenge to his former general manager Nico Harrison, and Zion Williamson is fully remade after looking back at his career and seeing that he has missed 57 percent of it due to injuries apparently caused in significant part by his sheer girth. Doncic's motivation is that he has been gifted the central place in the next iteration of the Los Angeles Lakers, and Williamson's spark has been caused by his reputation as one of the best players in the history of the sport to eat his way out of the league. The Lakers are still going to go as far as LeBron James's sciatica will allow, and the Pelicans are ... well, they have to be better with an improved silhouette from their most important player, even if "better" falls short of "play-in-level better." They were 10-20 when Zion played, 11-41 without him, so on that basis alone a trimmer and fitter Williamson is to be greatly desired.
But the biggest change of all happened in San Antonio, where Victor Wembanyama may have added a couple of inches to his height (he is now 7-5, after being listed at 7-3 when he was drafted two years ago) and gained "like 30 pounds" by his estimation in an interview with omnipresent hyper-salesman Kevin Hart on his "Cold As Balls" podcast. And yes, we just said that so we could reference a podcast called "Cold As Balls."
Wembanyama's entire offseason, it seems, has been spent as the star in a series of highlight reels in which he uses his new and improved robo-body to expand his skill set both in open court and going to the basket, as part of a progression that could make him the greatest physical force this side of Shohei Ohtani. He may have taken it upon himself to engage in a bit of reverse fat-shaming after a year of trying to navigate the rough-and-tumble of post play with smaller but heavier giants, and the matter of missing half the season with shoulder thrombosis may not be addressed by his greater height and width.
However you choose to navigate this, the Western Conference may well be powered by three fellows who were significantly different fellows as recently as six months ago. Doncic and Wembanyama may even engage in championship aspirations, though neither makes his team a favorite even with their new bodywork, but Williamson's achievement may be the easiest to spot. All he has to do is play impactful minutes more than 70 times this year on a team that has been living in an impact-free world for most of its entire history. – Ray Ratto
The Thompson Twins
The two players I am most excited to watch this season are the Thompson twins. Amen (Houston) and Ausar (Detroit) are the perhaps two best athletes I've ever seen on a basketball court, twitchy yet huge, capable of moving in three dimensions more adeptly than most people can move in one. In their second season, each twin played a big role for an interesting team that lost in the first round of the playoffs. This year, both will play even more significant roles for teams trying to win bigger than they did last year.
Amen is the headliner, thanks to an untimely ACL tear for Fred VanVleet, who likely will miss the entire season. The Rockets had a curious offseason aside from trading for Kevin Durant: They signed Clint Capela for no discernible reason and left themselves alarmingly thin at guard even before VanVleet's injury. Thompson has never been an easy player to align within orthodox positionality: Is he a point guard because he moves and passes so well? Or is he a power forward because he guards up the lineup and can't shoot? Does he destroy the Rockets' spacing or enable it through sheer force of off-ball terror?
These are the sorts of questions you can only pose about someone who is as athletic and nasty as Thompson, and he's going to be on the ball a ton this year. I do not think he will ever be a good shooter, but the thing to watch is how willing he is to take open ones. The thing VanVleet gave this team, more than any traditional point guard stuff, was spacing. Thompson needs to find some room for an otherwise cludgy offense to breathe.
As for Ausar, he is generally regarded as the less accomplished brother, which is probably fair, though I think the difference between the twins has been exaggerated by Ausar's relatively poor health. He's dealt with blood clot issues and a couple of minor knee injuries, which have limited his playing time and forced him to jockey for minutes while actively recovering. He was good in the playoffs last season, and even though Jalen Brunson cooked him plenty when the Pistons faced the Knicks in the first round, he never backed down and he always made the veteran work for everything he got.
The Pistons will be without Jaden Ivey for a while, and after a strong campaign last year, they chose not to make any big additions to the team, opting instead to give their young guys space to grow. Ausar is a huge part of that. He's the only functional two-way wing player on the roster, even if he, like Amen, is totally incapable of shooting the basketball. You can see the potential for an all-action group, built around him and Ron Holland, making people's lives difficult. – Patrick Redford
Let It Be Wemby's Year
Every great player, at some point, gets to enjoy that magical season where the full extent of their abilities is revealed and they claim their share of power within the league for good. Victor Wembanyama is ready for that season.
He was on his way last year, before a diagnosis of deep vein thrombosis caused him to miss the last 36 games of the season. He averaged 24 points, 11 rebounds, and 3.8 blocks in 33 per minutes per game. And yet, despite what those gaudy numbers might tell you, Wembanyama's performances could still leave you with the impression that he was not fully comfortable as an NBA player. He drifted in and out of games, and seemed to use the three-point shot (8.8 attempts per game! Jesus!) as a reason to not think too hard about the rest of his offensive game. What I'm saying is that this guy put up prime Tim Duncan numbers without even really having a plan for what he wanted to do on a possession-by-possession basis.
Wemby seems to have more of a plan heading into this season. He made his inevitable pilgrimage to Camp Olajuwon over the summer, and has looked noticeably stronger during preseason games. He also seems to have learned some nasty footwork. Imagine what it might look like if Wembanyama, suddenly more sure of himself and comfortable throwing his weight around close to the basket, cuts a few of those pull-up threes from his shot diet and replaces them with attempts to go to work on his defender on the block. A lot of those possessions are going to end with guys getting put into the basket.
You need to be prepared to see some freaky shit. Again, Wemby averaged 24 and 11 and nearly four blocks per game while he was just kind of making things up as he goes along. There is a world in which you will wake up on some morning in early December and be forced to confront the fact that an NBA player scored 57 points, grabbed 16 rebounds, and blocked seven shots while you were sleeping. Then you will have to deal with the fact that he is averaging 30 points, 14 rebounds ,and four blocks per game. You need to be ready for this shit. – Tom Ley
