The divide between the NBA’s best and worst front offices is starting to widen. On one end of the spectrum, June served as a coronation for the best general manager in basketball as Sam Presti finally collected his long-awaited first championship. He’s set the Oklahoma City Thunder up to compete for many, many more, and it won’t hurt his cause that there now appear to be several easy marks for him to trade with around the league.
After all, we’re still only about six months removed from the Dallas Mavericks trading Luka Dončić. Since then, the Chicago Bulls have authored a spiritual successor to last year’s widely disliked Alex Caruso trade, the Phoenix Suns are preparing to pay Bradley Beal not to play for them, the Sacramento Kings have cleaned house less than two years after their best season in two decades, and the New Orleans Pelicans hired a lead executive who has gotten even less right within those two decades than the Kings have. These past few months have crystallized the shockingly vast gap between the well-run teams and their poorly run counterparts.
So, with most of the offseason dust now settled, now is the perfect time to evaluate these front offices holistically. Following February’s trade deadline, we ranked all 30 NBA front offices. Now, we will revisit those rankings and revise them based on everything that has happened since.
In February, we covered the criteria for these rankings in more depth. In short, we’re evaluating the following: track record, overall vision, creativity, current success, willingness to spend money, alignment between all stakeholders, drafting, trading, value in contracts, coach hiring, ambition, self-awareness, luck, and whether or not there is a clear hierarchy in decision-making. For this July addition, I’d like to emphasize one more important trait: malleability. There are a lot of front offices that have found success by following a single strategy. They look for similar types of players or make the same kinds of moves again and again. But the smartest teams are the ones that can pivot as needed and aren’t married to any single approach in an ever-changing league. That is a trait that we will prize in this space. These rankings are meant to answer a simple question: who would you most trust to run your favorite team?
Before we begin, something to keep in mind is that there are more smart teams than dumb ones. The reality here is that some teams that are broadly well run will be ranked lower than their fan base would probably prefer. That is just the reality of the landscape right now, and it manifests most in the middle. The teams that are ranked between No. 16 and No. 21 are, technically, below average. That does not mean they are poorly run. In most cases, those teams are just operating with significantly shorter track records than the ones above them. The bottom five teams are in a tier of their own. Everyone else is at least operating in a somewhat defensible manner.
And, finally, one last thing before we start ranking: as we are focusing primarily on what has changed between February and July, some of these blurbs will be substantially longer than the others. I’m sorry, Thunder fans. There are only so many ways to call Sam Presti a genius. Some teams will get less attention here than others. However, if you’d like to read more on your own team’s front office and it isn’t one of the teams covered in more depth here, the February edition of these rankings likely has you covered. So with all of that in mind, let the rankings begin.
1. Oklahoma City Thunder
February ranking: 1
Almost everything that can be said about Oklahoma City’s flawless rebuild has been said. I just want to focus on a specific element that tends to get overlooked. There has been so much focus on the brilliance of the plan that not enough has been said about its execution. They didn’t just stack endless draft picks. They did more with the selections they had than anyone else. Consider the Jalen Williams pick at No. 12. He just made an All-NBA Team in his third season. Do you know who the last non-top-10 pick was to make an All-NBA Team within his first three seasons? Kobe Bryant. Yes, circumstances handed them the MVP. Yes, they tanked for their defensive anchor. But they’ve done just as well in their quieter moves as they have with their loud ones. They are the gold standard, elite in just about every element of roster-building and amazingly set up to not only avoid the worst impacts of the second apron, but actually benefit from them. If there were any doubters remaining, the title should have converted them. Sam Presti is the best executive in the NBA and is headed to the Hall of Fame one day.
February ranking: 2
If there was even the slightest feasible criticism for Brad Stevens as a general manager, it was that he never really had to build from scratch. He started his tenure with Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown in place and just added on top of them. He did so perfectly, but from that perspective, Tatum’s injury is sort of a chance for him to prove that he can. He suddenly isn’t operating with every possible advantage. His best player’s long-term health is uncertain. His second-best player has a supermax contract. He’s spent some of his draft capital. He’s already begun the process of reshaping his roster by deftly avoiding the second apron without sacrificing real assets, but the true rebuild will take place over the next year or two. Based on the rumors surrounding Jaylen Brown and Derrick White this offseason, almost anything is on the table as Stevens attempts to put a younger and perhaps cheaper contender around Tatum when he eventually returns. He’ll attempt to do so without key deputy Austin Ainge, who is now running the Jazz, and with a transition in ownership, as Wyc Grousbeck slowly hands the keys to Bill Chisholm. This is the greatest challenge of Stevens’ front-office career, but if his sterling track record is any indication, he’s more than prepared to face it.
February ranking: 3
We have to address the elephant in the room here. No team in recent NBA history has benefitted more from lottery luck than the Spurs. They have now moved up in three consecutive lotteries. They jumped from No. 3 to No. 1 to get Victor Wembanyama, No. 5 to No. 4 to get Stephon Castle, and, most recently, No. 8 to No. 2 to get Dylan Harper. That’s nine total draft slots gained over the course of three years. In the entire history of the NBA Draft Lottery, only the 76ers, Hornets, and Lakers have gained nine or more net draft slots. If San Antonio builds a long-term winner as we expect, lottery luck will have been by far the single biggest factor. But the notion that the Spurs were or will be entirely built on lottery luck is a fallacy. The things they can control, they do so deftly.
- They had the self-awareness to recognize in 2022 that they were going nowhere and kickstarted this rebuild by trading Dejounte Murray at the absolute peak of his value.
- They’ve stacked draft assets around their own lottery picks as well as anyone in the NBA. The Jakob Poeltl trade in 2023 ultimately led to an unprotected Minnesota pick and a top-1 protected swap. Their willingness to take on the Harrison Barnes contract in 2024 got them an unprotected Kings swap that looks quite valuable. Moves like this partially funded their De’Aaron Fox acquisition without bankrupting them for future moves.
- They manage contracts as well as any team in the NBA. Both Devin Vassell and Keldon Johnson signed deals that do not increase in annual salary. Luke Kornet only got two guaranteed years on his deal. Their books are still relatively clean going into 2026, their last cheap Wembanyama season. A Fox extension would change that, but it’s worth noting that the Spurs haven’t rushed into a new deal with him yet. Their circumstances have changed since his acquisition, as they surprisingly landed Harper, and they’re seemingly using that to their advantage to potentially negotiate more favorable terms with Fox.
- They were patient enough not to force a Kevin Durant trade. They know they have the chips to get someone younger, and they’re comfortable slow-playing this build in ways lesser front offices might not.
- While not in the same roles, it’s worth noting that the three men who built their dynasty, Gregg Popovich, RC Buford, and Peter Holt, are all still here. The Spurs deservedly get legacy credit for basically everything they’ve done for the past 30 years.
So yes, the Spurs have absolutely gotten lucky in the lottery. But they’ve also maximized the opportunities they’ve been presented with. It’s possible to be both lucky and smart. The Spurs are.
February ranking: 9
Rafael Stone is the NBA’s best negotiator. He not only convinced Alperen Sengun to re-sign at a number below the max, but to take less than the maximum allowable 8% raises. Dorian Finney-Smith was the second-best 3-and-D wing on the free-agent market. How did Stone convince him to take only two guaranteed seasons? Steven Adams is on a descending-salary contract. Jabari Smith‘s extension includes an immediate descent, meaning his salary doesn’t actually increase until the fourth season of the deal. Clint Capela passed up chances to start so he could be Houston’s third center at only slightly above taxpayer mid-level money. All it took for him to convince Fred VanVleet to give up $20 million this season was a player option for next season. This is contract sorcery.
Stone isn’t just a brilliant accountant, though. He’s built an almost impossibly deep and versatile team. The Rockets barely even used No. 3 overall pick Reed Sheppard last year. They doubled down on their two-big lineups by adding Capela to Sengun and Adams, but with Smith and Durant, they can just as easily play five-out, no-big lineups if the matchup demands it. Speaking of Durant, they landed a top-20 player in NBA history that fills their biggest need by far without sacrificing much of anything for the long haul. Durant is a Jalen Green replacement. Finney-Smith fills in for Dillon Brooks. They lost the No. 10 pick but, as Sheppard showed, they didn’t have minutes for that pick anyway, and besides, they kept their more valuable draft assets (Phoenix’s pick in 2027, Phoenix and Dallas’ picks in 2029, swap rights with Brooklyn in 2027) out of the deal.
They don’t have their own Shai Gilgeous-Alexander yet. They may never develop a homegrown MVP candidate. But otherwise, they’ve mimicked the strategy executed by Oklahoma City better than any team in the NBA, and now figure to challenge the Thunder for years to come.
February ranking: 7
The player acquisition speaks for itself. They were bold enough to trade for Donovan Mitchell with no reassurance that he’d re-sign. They just bet that they’d be good enough to convince him to stay and they were right. They swooped in and stole Jarrett Allen during the James Harden trade. Evan Mobley and Darius Garland were home run draft picks. They’ve discovered their share of diamonds in the rough lately like Ty Jerome and Sam Merrill. That’s what gets Cleveland in the mix at the top of this list.
But don’t overlook Dan Gilbert’s historic willingness to spend, either. Very few small-market owners are willing to pay what he is to keep his teams together. Cleveland is currently $20 million above the second apron. They’re staring down a payroll that will approach $400 million for a team that just lost in the second round of the playoffs. Gilbert threw similar cash around during the second LeBron James era. In a few slots, we’ll talk about a small-market team that has been similarly successful in acquiring talent but has no such track record of spending to keep it. That’s a legitimate tiebreaker this high on the list.
February ranking: 8
It took courage to fire Tom Thibodeau. This front office deduced — likely correctly — that the Thibodeau version of this team had hit its ceiling. To most teams, Game 6 of the Eastern Conference finals is an acceptable outcome. The Knicks are ambitious enough to think bigger, and that’s commendable. They may very well be worse under Mike Brown, but that’s a risk they’ve deemed acceptable for the reward they’re chasing. There is low-hanging fruit here. Thibodeau’s refusal to experiment with lineups and trust his bench ultimately doomed last year’s Knicks, but the front office acted quickly and decisively enough to ensure that it wouldn’t ruin next year, too.
What’s more is that Thibodeau’s firing was the strongest indicator yet that the Knicks are willing to look outside of the family when necessary. No team operates more on relationships than the Knicks do. Think about their major acquisitions under this front office. Jalen Brunson is the son of Leon Rose’s first client as an agent. Mikal Bridges was Brunson’s college teammate. Karl-Anthony Towns was also a Rose client. OG Anunoby is represented by Rose’s son, Sam Rose. The Knicks have largely succeeded by adding players who are either represented by CAA or attended Villanova. That strategy has worked for them, but it probably isn’t sustainable, and given the price they paid for Bridges and the disappointing individual season he gave them, it was fair to start to question it a little bit. Thibodeau, also a CAA client, was hired on this principle, but he was fired on merit. The Knicks have to be willing to make hard choices if they’re going to take that last, critical leap, and they’ve shown thus far that they are willing to.
Still, the Bridges trade is going to be relitigated for years. Every time a better player is moved for a lesser or equal price, there will be questions about whether the Knicks were wrong to trade for Bridges. That criticism will be at its loudest whenever Giannis Antetokounmpo‘s future is settled and, on some level, it’s warranted. For now, look at the Bridges trade as the Eastern Conference equivalent of Minnesota’s Rudy Gobert gambit. Was it an overpay? Probably. Should they have held those assets for someone else? Potentially. But the Timberwolves have made back-to-back Western Conference finals. It would be hard to call that trade a loss. The Bridges trade got the Knicks within six wins of the title. If they hover around that area for the next few years, even without winning a title, the deal’s legacy is more complicated than the outright loss many will peg it as. It can be the wrong move without being a bad one. And if they do reach the Finals? At that point, their level of team success will have been great enough to justify the trade regardless of the price they paid to make it.
February ranking: 17
I was ready to do a full mea culpa on my February ranking of the Pacers when they were storming their way through the playoffs. That No. 17 ranking was based on the idea that, to me, they seemed satisfied as a 50-win team and weren’t going to be ambitious enough to take the next step towards true championship contention. Turns out, they were already there. Kevin Pritchard and Chad Buchanan are arguably the best talent evaluators in basketball right now. They drafted Andrew Nembhard in the second round. They pulled Aaron Nesmith and Obi Toppin off the benches of their rivals and turned them into core players. They’ve wisely handed out long-term deals as early as possible to basically everyone to avoid the sort of financial difficulties most deep contenders face. They even had the foresight to regain control of their 2026 first-round pick mere days before Tyrese Haliburton tore his Achilles, sacrificing only the No. 23 overall pick to do so. On the morning of Game 7 of the NBA Finals, the Pacers ranked third on my preliminary rankings.
And then they let Myles Turner walk for nothing. They didn’t sign-and-trade him for an asset return. They didn’t make a calculated decision to get younger with Haliburton out for the year. That might have even been justifiable. With that 2026 pick back, you could argue that the right play for Indiana would have been to move players in their 30s before any possible decline (Pascal Siakam, T.J. McConnell), plan to tank for a year, and then jump right back into the fray with a healthy Haliburton still in his mid-20s after that. But that’s not what they did. There wasn’t a basketball justification for what happened. They just lost a very good player for nothing.
The Pacers claim they were prepared to pay him what it took to keep him, but implied that he took Milwaukee’s offer without giving them the chance to counter. To be frank, you lose the benefit of the doubt on claims like that when you haven’t paid the luxury tax in 20 years. Maybe they would have done so with a healthy Haliburton, but for what it’s worth, they never paid the tax with Paul George, who took them to the Eastern Conference finals twice. It certainly seems as though they just got skittish and didn’t want to go into the tax without a healthy Haliburton. The Pacers have been one of the cheapest teams in the NBA for decades now. So long as Herb Simon controls this team, it would be very difficult to justify ranking them higher than this. Winning at the highest levels in the modern NBA often requires exorbitant spending.
It’s a shame, too, because this front office, like the Larry Bird- and Donnie Walsh-led versions before it, consistently exceeds expectations despite the restraints ownership has imposed upon it. They made lemonade with a very wise (and, not coincidentally, cheap) acquisition of Jay Huff, who will likely be central to their “replacement by committee” plan alongside Isaiah Jackson, Tony Bradley and Siakam-Toppin lineups. They’ll continue to tweak in Haliburton’s absence and will likely contend again in the somewhat near future. The basketball people here know what they’re doing. They just have fewer resources at their disposal than the teams ranked ahead of them on this list. If Simon spent like Dan Gilbert, the Pacers would have a top-five front office.
February ranking: 5
Will Hardy has won less than 35% of his games as an NBA head coach, yet the Jazz just extended him all the way through 2031. Know why that is? Because if Hardy became available, he’d have another job in 30 seconds. He’s not losing because he’s a bad coach. He’s losing because the Jazz have made a concerted effort to lose, and will continue to do so for as long as it takes to eventually build not just a good team but a great one. That’s the primary reason the Jazz rank so high here. Nobody here is panicking. Nobody is suggesting that after three down years, it’s somehow time to change course. This team has a plan and it’s sticking to it. Given Danny Ainge’s track record, it’s one we should trust him to see through.
His son Austin’s arrival has, in some ways, even emboldened the Jazz further in this respect. One of Danny’s flaws as an executive is how frequently he lets great become the enemy of good. He doesn’t make trades he doesn’t win convincingly. This manifested most glaringly with Lauri Markkanen. He could have traded him for a haul last offseason, when his cap figure was relatively low and anyone could have afforded him. He kept him, and now he’s on a max deal that has generated far less league-wide interest. He held onto veterans like John Collins, Jordan Clarkson and Collin Sexton for too long and their trade value dissipated entirely. So Austin dumped them because he recognized that getting fair value back wasn’t the point. They just needed to go so Utah could create more minutes for its deep group of young players. He understood that, sometimes, it’s better to make a good, simple move than it is to hold out for the great one.
If there’s something to criticize here, it’s the drafting. It’s been three years and they haven’t drafted anyone yet who’s proven he can be a long-term cornerstone. Cody Williams looks like a miss at No. 10. Taylor Hendricks is dealing with a devastating injury, but he hadn’t blown anyone away before going down. Players like Isaiah Collier, Keyonte George and Kyle Filipowski have all shown promise, but after three losing seasons, you’d hope for at least one or two that look like long-term starters. This is something to watch over the coming years, especially since the Jazz reportedly fired two of their lead scouts this offseason. It doesn’t matter how many picks you accumulate if you aren’t using them properly.
February ranking: 10
We don’t think of Daryl Morey as a great drafter because of how veteran-heavy his Houston rosters typically were, but just look at the picks he’s made in Philadelphia: Tyrese Maxey at No. 21. Jared McCain at No. 16. Isaiah Joe, Paul Reed and Adem Bona in the second round. Justin Edwards as an undrafted free agent. How many teams have done better than that outside of the lottery in the last five years? Morey, who had never gone below .500 as a GM before last season, just made his highest pick ever at No. 3 in June, and VJ Edgecombe looks like a winner so far.
That success in the draft is largely what is keeping Philadelphia afloat right now. Morey’s defining trait as a general manager is his star-hunting. He might be the NBA’s most aggressive executive when it comes to adding and retaining big names but, at least lately, that’s come back to haunt him. Morey gave Paul George a max four-year deal in free agency last offseason and then followed it up with a max extension for Joel Embiid. Right now, those look like two of the worst contracts in the NBA. They were entirely defensible at the time, but think about the idea of malleability we covered above. Morey can get superstar tunnel vision. He did what it took to get three stars onto his roster and is feeling the long-term consequences now.
Building this way can cause other problems on the roster. Philadelphia’s fixation on creating max cap space in 2024 is part of what led to the breakdown in its relationship with James Harden in 2023, as the 76ers just didn’t make him a competitive contract offer. Was this the right call? Probably. They got good value for Harden back in a trade, and that team had likely peaked. But communication and chemistry haven’t always come easily on Morey teams. Danny Ainge teams have encountered similar issues, where players sometimes feel as though they are treated too much like assets. Ainge gets a slight edge on the basis of having built a champion.
Still, the most important job a front office has is gathering talent, and Morey does so as well as almost any general manager in basketball. We haven’t even covered the midseason Quentin Grimes heist. Morey may have created long-term problems with the George and Embiid contracts, but the surplus value he’s generated through that smart drafting and the cheap rookie deals that come with it is also gives Philadelphia a real path to solving them.
February ranking: 6
How far can an impeccable draft record take a front office? Memphis is beyond reproach on that front. Of the 14 players on last year’s roster to play more than 400 minutes, 13 were either drafted by Memphis, signed as an undrafted free agent by Memphis or developed on two-way deals by Memphis. Desmond Bane and Santi Aldama both went No. 30 overall. Jaylen Wells almost won Rookie of the Year as the No. 39 pick. The Grizzlies identify and nurture young talent as well as anyone in the NBA.
Where they’ve tended to struggle has been with veterans. The Justise Winslow and Marcus Smart trades were big swings that resoundingly missed. Zach Kleiman’s best veteran addition was Steven Adams, and he was ironically acquired more as the cost of doing business in a trade-up with New Orleans in 2021 than as an intentional target. Otherwise, their most successful external addition under Kleiman was… probably Kyle Anderson at the mid-level? Some of this is circumstantial. Not many players are excited to move to Memphis. But the Grizzlies have stumbled a bit as they’ve attempted to take the all-important step from plucky young regular-season team to high-level playoff winner.
The drama at the end of last season was disappointing and somewhat self-inflicted. Last offseason, the front office reportedly made the unilateral decision to fire five members of Taylor Jenkins’ coaching staff. Two of the new hires they made for that staff, Tuomas Iisalo and Noah LaRoche, led the charge in redesigning the Memphis offense. It largely worked. Some players, reportedly including Ja Morant, hated it. When that became a point of contention, it was ultimately Jenkins and LaRoche who were fired and Iisalo who was elevated to interim head coach before eventually getting the full-time job. If the front office was unhappy with the style Jenkins played, why not fire him before last season? The unhappy marriage between him, his new assistants and his players seemingly satisfied nobody and ultimately led to a mid-season collapse. At the very least, the alignment and communication between coach and front office appeared frayed. Hopefully that resettles with Iisalo at the helm.
The Bane trade is going to create a fascinating case study here. In terms of value acquired, the deal was an undeniable win. Four first-round picks and a swap for a non-All-Star on a max contract? Of course, you do that if you don’t view yourself as a championship contender. The Grizzlies — correctly — had the self awareness to know that they were not one. But now they’re in the middle. Not good enough to contend, not bad enough to tank. They’ve restocked their asset cupboard. They’ve balanced their books as well. In terms of salary, at least, they are moving forward with two stars rather than three. In other words, they’ve reset, but not in the traditional sense. They can move in any direction, try to get better or try to get worse, stack assets or spend assets. Which direction they decide to take and how successfully they follow that path in the next year or two will tell us a lot about this front office. Are they just great drafters, or are they capable of planning and executing a complete, team-building strategy?
February ranking: 18
Minnesota’s relatively low February ranking was based in large part on questions surrounding its ownership dispute. Well, now that dispute has been settled. Marc Lore and Alex Rodriguez own the team, and despite reports suggesting that they might take drastic steps to save money, they actually spent as much as could reasonably have been asked. Tim Connelly didn’t use the opt-out in his contract to leave. There is stability here now.
Does that mean there aren’t questions? No. It will take years to fully understand the ramifications of the Karl-Anthony Towns trade and Rudy Gobert’s decline, especially on offense, seemingly began last season. Connelly built a two-time Western Conference finalist in Minnesota but, in a way, that was the easy part. Now he’s out of picks. He has a payroll that has crept up to the second apron. He has far less maneuverability than he did when he took this job and, if the Oklahoma City series is any indication, he has a long way to go before he can truly consider this team championship-caliber. But considering this is someone who both built Denver’s championship core and took Minnesota further than anyone else ever had, he’s earned the benefit of the doubt here. He’s already proven very creative in pursuing blockbusters, and if Kevin Durant had wanted to play in Minnesota, that is likely where he’d be right now. If there is a way to get this Minnesota team over the hump with the limited flexibility it still has, Connelly can be trusted to find it.
February ranking: 11
Don’t read into the Clippers dropping here from their February slot. That was out of their hands, as the renewed clarity in Minnesota and Indiana’s ascent demanded significant jumps. Tim Connelly has built a champion. The Pacers came one game away from doing so. The Clippers, therefore, had to come in slightly below them, but they’ve continued to execute their post-Paul George strategy as well as anyone could have reasonably hoped. They can get to max cap space as soon as next offseason, but they’ve built a roster that, if healthy, is reasonably equipped to win right now. They just pushed the Nuggets to seven games in the first round and have improved more than Denver has this offseason without committing to any long-term deals or giving up any first-round picks. This is one of the deepest teams in the NBA, yet simultaneously one of the most flexible, given all the short-term contracts they’ve stacked. The moment they let George go, their plan became to win as much as possible while remaining nimble. That’s a very tough needle to thread, but they’re doing it right now.
The flaw here is drafting and developing. The Clippers had 1,706 minutes of available playing time in the postseason and players they drafted got 41 of them, all in garbage time. They didn’t draft anyone in their projected rotation for next season, and many of the players they’ve signed or traded for were available to them in part because of their market advantage in Los Angeles. They developed Ivica Zubac from a relatively young age, but he technically started his career with the Lakers. The best truly homegrown Clipper since this front office took over in 2016 is… Terance Mann? Undrafted Amir Coffey? Still, it’s worth noting that the Clippers have obviously been working with pretty limited draft resources for most of that time, and the highest draft pick they have made it in that window worked out pretty well: Shai Gilgeous-Alexander. He just happened to work out for a different team.
February ranking: 4
Miami’s top-four ranking in February was based on track record. With the benefit of hindsight, that was probably too high. While Miami has been among the NBA’s smartest teams for three decades now, the last few years have raised serious questions. Pat Riley very publicly mishandled the Jimmy Butler situation, challenging him through the media rather than either extending or trading him. Sure enough, that led to a mess of a season and an underwhelming trade return that likely could have been avoided if he’d just acted more decisively last summer. The recent draft picks have been a somewhat mixed bag, though Kel’El Ware looks like a keeper. The Terry Rozier trade has been an outright disaster, and it fundamentally misunderstood where the Heat were as a team. They’ve been a play-in team three years in a row now. They were not a below-average starting point guard away from winning anything, but that lost first-round pick has made it harder for them to chart a real course in the aftermath.
That’s what’s most concerning here. The overall vision here feels outdated. The Heat appear far too comfortable being mediocre. They would likely prefer the term “patient.” In the late 2000s, they were comfortable punting away two seasons to create the cap space to sign LeBron James. Between the 2016-17 and 2018-19 seasons, they went two games above .500, seemingly in a holding pattern until the next star forced his way to Miami. Butler fell into their lap. Now, they seem to be acting somewhat similarly. This is a roughly .500 team. It has limited long-term upside. They’re just waiting for another star to choose them.
But the NBA doesn’t really work that way anymore. Stars don’t move through free agency like they used to, but the Heat haven’t traded for a star who was under contract since 2004, when they landed Shaquille O’Neal. The market has never mattered less than it does right now. De’Aaron Fox, Bam Adebayo‘s college teammate, just forced his way to San Antonio because he knew Victor Wembanyama was his best chance at competing for championships. Nowadays, you either have to draft your stars or you have to stack enough assets to trade for them. The Heat not helping themselves do the former by hanging around .500 instead of accepting defeat in this era and tanking. They’re not helping themselves do the latter by wasting assets on players like Rozier.
Right now, they’re just sort of stuck. There doesn’t appear to be much of a long-term plan beyond waiting for someone to pick them. We just covered the Clippers, who are acting somewhat similarly, but they’re doing a far better job of it. They have less draft control than Miami does, but they’ve built a far better team with even more cap flexibility. The next star to change teams through free agency is likelier to pick the Clippers than the Heat, but if that never happens, the Clippers have done a far better job of building a competitive team than the Heat have anyway. The days of Pat Riley dropping his rings on the table and landing whoever he wants appear to be over. The league is changing. It’s not clear that the Heat are changing with it.
February ranking: 14
It still feels fairly early to judge the post-Bob Myers Warriors. The people running the show here, Mike Dunleavy Jr. and the Lacobs, were around during the dynasty. But many of its key figures, like Myers, Jerry West and Travis Schlenk, are not. The Warriors are known as a fairly collaborative front office, and the moves made since Myers left have been so subtle that it’s hard to really gauge how much the brain drain here has affected them. The Jimmy Butler trade was a win. It was also possible largely because of how difficult he made life for the Heat and because they failed to seal the deal on blockbusters for Paul George and Lauri Markkanen, which would look iffy right about now. As of this writing, they haven’t even added a single veteran in the 2025 offseason, though Al Horford is widely expected to join eventually. So for the time being, we’ll say TBD. They still have Lacob’s money, and the team is still reasonably competitive, but the sample here is so small for a front office that inherited a dynastic albeit aging roster that somewhere in the middle feels appropriate until they try to do something more drastic.
February ranking: 16
The Magic finally got their guard! As guards go, Desmond Bane aligns with this front office’s vision of a long, defense-first roster as well as anyone they reasonably could have acquired. He is by no means a stopper, but he can hold up defensively in ways that few of the plausible offensive game-changers they could have pursued would. He is not, say, Trae Young. This can still be a defense-first roster with him, and he won’t monopolize an offense that can still run through Paolo Banchero and Franz Wagner. Pulling off a blockbuster without compromising your overall vision is difficult, but the Magic have seemingly done it.
Their ranking here is not dissimilar to Indiana’s in February. They have a consistent vision and they’ve built a very good team. Now, it’s time to see if that team can be great and if ownership will pay what it takes to keep it together. The Magic are in line to be a second apron team for the 2026-27 season as of this writing. They’ll be far above that line if Paolo Banchero makes an All-NBA Team and therefore earns Rose Rule eligibility. Orlando could very easily rise up these rankings in future installments if this core proves capable of going deep into the playoffs and ownership proves it is committed to keeping the team together, but for now, this range is about right.
February ranking: 26
No team has improved its fortunes more since the beginning of the 2024 offseason than the Hawks. It started, admittedly, with the Landry Fields front office. The second Dejounte Murray trade kickstarted this turnaround, and Fields was in the GM seat when it happened. Of course, as we covered in February, there was a lot of uncertainty about who was making decisions during his reign. Perhaps that’s still true. But the new front office triumvirate of Onsi Saleh, Bryson Graham and Peter Dinwiddie just had a nearly perfect first transaction cycle at the helm.
The Fields front office was devoted to putting big, athletic wings around Trae Young to improve the defense. They did so, but that created spacing issues. No problem. They bought low on Kristaps Porziņģis and signed Luke Kennard to a one-year deal to juice the shooting. Too many big wings, not enough point-of-attack defenders? Again, the problem was quickly solved with Nickeil Alexander-Walker. The Hawks gave out no unwieldy long-term deals. They only gave up one late first-round pick. And they completely remade their team. At the very least, they’ve set themselves up to be a top-six playoff team this year.
Of course, these rankings don’t give too much weight to just making the playoffs. We’re looking for paths to championship contention. And that’s where Atlanta’s draft night trade with New Orleans came in. By moving down from No. 13 to No. 23, Atlanta picked up one of the most valuable future first-round picks that has ever been traded: an unprotected 2026 pick from the Pelicans, who just had the fourth-worst record in the NBA and play in the brutal Western Conference, that comes attached to unprotected swap rights with the Bucks, who are one Giannis Antetokounmpo trade request or injury away from calamity. This pick has a chance to be the catalyst for an eventual championship push in Atlanta. Very rarely does a team this good and this young have a chance to pick at the top of the lottery. If the ping pong balls bounce their way, they could get the true superstar they need to eventually enter the title mix.
The last major question here will be the resolution of Young’s contract status. It’s a tricky subject. He’s been the franchise player for more than a decade. He recruited Alexander-Walker and Kennard in free agency. But in this cap environment, in which every dollar counts and at a time in league history in which small, defensively deficient guards have never been more vulnerable, Young simply is not a max-level player. If the Hawks can come to some sort of satisfactory resolution here, either by extending Young at a fairer number or by trading him for an acceptable return package, that will put the bow on top of a flawless first offseason. But regardless of the Young situation, Atlanta’s front office has improved the team substantially in the short term and acquired the asset that may well define its longer term. Incredible work by a front office that could easily rise quite a bit in future installments of these rankings.
February ranking: 12
Brooklyn is getting too much flak for this offseason. Yes, the Nets became the first team ever to make five first-round picks in a single draft, but they’re tanking. Isn’t that exactly the sort of team that should be devoting one-third of their roster to rookies? The Nuggets were widely praised for the Cam Johnson trade, but it’s just as much of a win for the Nets. Denver’s 2032 first-round pick is one of the most valuable outstanding selections in all of basketball, and as bad as Michael Porter Jr.‘s contract was in Denver’s specific context, it’s actually a pretty useful trade chip for the Nets, specifically. Only $12 million of it is guaranteed for the 2026-27 season. They’re going to be able to flip it to another financially desperate team for another big contract and draft picks down the line. If New York doesn’t institute a vaccine mandate, Sean Marks may have a championship ring by now. He deserves a fair bit of credit for assembling Kevin Durant, James Harden, and Kyrie Irving, even if it wasn’t as successful as we assumed it would be. A lot of that was the result of completely uncontrollable and irreparable circumstances.
And yet we dropped the Nets five slots. Why? A few reasons. The first relates to their draft. Making five first-round picks, in their shoes, was fine. But the players they picked were strange. Egor Demin, at least based on consensus, was overdrafted meaningfully at No. 8. They then proceeded to overindex on Demin’s skillset, devoting the bulk of their draft capital to on-ball creation. Those players, at least in theory, won’t complement one another well. Individually, you could justify each pick. Taken as a whole, it is a strange class.
Second, we have to address the Houston trade from last offseason. I was very, very wrong about that deal. At least for now, Houston won it convincingly. The Nets only gained two draft slots in 2025 by regaining control of their own pick, and since Demin was seemingly overdrafted, they likely could have just gotten him with Phoenix’s No. 10 pick if they hadn’t made the deal. Now everything rests on their 2026 pick. If that pick jumps into the top three and nets them a franchise player, it was worth it. If not? They gave away several Phoenix picks, among the most valuable in the entire NBA, for a minuscule return that they themselves failed to maximize. They didn’t tank hard enough in 2024. Frankly, they haven’t tanked hard enough in 2025, either. Given the gargantuan price they paid to regain control of their own pick, they haven’t done enough to maximize it yet. Nic Claxton should not be on this team. If they can flip Porter Jr. now as well, they probably should. Poorly executed tanks are one thing when they come about organically. When you pay a premium to regain control of your own pick, it’s up to you to justify that price by losing properly. The Nets didn’t do that last year, and they’re losing ground in these rankings as a result.
February ranking: 22
The closest analogue for Washington right now is Houston a few years ago, albeit without the massive head start that the James Harden trade gave the Rockets at that time. The Wizards haven’t drafted an obvious superstar yet, though that has mostly been the result of poor lottery luck (they famously came one ping pong ball away from Wembanyama). But they are doing everything right in the interim, setting themselves up for long-term winning the moment they land the centerpiece they need.
They’ve obviously tanked effectively, and with a top-eight protected pick owed to New York, they will surely be among the league’s worst teams again this season. What they lack in star-quality young players, they make up for in upside quantity. They’ve developed an interesting niche as the team that plucks young players off of teams that are trying to win immediately and don’t have minutes for them. AJ Johnson was a big win on that front at the deadline. Cam Whitmore may be as well. Malaki Branham doesn’t come with quite as much upside, but hey, why not give him a try?
They’ve set themselves up for multiple years of significant cap space, but while they wait for it, they get to benefit from the presence of good veterans on expiring deals. Khris Middleton and CJ McCollum are the kinds of players you want around your youngsters. While they haven’t accumulated quite the volume of external picks that Houston did during its rebuild, it’s worth noting that the Wizards have even-year swap rights with the Suns through 2030, so there is plenty of upside baked into the assets they do have. It’s still early, but the Michael Winger-Will Dawkins duo in Washington is off to a great start.
February ranking: 20
Thus far, the Trajan Langdon-led front office in Detroit really hasn’t made any significant changes. He hasn’t traded a first-round pick. Aside from Cade Cunningham‘s obvious max rookie extension, he hasn’t even handed out a contract that has included even $30 million in guaranteed money. Langdon hasn’t really put his stamp on the Pistons yet. His long-term vision for their playing style and roster remains to be seen.
Yet you can’t argue with the results. He took over a 14-win team and made it a 44-win team. The tweaks he made were subtle but effective. Dennis Schröder, Tobias Harris and Malik Beasley all fit wonderfully last season. Schröder left and Beasley’s gambling investigation may keep him out next season and beyond, but the success of those imports bodes well for Caris LeVert and Duncan Robinson this season. So, for now, we can’t rank Detroit all that high because the current front office hasn’t really built anything yet, but the moves it has made have been promising enough to suggest this team is moving in the right direction long-term.
February ranking: 21
The Hornets are on a similar trajectory to Washington. They’ve slow-played their rebuild but are largely managing it well thus far. They’ve quietly accumulated a fair amount of future draft capital with trades of P.J. Washington, Terry Rozier and Mark Williams (it’s not their fault they lost out on a Lakers haul because of a failed physical). Their young players generally make sense together, though they need an entire center rotation and quite a bit more defensively. The jury is still out on Charles Lee, but he was about as highly regarded as first-time head coaches get.
So why is Charlotte behind Washington? The Wizards have just done slightly better on a few fronts. Charlotte’s books clean up after the 2026-27 season. Washington’s do so a year earlier. Charlotte seemingly has the worst draft pick among the two teams, with Tidjane Salaun looking lost for most of his rookie season, though there’s obviously still time for him to figure it out. The Hornets also started with a greater talent base than Washington, as LaMelo Ball and Brandon Miller are both plausible long-term star candidates. We’re splitting hairs, though. The Wizards and Hornets are both moving in the right direction, but taking their time in doing so.
February ranking: 24
We’re still in the early stages here, but Denver’s new front office, like Atlanta’s, did quite well in its first offseason. The Johnson trade made as much sense for them as it did for Brooklyn, not only getting them a superior player, but helping them duck the tax ahead of a gargantuan 2026-27 payroll that’s looming. Bruce Brown and Tim Hardaway Jr. for the minimum are steals. Assuming Jonas Valančiūnas plays for them, he’s potentially the best backup center of the Nikola Jokić era. This is probably the best on-paper roster the Nuggets have ever had, and all of the in-fighting from the Calvin Booth-Michael Malone era is hopefully a thing of the past. All signs are pointing up in Denver.
You just can’t get too much credit for a single offseason when you’re starting from the sort of place Denver is, and even if there were basketball reasons to save the money they did in the Porter trade, we can’t deny the relatively frugal manner in which the Kroenkes have run the Nuggets for years, either. They still practice in their arena, though they’ve said they are in the design phase of a new facility. They were one of the last NBA teams to get a G-League affiliate. They’ve paid the tax of late, but they’ve never been known for the sort of spending it seemingly takes to sustain winning in this era. Only time will tell what sort of repeater taxes they’ll be willing to pay over the next several years.
February ranking: 19
Let’s get this out of the way: there is real reason for optimism here. Mark Walter just bought majority control of the Lakers. Mark Walter also owns the Dodgers, who might be the smartest team in baseball and are very eager to spend. In the years to come, the hope here is that he modernizes this organization by revamping the behind-the-scenes staff and streamlining the decision-making process.
That has been a major problem for the Lakers essentially since Jeanie Buss wrestled control of basketball operations away from her brother Jim. While the Lakers will spend heavily on big-name players, they’ve never been known for extensive investments in things like scouting or analytics. Yet, when major decisions need to be made, there have seemingly been too many cooks in the kitchen. Buss herself. Rob Pelinka. Kurt and Linda Rambis. Head of business operations Tim Harris. The various player agencies they’ve aligned themselves with, first Rich Paul and Klutch Sports, and now, seemingly, Bill Duffy and WME sports. Even Magic Johnson and Phil Jackson have reportedly had Buss’ ear. The lack of a clear hierarchy here has been a problem for some time. It’s never quite clear who is making decisions and why, and when something goes wrong, it’s always someone else’s fault. It’s pretty rare for a front office to reach its fourth head coach without substantial changes in management structure. That’s where the Lakers are. They lead the league in palace intrigue.
Broadly, the Lakers have always been a star-driven enterprise. Most of the good things that have happened for the Lakers under this regime have happened because they’re, well, the Lakers. Players want to live in Los Angeles, and the presence of those great players attracts more great players. This is how they got LeBron James. He recruited Anthony Davis. Having Davis is what got them Luka Dončić. Pelinka nailed the Dončić negotiations, but the trade itself sort of fell in his lap. The Lakers were aging and seemingly directionless before Nico Harrison knocked on their door and offered salvation. Pelinka didn’t stack assets and win a bidding war. He happened to have the one specific player Harrison wanted largely because of inherent advantages specific to the Lakers. Most front offices would look better if they had those advantages. Where they’ve struggled has been in the more mundane elements of team-building that apply to all 30 teams.
The one thing the Lakers consistently do quite well is identify and develop young talent. The trouble is that they so often give up on that young talent too quickly. The decision to sign Talen Horton-Tucker and Kendrick Nunn instead of Alex Caruso, in the context of the roster they were building at the time, is one of the most inexplicable choices a team has made over the past several years. Scotty Pippen Jr. and Jay Huff both blossomed after leaving the Lakers into exactly the sort of supporting pieces the current roster could really use. The scouting and G-League operation, led by Joey and Jesse Buss, has been this front office’s most consistent asset. The higher-ups making bigger-picture decisions, though, have too often given up on their discoveries early.
Their big recent win is Austin Reaves. Unlike those other young success stories, they’ve actually kept him. In the context of their overall roster-building strategy though, it’s not hard to see why. He puts up numbers. The Lakers under Pelinka have largely undervalued quieter role players while overvaluing players who score a lot of points. That’s how you wind up with Nunn over Caruso. It’s how you lose Dorian Finney-Smith for nothing when he signed for only two guaranteed years in Houston. It’s how you break up a championship team for Dennis Schröder, Montrezl Harrell, Andre Drummond, and eventually Russell Westbrook.
Not all of these moves have been inherently bad. All things considered, Rui Hachimura has been an organizational win. Deandre Ayton for $8 million or so is good value. And yet, the Lakers currently have a team with very little defense. At present, they’re putting a lot of faith in a 31-year-old Marcus Smart who has played 54 games in the last two seasons, to defend opposing stars. Again, this tracks. Smart falls into the big-name bucket as former Defensive Player of the Year, and they’ve had success with reclamation projects like this in the past. The 2020 championship team was frankly full of them.
But there’s nothing sustainable about moves like that. It’s why the roster tends to be remade so drastically every year or two. They target high-risk, high-reward players hoping to milk surplus value out of them, but that surplus value is usually condensed into a short window. The Lakers almost always structure these contracts as either straight one-year deals or more often, as one-year deals with player options attached, so if the player performs, he can just leave for more money elsewhere. If he doesn’t, as was the case with so many of their 2023 signings, they just opt in and clog the team’s books, forcing them to get creative in finding replacements with limited resources.
The Lakers have a star-obsession, yes, but it extends outward as a talent obsession. They love bringing in former high draft picks who have flamed out elsewhere like Cam Reddish, Jaxson Hayes, or Mo Bamba, but unlike Indiana, who specifically targets such players who have been denied playing time early in their careers, they take players who have had chances and largely failed to maximize them. They’ve similarly been late-career stops for veterans who are past their prime. This applies to most of the 2021-22 roster. Spencer Dinwiddie is another recent example. Talent acquisition is obviously important, but it can’t come at the expense of cohesion. This organization just doesn’t seem to think that holistically. It’s always about the next big name.
That’s seemingly what’s happening now. The plan by all accounts is to preserve both cap space and draft assets so that they can either try to sign Giannis Antetokounmpo or Nikola Jokić when they are currently slated to become free agents in 2027 or make themselves appealing enough for a player like that to force his way to Los Angeles earlier through a trade. Laker history suggests that plan will work. Someone always wants to play for them. But they just had James and Davis together for five full seasons, and while they did win the 2020 title, that ironically only happened when they missed on signing a third star, Kawhi Leonard, and were forced to surround them with the role players who were still available in free agency. After that, the Lakers got more things wrong around James and Davis than they got right. It’s not hard to convince great players to play for the Lakers. The real work comes in surrounding those great players with the appropriate supporting pieces. This current front office hasn’t always done a great job of that. But if Walter does for the Lakers what he did for the Dodgers, they’ll soon have a front office that will.
February ranking: 25
If there was any lingering doubt, the last few months have proven pretty emphatically that Portland made the right decision in trading Damian Lillard to Milwaukee instead of Miami. The Bucks are now floundering, and those Milwaukee picks from 2028 through 2030 are now some of the most valuable trade chips in basketball. Toumani Camara might be as valuable a trade asset in his own right as anyone the Heat offered. Oh… and Lillard is back on the team two years later. The Deni Avdija trade looks like a pretty clear win-win at this point as well. He’s on one of the best contracts in basketball.
But would it kill them to stop paying older players? The Jrue Holiday trade was baffling. He’s already in decline and the Blazers are now set to pay him over $37 million in his age-37 season. They drastically overpaid Jerami Grant two summers ago and then compounded that mistake by refusing to trade him while he still had some value. Now they’re stuck with three expensive years for him as well. Getting Lillard back was probably a reasonable value in a vacuum, but it guaranteed yet more money to an aging, declining player for the 2027-28 season. They had paths to significant cap space as soon as 2026 that they willingly punted for reasons that remain unclear.
For now, there is no cornerstone player here. The hope is that Scoot Henderson or Shaedon Sharpe (or perhaps summer-league standout Yang Hansen) can become that player. But given the win-now moves they made for older players, we’re veering pretty dangerously into mediocrity treadmill territory, especially in a loaded West. Short-term cap flexibility could have given them room to opportunistically take swings for higher-upside additions, but they went in another direction. It’s not necessarily a crazy one. Holiday and Lillard are great culture setters. Having them in the building might be the best chance they have at maximizing the youth that’s already in place. But that’s a pretty big risk to take on youngsters who haven’t shown all that much yet. The Blazers haven’t earned the benefit of the doubt. But if Henderson or Sharpe pops? Suddenly, the plan starts to make a lot more sense.
February ranking: 23
The Bucks certainly get points for creativity. Time and time again, they manage to pull a rabbit out of the hat to briefly satisfy Giannis Antetokounmpo. Nobody saw the Damian Lillard trade coming, but Jon Horst pulled it off. Even fewer suspected the Bucks could snag Myles Turner, but they did that, too. Of course, they did so at a heavy price. They’ll now pay more than $22 million to Lillard for the next five seasons as the price for waiving and stretching him.
It’s an appropriate outcome given the way they’ve operated over the last several years. They just keep kicking the can down the road, throwing more future draft picks and cap flexibility after increasingly diminishing short-term returns. The Lillard trade was a justifiable risk, but even then, they should have known how shorthanded it would leave their team and had some sort of plan for replacing the lost depth and defense. They didn’t, and back-to-back underwhelming coaching hires have contributed to those problems. The Turner move, alone, does little to lift the Bucks into legitimate contention. He’s essentially a Brook Lopez replacement. A younger and more versatile version of him, for sure, but little has been done to replace the offense lost with Lillard or the point-of-attack defense Jrue Holiday previously provided.
That’s what has the Bucks so low in these rankings. They don’t control their own first-round pick until 2030. They’re stuck with this dead Lillard money. And for what? A team that might be a top-six seed in the East, but is more likely headed for the Play-In Tournament? They’re all-in on a team that’s far worse than teams that have invested far less. If you’re going to overextend like this, you’d better hope it creates a competitive enough team to justify those long-term losses. That just isn’t the case here.
Nobody in Milwaukee wants to trade Giannis. As they learned with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, it might be 50 years before they get another player like that. But right now, it just seems like the only out Milwaukee has, and the longer they wait to acknowledge that, the less they’ll be able to command in return for an eventual trade. A reckoning of some sort is coming here. Antetokounmpo is extension-eligible next offseason. If this team doesn’t overperform, he may well decide against re-signing. At that point, on an expiring contract, he has total control of his next destination. Milwaukee probably can’t risk playing the situation out with so many desirable cap space teams looming in 2027 free agency.
And if he does re-sign, what happens then? The Bucks have been among the worst teams in the NBA at drafting and developing under Horst. Their recent trade track record, especially the Kyle Kuzma deal, is spotty as well. They’ve done well on the minimum market, but part of the reason they’ve been able to do so is that they’ve done such a poor job of cultivating internal depth that such free agents know they can get playing time for the Bucks. The vision here seems focused entirely on keeping Antetokounmpo rather than actually building a complete winner around him. They keep adding flashy names, but if they can’t build a sustainable structure around them, that just isn’t going to matter.
February ranking: 15
Toronto’s February ranking gave too much credit to Masai Ujiri’s earlier track record and not enough to how weird things have gotten since the Raptors won the 2019 championship. Aside from the Scottie Barnes draft pick, what exactly has gone right for the Raptors since then?
You could argue that they traded more value to land Jakob Poeltl (a pick that wound up at No. 8 overall) than they got back for OG Anunoby (Immanuel Quickley and RJ Barrett) or Pascal Siakam (three bad first-round picks, one of which was flipped for Brandon Ingram). They compounded their mistakes on the underwhelming Anunoby and Siakam returns with overpays for Quickley and Ingram. Speaking of overpays, the Poeltl extension was another. He’s already declining defensively, and he’s now locked up for five more seasons and will make over $27 million in his age-34 season. Practically every veteran on this team is overpaid. How on Earth is Toronto technically above the luxury tax line for this roster?
It’s not a surprise, therefore, that Ujiri was relieved of his duties after June’s NBA Draft. There have been some small wins recently. Gradey Dick is ready for a bigger role and could be a breakout candidate if his 3-pointer starts falling at the rate the Raptors hoped it would when they drafted him. Jamal Shead was a second-round steal and an absolute defensive menace. But there is just no coherent vision here. It’s just a collection of pretty good players that don’t really complement one another. It is, essentially, a worse version of the “get a bunch of 6-foot-8 wings and pair them with one small guard” model that they previously employed with Anunoby, Siakam and Fred VanVleet. This team needs a shakeup in the worst way, but for now, it has to rank near the bottom of this list.
26. Dallas Mavericks
February ranking: 27
As we covered with the Spurs, you do not get credit for luck. If anything, Dallas should be admonished for the irresponsible manner in which it landed Cooper Flagg. I’m not even talking about the historically idiotic Luka Dončić trade. That much was a given. I’m talking about the ridiculous choice to rush an injured Anthony Davis back onto the court when the team had nothing to play for beyond a play-in berth. If they’d been smart, especially in light of their disastrous recent medical history, they would have been cautious with Davis, tanked down the stretch and focused on next year. They didn’t make a conscious choice to try to improve their lottery odds as San Antonio did when it traded Murray ahead of Wembanyama’s draft year.
They actively went the other way and fought for a No. 10 seed they shouldn’t have wanted. Then, a fluke 1.8% outcome occurs and Nico Harrison is claiming that fortune favors the bold? No. In this case, it favored the stupid. The far likelier consequence of that choice was Davis suffering an injury that could have lingered into this season. They’re lucky that the injury he suffered against the Grizzlies in the Play-In Tournament was minor. They’ve been lucky in a lot of ways lately.
And what have they done with that luck? This roster still makes almost no sense. While Kyrie Irving is out — and he’s implied there’s a chance it will be for the whole season — there’s really only one player on the team who can break defenses down off the dribble. Relying on D’Angelo Russell has rarely gone well for previous employers. You know who might be helpful on this front right now? Quentin Grimes, who immediately blossomed into a high-level starter the moment Harrison traded him. Regardless of Anthony Davis’ preference, he’s playing out of position if he’s primarily a power forward, and Flagg likely is too as a small forward. Size is generally a good thing. The Mavericks have too much of it.
That’s part of the irony of Harrison’s “defense wins championships” ethos. They don’t have a single point-of-attack defender as good as Derrick Jones Jr. was for them during the 2024 Finals run. Have they emphasized defense, or are they just a lot bigger? This team is not balanced enough to maximize the talent it has accumulated. There’s not enough shooting. There’s not enough dribbling. And, yes, it was almost certainly foolhardy to build a win-now team around two injury-prone stars in their 30s.
Winning the Flagg lottery was a golden opportunity. It was an escape hatch for an organization that had burned every conceivable bridge with a devoted fanbase. They could have fired their enormously unpopular general manager, traded Davis for a haul, moved their veteran role players, taken advantage of a strong West to add another lottery pick and then rebuilt organically around Flagg without the specter of the Dončić trade hovering above everything they do. They chose not to do that.
Instead, they’ll likely waste this season waiting for Irving to return or trying to win with a compromised version of him. After that, he and Davis will likely start to experience age-related decline. By the time Flagg has ascended to the level of stardom we suspect he’s capable of, Davis and Irving will be past their primes, and Harrison will have spent too much future draft capital to build into Flagg’s apex properly. He doesn’t seem all that concerned about that. After all, in his eyes, the future is only the next three or four years. Now, that period represents Flagg’s rookie deal. We’ve talked a fair bit about self-awareness in this space. A smart team has the self-awareness to change course in light of that reality. A team that trades Dončić for Davis is not a smart team. Harrison’s defining trait as an executive, at this point, is obstinacy. He’s riding his vision to the end of the line.
From that perspective, his lottery luck might ultimately work against him. There are no excuses now. He took over a team with Dončić, Jalen Brunson and Kristaps Porziņģis and let all three of them go. He was just given perhaps the greatest roster-building gift the basketball gods have ever bestowed on a floundering executive. If this doesn’t work now, with Flagg in place, there is a reasonable chance he goes down as the worst general manager in NBA history. To be given as much to work with as he has and to squander it to the degree that he’s looking like he might is almost unheard of. So this better work, because if it doesn’t, boldness isn’t going to be a trait anyone associates with Harrison.
27. Phoenix Suns
February ranking: 28
Jordan Ott is a qualified first-time NBA head coach. He is also a former graduate assistant at Michigan State, which raises questions about the process that led to his hiring, considering just how many Spartans are in the building right now. New general manager Brian Gregory did not have NBA front office experience prior to joining the Suns last summer. He was a collegiate head coach who made the NCAA Tournament twice in 19 years. But, like Ott, he was a former assistant at Michigan State, not coincidentally overlapping with Mat Ishbia’s time as a walk-on for Tom Izzo. The Suns are by no means the only team to so blatantly operate in this manner. Hell, the Knicks are No. 6 on this list and are built on Leon Rose’s CAA connections. But Rose took a bad Knicks team and made it good. Ishbia took a good Suns team and made it bad, losing the benefit of the doubt that Rose has long since earned.
The degree of control Ishbia seemingly exerts over basketball decisions is extremely concerning. Earlier this offseason, he made the bizarre suggestion that he had, at some point, been a hands-off owner. “I’m not the conventional NBA owner and I don’t want to be,” he said. “I’ve tried running the typical NBA owner playbook — hiring the experts, signing the checks, and getting out of the way — and none of us were happy with the outcome.” It’s worth asking here what period he was specifically referring to. Ishbia officially gained control of the Suns on Feb. 7, 2023. On Feb. 9, they traded for Kevin Durant, with rumblings suggesting that Ishbia played a substantial part in those negotiations.
Rarely does it make sense for an owner to be this heavily involved in basketball decisions. The best ones trust their basketball people to act in their long-term interests. Ishbia has done the opposite. His track record is one of impatience. He’s never kept a coach longer than a year. He waived-and-stretched the two remaining years on Bradley Beal, offering immediate financial relief, but leaving five years’ worth of dead money on their books.
Even the midseason trade with Utah reeked of desperation. They swapped an unprotected 2031 first-round pick for three lesser, protected first-rounders several weeks before the deadline. Utah general manager Justin Zanik immediately called that pick “the most valuable asset on the market.” Why not wait until the deadline to see if you could have done better with it? What was the point of rushing into that trade then? The same could be said of some of the secondary swap trades they made. Orlando got Desmond Bane in part because Phoenix offered them swap rights on the lesser of their own or Washington’s 2026 first-round pick, giving the Magic a premium pick to dangle to the Grizzlies in those negotiations. All the Suns got in return were three low-upside second-rounders. Could they not have waited a bit just to get a better sense of how valuable those swap rights might actually have been?
This is just how the Ishbia Suns operate. Every move is shortsighted. Not surprisingly, the team seems to get worse every year. Having someone in a prominent role outside of his Michigan State orbit to offer a different perspective would probably go a long way, but Ishbia has stayed within his comfort zone, and the result is one of the bleakest long-term outlooks in basketball.
28. Sacramento Kings
February ranking: 29
This team has missed the playoffs in 18 of the past 19 seasons and it’s still innovating in the poor roster-building space. Sacramento had a $2.3 million team option on key 3-and-D guard Keon Ellis this offseason. Had they declined it, he would have been a restricted free agent. Virtually every smart front office has realized that, in that situation, it almost always makes sense to decline the option. That way, you can use the leverage of restricted free agency to secure the player on a team-friendly long-term deal. Sam Presti has done this four separate times in recent summers with Lu Dort, Isaiah Joe, Aaron Wiggins and Jaylin Williams. But the Kings apparently know better than the Thunder, because they picked up the option. Now Ellis can negotiate a long-term extension with the leverage of unrestricted free agency looming next offseason. Either he makes far more than he would have as a restricted free agent or he leaves for nothing. Great work, guys.
The theoretical benefit to picking up that cheap team option was that it gave the Kings more financial wiggle room to build this year’s roster. They just haven’t built a roster that’s going to win anything. Dennis Schröder is a good player. He’s also played for seven different teams in the past four seasons. Probably not someone who should be getting a three-year deal in his 30s. Domantas Sabonis wanted a point guard to replace De’Aaron Fox. Schröder is point-guard sized, but he’s a shoot-first player. So is Malik Monk. And Zach LaVine. I guess DeMar DeRozan is at least a bit bigger? It’s a good thing Ellis is around to provide some defense, because nobody else here will. If only there had been a way to lock him up long-term…
Two years ago, Mike Brown was the unanimous Coach of the Year and Monte McNair was the Executive of the Year. Now, both of them are gone. Vivek Ranadive, the owner who had never reached the playoffs without them, remains. Scott Perry is the new general manager, but it’s not clear who else is influencing him. Reports have suggested that Vlade Divac, one of the worst general managers in NBA history, has been around the team more lately. One Kings employee joked to The Athletic’s Sam Amick that “we’re all going to be working for Jeremy Lamb soon enough,” referring to former NBA player Jeremy Lamb, who seemingly gained influence while in a relationship with Ranadive’s daughter Anjali, though Amick reported in the same story that Lamb has since seemingly fallen out of the loop. Regardless, there does not appear to be anything resembling a coherent long-term plan here. There hasn’t been for the better part of two decades.
29. Chicago Bulls
February ranking: 30
Well… at least they’re finally negotiating with their own free agents? After negotiating against themselves for Nikola Vučević and Patrick Williams in recent years, the Bulls finally seem to have drawn a line in the sand with Josh Giddey in restricted free agency. That’s… progress? Sadly, little of it has been made in the many other areas in which the Bulls have always been deficient.
A year ago, they had a role player in Alex Caruso that practically any team could use. Rather than trading him for draft picks, they swapped him for Giddey, a recent lottery pick whose original team no longer wanted him. They have seemingly seen the flaw in this logic because they themselves are seemingly hesitant to pay Giddey. Yet they made a very similar trade this summer by turning Lonzo Ball into Isaac Okoro. Did it matter to them that Okoro and Williams don’t really fit together as athletic wings who can’t really shoot? Apparently not.
In the entire five-year reign of Arturas Karnisovas and Marc Eversley, the Bulls have acquired just one future first-round pick through a trade. It was a pick from Portland that would be lottery-protected for seven years. Getting that pick cost the Bulls Lauri Markkanen. Maybe that’s why they’re so gun shy that they chose to draft Noa Essengue at No. 12 rather than grab that ultra-valuable 2026 Pelicans pick Atlanta eagerly scooped up one slot later.
It’s the same old story in Chicago. The Bulls’ ambition doesn’t seem to extend beyond filling the arena and ducking the luxury tax. The Bulls have failed on just about every roster-building front: drafting, trading, contracts, any sort of coherent vision, all of it. You know things are bleak when Jerry Reinsdorf is selling the White Sox to Mat Ishbia’s brother, who represents real hope to that broken fanbase. In February, I assumed that the Bulls would hold the No. 30 slot in these rankings until Reinsdorf sold them as well.
…And then the Pelicans hired Joe Dumars.
30. New Orleans Pelicans
February ranking: 13
Joe Dumars was among the worst general managers in basketball for the final decade of his tenure with the Pistons. He proceeded to spend the next decade working at the league office and advising unsuccessful teams (like the Pelicans!). Nothing about those two sentences suggests that he should have been at the top of any team’s list of potential front office hires. Yet he now runs the Pelicans. His top deputy is Troy Weaver, whose Pistons went 74-244 in his four years as a GM. You, therefore, likely won’t be surprised to hear that in their first offseason on the job, Dumars and Weaver have already made one of the most widely panned trades in recent NBA history in surrendering that unprotected 2026 pick to move up for Derik Queen.
That trade was so bizarre that it overshadowed another two of the offseason’s strangest moves. Why did the Pelicans take on $40 million in 2026-27 salary by trading CJ McCollum and Kelly Olynyk for Jordan Poole and Saddiq Bey? And why were they so eager to get the No. 23 pick that they traded Indiana’s first-rounder next year to get it before the end of the Finals? Tyrese Haliburton was already injured by the time that trade happened, though his Achilles tendon was still intact. Why wouldn’t they have played that safe and ensured he made it through the Finals in one piece first? What is the basketball strategy here? They’re seemingly built around Zion Williamson, except they just used multiple lottery picks on high-usage offensive players that aren’t good enough shooters yet to space the floor for him. Herb Jones and Jose Alvarado are the only high-level defenders in sight.
All of this is bad enough on the surface, yet it almost pales in comparison to the organization’s overall infrastructure. Just look at what Dejounte Murray said about the year he just spent in New Orleans on The Pivot Podcast. He said it was his “worst experience in the NBA.” He was going through family tragedies, and he did try to specify that he didn’t want to badmouth the organization. But he proceeded to explain what it was like to both deal with those tragedies and recover from injuries while playing for the Pelicans. “I’m not getting what I need in the organization,” he said. “It’s hard for me to get my training time. It’s hard for me to get lifts. It’s hard for me to get my own court time. So, you can only imagine where my mental was at.”
When the Pelicans hired David Griffin in 2019, it seemed as though they were prepared to make the sort of behind-the-scenes investments needed to keep up in the modern NBA. He was hardly a perfect general manager, but he at least drafted extraordinarily well, a necessity for an organization that has never paid the luxury tax. While he certainly made some questionable moves, his tenure was defined mostly by terrible injury luck. What’s happening now has little to do with luck. Between the experiences Murray shared and the inexplicable manner in which the Pelicans have operated this offseason, New Orleans has seemingly never been further from building a championship-caliber organization.
