From Cooper Flagg to Tyronn Lue, my fearless predictions for the 2025-26 NBA season

LeBron James, Stephen Curry and Kevin Durant.

For the better part of two decades, the league has counted on those three players to move the needle for eyeballs. Even now, in the sunset of their careers, they dragged Team USA to a men’s basketball gold medal last year and are the linchpin of the league’s biggest TV dates.

For instance, the league’s opening day, by custom, features the defending champion and three other teams. This year, joining the Oklahoma City Thunder are the three teams that employ James, Curry and Durant (the Los Angeles Lakers, Golden State Warriors and Houston Rockets, in case you’ve been living under a rock). That’s not an accident.

Those three again are the centerpieces on Christmas, when Durant, Curry and James occupy the prime-time viewing hours, even as more likely NBA finalists (the Thunder and Cleveland Cavaliers — more on that in a minute) work the early-afternoon undercard.

It’s that last record-scratch of a sentence that underscores the somewhat odd state of the NBA union. We’re in the midst of a changing of the guard and have been for the past few years. Yet, even in their sunset years, the three players above still retain the strongest gravitational pull — so much so that the league’s TV partners have motored right through the prime years of Nikola Jokić, Giannis Antetokounmpo and Joel Embiid to keep showing the LeBron-Steph-KD triumvirate.

That formula worked better when the star trio was still playing into late May and June. In 13 of the 14 NBA seasons from 2010 to 2023, at least one of Curry, James and Durant played in the conference finals, with the lone exception being the already forgotten 2021 postseason. Seven of those seasons featured two of them in the conference finals, and the 2017 and 2018 editions had all three in the Cavs-Warriors NBA Finals.

But in the last two conference finals … crickets. Not one of James, Curry or Durant made it, the first time that happened in consecutive years since 2005 and 2006, when Curry and Durant were still in high school. So let’s kick off my 2025-26 bold predictions with this one: For a third straight season, none of the three — James, Curry or Durant — will make the conference finals.

I have more fearless predictions below, but before we go deeper, let’s review what I forecast a year ago. First, the good stuff: I picked the Atlanta Hawks to be in the Play-In Tournament once again (cha-ching!) and Victor Wembanyama and Jalen Williams to be first-time All-Stars (cha-ching!). I correctly picked that Shai Gilgeous-Alexander would win MVP (and shamed the league for not putting him on its Christmas schedule), and that Cleveland’s Kenny Atkinson would win Coach of the Year (double cha-ching!).

I also get a close-but-not-quite on picking every Western Conference Play-In game to be in California — ruined when Golden State and Sacramento didn’t meet in the final one — and picking Houston’s Amen Thompson to win Most Improved Player (he finished seventh). I had Cleveland and Boston meeting in the East finals, and they posted the two best regular-season records before playoff upsets knocked both out in the second round. I had Oklahoma City winning the West, but I should have gone further and picked it to win it all.

Some other calls didn’t work out quite as well. I pegged five coaching changes by the All-Star Game, and we only had four the entire season (two of which didn’t happen until the final week). I projected a 50-loss Play-In team in the East, a prediction destroyed by the shocking competence of the Detroit Pistons. I had a Rookie of the Year from outside the top five in the draft (close but not quite; fourth pick Stephon Castle topped an underwhelming field, although Jared McCain’s injury may have robbed me here) and said the East would have zero first-time All-Stars (Tyler Herro, Cade Cunningham and Evan Mobley all made it).

With that, we forge on. I shouldn’t be hitting on all of these, because I’m trying to raise the bar high enough on difficulty that these are actually “bold” predictions and not the Captain Obvious stuff. But here are some of my hotter takes for 2025-26:

No Americans will make first-team All-NBA

This is a risky one because one injury likely terminates the prediction, but on paper, it appears to have a halfway decent chance of happening. The best American players are either aging out of dominance (Curry, James and Durant above), out for the season (Jayson Tatum, Tyrese Haliburton and Damian Lillard) or are still-rising stars not yet at the peak of their powers (Mobley, Anthony Edwards, Cooper Flagg and Paolo Banchero).

That trend showed itself in the numbers last season, when the top five players in both PER and BPM had non-U.S. passports: Canada’s Gilgeous-Alexander, Serbia’s Jokić, Greece’s Antetokounmpo, France’s Wembanyama and Slovenia’s Luka Dončić. The only American who is both under the age of 35 and healthy for this season to finish in the top 14 in BPM was Dallas’ Anthony Davis. A sixth foreign-born wild card, Cameroon’s Embiid, should also be a factor if he can play the minimum 65 games, and we can’t totally rule out Germany’s Franz Wagner crashing the party.

Last season, two Americans made first-team All-NBA, after Wembanyama, Dončić and Embiid all failed to play enough games to qualify. Tatum was one of them, however, and he’s out, and the other (Donovan Mitchell) was a distant fifth of five in the voting. Edwards and Mobley seem the most likely to push into the top five should one of the top six falter, with Mitchell, Jalen Brunson, Williams, Cunningham and Banchero potential vote-stealers if their teams have big years.

Still, none of those guys grade out on the level of Gilgeous-Alexander or the four Europeans — Dončić, Wembanyama, Jokić and Antetokounmpo — nor do they match peak Embiid if that’s still a thing.

Cooper Flagg will be the unanimous ROY

Picking Flagg to merely win is too easy, so let’s do something spicier. Only six players in NBA history have been unanimous Rookie of the Year picks in the 73 years in which it was awarded: Wembanyama, Lillard, Karl-Anthony Towns, Blake Griffin, David Robinson and Ralph Sampson.

Flagg will be the seventh. The Mavericks’ rookie forward graded out far ahead of his peers in both my eye-test evaluations of draft prospects and in the statistical model I use to help inform my draft takes, and he couldn’t have landed in a better situation. The Mavs will need him to start and take on a major ballhandling load because they’re thin on quality guards with Kyrie Irving recovering from a torn ACL, assuring Flagg will put up the kind of counting stats that settle any debate.

While we’re here: I was tempted to project one other unanimous award winner — Wembanyama for Defensive Player of the Year — after he was on track to run away with the award a year ago before a blood clot ended his season. Alas, no player has ever won this award unanimously, and measuring defense is mushy enough that perhaps it will never happen.

Every West Play-In game will be in Texas

Time for another geography-specific prediction about the middle of the postseason bracket!

With Houston, San Antonio and Dallas all looking like mid-tier squads in the crowded West peloton behind Oklahoma City, let’s circle Texas as the epicenter of the 2026 West Play-In. My initial theory is that Dallas can host the No. 9 vs. No. 10 game, and one of San Antonio or Houston will finish seventh; if so, I just need things to break my way so that the third Play-In game will also be hosted by a Texas team.

Miami will meet Chicago in the Play-In … again

The Heat are too proud to tank, and the Bulls are too unambitious to bother, so here we are. Is this the year the Bulls finally beat Miami in April? Chicago and Miami played each other in three straight Play-In Tournaments, with Miami prevailing to eliminate the Bulls each time. Last season, the Heat became the first 10th-place finisher to advance out of the Play-In by winning easily in Chicago before beating Atlanta in overtime for the final playoff spot.

The East’s other regular Play-In participant (the Hawks) appears to be too good to continue making their mid-April showing, which should allow the Heat and Bulls to match the Hawks with four lifetime appearances. Miami can also aim for another record: The franchise could have eight total Play-In games at the end of this season, even though it’s only the fifth season the Play-In has existed. The Heat have played the maximum two games in each of the last three seasons.

Shaedon Sharpe will make Sixth Man history

My former colleague Seth Partnow has referred to voting for this award as “Yay! Points!” That’s been a pretty accurate barometer. However, it’s also been in concert with another factor: Gunners on good teams get the votes. The last six winners of Sixth Man of the Year were on teams that won at least 50 games (pro-rating for 2020-21), and you have to go back to Detlef Schrempf and the 40-42 Indiana Pacers of 1991-92 to find a player who won it on a losing team.

That is the only time a player on a losing squad won the award. One obvious issue is that, on a bad team, somebody playing well enough to win will almost inevitably end up promoted to the starting lineup. Perhaps that will happen to Sharpe as well, but we have some reason to think it won’t.

Can Shaedon Sharpe do something that hasn’t been done since the early 1990s? (Soobum Im / USA Today)

For starters (sorry), the Blazers moved him to the bench in the middle of last season and seemed pretty happy with the switch. Second, the Blazers are strongest at the wing positions, where Sharpe would potentially be promoted as a starter. Finally, Sharpe’s shot creation will be desperately needed with the Blazers’ second unit, even more than it would be with Portland’s offensively limited starters, because there is no reliable backup behind Scoot Henderson.

Sharpe may not start, but he will get starters’ minutes and shots and finish most games. He averaged 15.4 points as a reserve last season while playing only 25 minutes a game, and those numbers figure to go up given the departures of Anfernee Simons and Deandre Ayton, and the resultant shot-creation hole in the Blazers lineup.

With no other obvious candidate on the radar just yet — Payton Pritchard will be promoted to the Boston starting lineup, as will De’Andre Hunter in Cleveland, while Malik Beasley is still in limbo and Alex Caruso is unlikely to play enough games — it’s out there on a platter for Sharpe to break tradition and win Sixth Man of the Year on a losing team.

Celtics, Pacers will miss the playoffs

Thanks to Achilles injuries to their star players in the 2025 playoffs, the last two winners of the Eastern Conference are unlikely to be factors in the race this season, possibly paving the way for some new faces in the late playoff rounds. None of my top four projected teams in the East have made an NBA Finals since 2018, and only Cleveland has done so since 2009.

As for Boston and Indiana, it isn’t just about the injuries to Tatum and Haliburton, respectively, but also each franchise’s response to them. Boston shed salary and talent in droves to repair its cap sheet and have a “gap year,” while the Pacers let center Myles Turner walk in free agency without any corresponding counter-move to fill the void. For either squad, just making the Play-In would be a mildly overachieving accomplishment.

Clippers’ Tyronn Lue will win Coach of the Year

I only feel obligated to try predicting this because I’m on a streak. Alas, I don’t have a team whose projected win total is quite as wildly off from preseason expectations as the Cavs were a year ago, so the “surprise team” factor built into most Coach of the Year votes isn’t a hanging curveball over the plate.

The other two key things about Coach of the Year are 1) usually, it requires a big win total, as opposed to heroically squeezing 30 wins from a 20-win roster, and 2) voter fatigue is almost instantaneous for previous winners. Repeat winners have happened (checks notes) zero times, and the only time somebody won twice in three years was when Gregg Popovich prevailed in 2012 and 2014.

That matters because the teams I project to have the two best regular-season records, by a pretty wide margin, also have the last two COY winners. I don’t expect Atkinson or Oklahoma City’s Mark Daigneault to be rewarded again this quickly.

However, I think Lue has a few things in his favor: The Kawhi Leonard saga will likely create a negative narrative about his team entering the season, the Clippers appear undervalued in most preseason predictions I’ve seen, and there’s a general respect for Lue as a coach that could bubble up into a “How has this guy not won yet?” case being made for him.

Cam Whitmore will win Most Improved Player

It may be tough to gain traction for an MIP campaign while playing for what is likely to be the worst team in the league, but Whitmore has a chance. On a Wizards team that is likely to be utterly devoid of alternate scoring options, he could easily score 20-25 points per game in a Cam Thomas kind of way, except that Whitmore is a bigger, downhill forward who adds more on defense and should be able to score more efficiently.

The 6-foot-7, 21-year-old Whitmore averaged only 9.4 points per game in Houston last year, but he was working as a role player who received only 16 minutes of playing time per night in the 51 games where he actually saw action. In Washington, he’ll either be starting or playing massive minutes off the bench, and I’ll be surprised if he doesn’t at least double his scoring average.

Does that make him a shoo-in for MIP? Of course not. Picking this award in advance is inherently difficult, as the winner is often somebody whose season came totally out of nowhere. But if you’re making a short list of “guys who might double their scoring average while averaging over 20 a game”, Whitmore is one of the few names on it.

Fewer than three coaching changes before the All-Star break

I won’t try to predict what might happen in April, based on last spring’s new trend of “just make the change now with a week left in the season.”

But as far as early-season coaching changes, there just aren’t enough hot seats entering the season to predict much action — even knowing that seemingly no job is truly safe in this business. Six teams changed head coaches within the last year, four others aren’t trying to win this season, and at least five additional coaches (Daigneault, Rick Carlisle, Erik Spoelstra, Steve Kerr and Joe Mazzulla) have basically been knighted and appear to have long-term immunity.

If there’s going to be action, it’s probably in the lower midsection of both conferences. Seats could get hot quickly in Toronto or Philly with a slow start, for instance, and nobody will be surprised by literally anything the Kings or Pelicans do.

Could Nick Nurse’s seat warm up if the Sixers get off to a rocky start? (Ken Blaze / USA Today)

The West will continue to outpace the East

This probably isn’t a surprise given the devastating injuries that beset two East powers in Boston and Indiana; in fact, I’d say the hotter take here is that I’m not expecting the West to be any more dominant than it’s been the last two seasons.

The West won 55.1 percent and 57.7 percent of interconference games the past two years; this season, I have a projection of 56.7 percent. That difference means the average West team will win 2.0 games more than a similarly placed team in the East; I have my 11th-best team in the East winning more games than its counterpart in the West, but the West has the edge at the other 14 spots.

If you’re curious, it also means playing in the East is worth about 1.6 wins to an average team above what the roster would normally produce, and playing in the West docks a team about 1.6 wins. Moving from West to East, then, would add roughly three wins for most teams between 30- and 50-win quality. (Note that this math doesn’t apply as sharply for the teams at the poles; the Thunder are likely to win no matter whom they play, and similarly, the Wizards are likely to lose.)

Thunder will repeat, beat Cavs in NBA Finals

And finally, we get to June. As excited as I am for this coming season, I fear the endgame will play out in an extremely predictable way, as both Cleveland and Oklahoma City win their conferences by several games (much as they did a year ago) and then roll through the playoffs (something that notably did not happen a year ago).

Injuries, hot streaks and randomness can all be major factors that tilt a short playoff series, but the Thunder and Cavs should be heavy favorites in each conference. That’s especially true for the Thunder, who appear on the verge of a dynasty.

That takes me back to what I wrote at the top: There’s a certain cognitive dissonance inherent in promoting the LeBron-Steph-KD trio as the faces of the league all season and then trying to hype Cavs-Magic and Thunder-Clippers in May. The league and its TV partners seem intent on tweeting right through it, but at some point, they’ll need to find a better answer.