Here's the thing: The NBA is a tremendous soap opera. Players have immense individual power, on and off the court, but they are all trapped in a room with their own fears, inadequacies, greed, and often cursed luck – just like the rest of us. It can be a riveting sport to watch but it's also a riveting league to keep an eye on through the trickle of delicious news. It should be so predictable and objective, what with teams taking over 100 shots a game, but that just means that when it's unpredictable – and often it is unpredictable – that randomness is coming from human factors.
But it can be hard getting into a new sports league. It's like picking up a TV show that's been going on for 50 seasons. There are so many characters and storylines you just don't know. I am here to take you by the hand and walk you through all of them. These previews focus, shamelessly, on the narrative and on the backstory of each team. I will talk about all 30 teams because all 30 teams have at least a C-plot going on, but some of them will get a lot less attention here because they are just not major characters in this year's drama.
Tipoff, if you plan on actually watching the games, is on Tuesday. Here's the West teams; tomorrow, the East teams.
Northwest Division
Denver Nuggets
Category: Actual contender
Defending champions, presumptive best team in the league. The Nuggets are very much a known quantity; they're running it back with basically the same roster and coach. Their center, Nikola Jokić, is probably the best player in ball at the moment – a Magician from Sombor who just kind of flicks the ball with his wrist and it goes where he wants it to, making him both an incredible scoring threat and a mesmerizing passer. But he treats it like a job, which is an incredible bit. He just wants to go home to Serbia to be with his horses and his wife. After winning the NBA championship, in a pre-season interview recently, he basically said that last season was tough because he had to keep playing basketball well into June. I love him dearly.
On the other end of the spectrum is the team's point guard, Jamal Murray. Murray broke out as a star scorer in the 2020 NBA 'bubble' (in which the NBA played the playoffs in an insulated environment in Florida), but he then lost over a year to recovering from an ACL tear. Last season he came back and made it absolutely clear that his incredible bubble performance wasn't a fluke. The pairing of Jokić and Murray is, for my money, probably the most watchable team in the sport right now.
Some good teams beat you with boring efficiency, but the Nuggets are good and exciting. When Jokić has the ball in his hands, basically anything can happen – he might bully his way inside and flip up a hook shot, he might shoot one of his improbable one-legged 'jump' shots over the top, or he might teleport the ball into the hands of a cutting teammate.
Minnesota Timberwolves
Category: The Chaos Zone
For a long time, the Guy in Minnesota was Karl-Anthony Towns, a shooting big man who was drafted in the heady days of 2016, when a center who shot 35% from 3-point range was still a relative novelty. Alas, it's now 2023, this is no longer such a unique skillset in the league, and KAT has had a few unfortunate playoff flameouts.
But a few years ago, this team got themselves a steal in the draft in the form of Anthony Edwards, an intriguing, forceful wing who looks like he's ready to become not just the best player on his team, but one of the best players in the league. He's not there yet, but expecting him to be an all-star this year is a widespread take at this point. Edwards gives Minnesota a different path towards the future.
In the meantime, Minnesota chose to temper their good fortune by trading an unprecedented pile of assets for Rudy Gobert – a multiple-time Defensive Player of the Year with no offensive game to speak of, and who is going into his age 30 season with noticeable decline. This was one of the most criticized and baffling trades seen in the league in a while. Rudy is also, well, not popular around the league, going back to that time when he jokingly coughed into a microphone that someone else was about to use in March of 2020.
The pairing of Gobert and KAT was nonsensical on paper. But last season, the haters were denied vindication; injury kept them from playing a significant number of games together. So maybe this crazy idea of pairing a big who can't really defend with a big who can't really attack will work out, after all. Or maybe it will be a spectacular flame-out. A team to watch for fans of unconventional success and also for fans of hating.
Oklahoma City Thunder
Category: Young and fun
A decade ago, OKC drafted extremely well and assembled the trio of Kevin Durant, Russel Westbrook, and James Harden: three guys who would all go on to win MVP. Then they didn't retain Harden in free agency, their title hopes sputtered out, and they traded all their great players away for a gigantic pile of draft picks.
Now, for the last three years, they've been engaged in a huge rebuild. Last season they only barely missed the playoffs, so this is, presumably, the year where they turn the corner and make the playoffs again. They have already hit big on Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, one of the best guards in the league – fresh off beating the US for third place at the FIBA world championship – and they have so many other high-potential players stemming from all those draft picks. Last year's #2 pick, Chet Holmgren, is a skinny big man with great potential who missed all of his rookie season with injury. All of the "bright future" clichés apply here; this might be your last chance to get on their bandwagon before they become good enough that it's gauche to get on their bandwagon.
Portland Trail Blazers
Category: Young and "fun"
Damian Lillard is one of the players who ushered in the three-point revolution; he changed the sport, turning the half-court shot – traditionally only seen at the very end of the clock – into a legitimate weapon that he'd fire off just to put the fear of God into opposing defenses. The Portland team built around him went to the playoffs eight years in a row.
But they just kept hitting the wall. Every Western Conference contender has taken their turn beating Portland in the playoffs, including the Spurs all the way back in 2014 (when they won their last championship). The Steph Curry Warriors (one of the greatest teams of all time) eliminated them three times. They even lost to the LeBron Lakers on the one year when that team was really good and won a championship.
League rules make it hard to keep these contending teams together in the NBA. Portland just ran out of gas in the tank to keep competing. Lillard finally asked for a trade this off-season. The Blazers front office, who were probably already thinking of throwing the towel, obliged.
Portland was already in a soft rebuild since 2021, with Lillard playing a limited number of games due to injury and a roster that was already being broken up for draft picks and young players. The team is now building around Anfernee Simons – a younger guard who made a big jump when Lillard went down with injury two years ago – and Scoot Henderson, the third pick in this year's draft.
Utah Jazz
Category: Young and displaying flashes of being fun
Utah blew it up last year, and then they had some surprising flashes of competitiveness, failing to fail as hard as their GM probably wanted. Still, this is also very much a rebuilding team still searching for its identity and whose best player is probably a transitional piece and not the final destination. That best player is pretty intriguing: first-time All-Star Lauri Markkanen, who spent years as a role player in Chicago, got traded to Utah, and then suddenly took a jump and started scoring 25 points a game.
Pacific Division
Golden State Warriors
Category: One last ride
For years, Golden State was the terror of the NBA. If you have any contact with the NBA at all, you probably know this, right. They've won four championships with the core of Steph Curry, Klay Thompson, and Draymond Green. They revolutionized the game, bringing about a complete shift in the way teams think about tactics, roster construction, and positional roles – Steph and Klay are the greatest 3-point shooters to ever play, and Draymond is himself a transformative figure who changed what it means to play his position.
For the last couple years, the Warriors were trying an experiment where they added some young players and began transitioning to a new era without giving up their championship core. This paid off in 2022, but not so much in the 2023 playoffs. So this offseason, they are pivoting to just trying to squeeze the last bit of juice out of this orange. They traded away Jordan Poole, Steph's once-heir apparent. And they added Chris Paul – a controversial, provocative, and electrifying point guard who is, himself, a transformative figure in his position.
The wrinkle is that they are just turbo old at this point. Steph is 35, Klay is 33 with a repaired knee, Chris Paul has been playing in the NBA since the Bush administration. The era of Warriors dominance is surely over. Right? Surely they're not going to win another title.
LA Clippers
Category: Suffering pit
In 2019 the clippers began their current era by getting Kawhi Leonard in free agency, fresh off his one-year championship-winning stint in Toronto. Leonard was, at the time, possibly the best player in the world; a wing who could playmake, who could make incredibly difficult shots, and who was simultaneously a monster on defense – one of the greatest perimeter defenders ever. This is a guy whose play style, body type, and level of play drew Michael Jordan comparisons. He has two championships and two Finals MVP trophies.
But Kawhi has recurring knee issues that require him to take a lot of games off. And his running mate, Paul George, has had his own playoff struggles and injuries. One or both of them have almost always been on the bench. It just never comes together for the Clippers, and while their supporting cast and coach Ty Lue do an admirable job of holding down the fort without their stars, at this point everyone kind of expects that things will never come together for this group as their roster ages. Next year, we'll be 10 years removed from Kawhi's first championship in San Antonio.
So, the Clippers live in limbo; on paper, they are a contender. In practice, well, it doesn't seem to work out like that.
Los Angeles Lakers
Category: Actual contenders, allegedly
Okay you might be the least NBA-headed person on the planet but you KNOW who LeBron James is.
LeBron is 38 years old. He refuses to decline. Every year we all think "this is the one, this is the year where LeBron is not going to be LeBron any more." And it just doesn't happen. It's actively infuriating. To be fair, he has lost a bit of a step. He's still him, but... he can't be him for quite as many minutes any more. Maybe he takes a bit of a breather on defense. He's not giving that second or third effort; he doesn't have the gas in the tank for it.
And then there's Anthony Davis. For a while, people thought Anthony Davis was going to be the best player in the league. When LeBron and Davis won a championship together in 2020, it looked like that time had arrived. And then... it kind of just didn't happen? Davis has hovered just shy of really realizing that potential since then; he's very good, but come playoff time he just falls a little bit short. His shooting isn't quite there, not enough to make him the versatile, unstoppable player he's supposed to be; the player he was in the 2020 bubble, where he seemed completely unstoppable. Davis has never been a total disaster, just a little disappointing. And as is common for highly mobile big men in the NBA, Davis' health has always been an issue – moving at NBA guard speeds when you're seven feet tall takes a toll on the body.
In 2021-22, the Lakers had one of the most disappointing seasons by any team ever. They added Russel Westbrook, then a star guard known for high-energy play, doing everything on the court, and making questionable shot choices. Westbrook was meant to bring consistency to the team – he's a guy who has consistently been healthy and who doesn't miss a lot of games, something that the old and injury-prone Lakers needed. Their upcoming roster was hyped to hell and back. Oddsmakers expected them to win 52 games and gave them championship odds. Then they cratered horribly due to a combination of poor health, several players on the roster sharply declining due to age (Westbrook included), the loss of many key role-players from that championship season, and just generally poor vibes. They won 33 games. It was a big coming-together moment for NBA fandom to watch the Lakers melt down like that.
But they bounced back last season. Davis and LeBron played well. They traded off Westbrook for some more depth. Second-year shooting guard Austin Reaves became a fan favorite and played quite well. They got unceremoniously cratered by Denver in the playoffs, of course, but who didn't? They are a contender again this season, but nobody is really taking them too seriously. After all, the wheels are going to start coming off LeBron any day now.
Phoenix Suns
Category: Actual contenders
The Suns have had a bit of a rocky situation these past few years. Lots of playoff disappointment, lots of uncertainty, an owner who was a racist piece of shit. In the 2022 playoffs, the Mavericks sent them home in one of the most shattering game seven blowouts ever.
This last season, they made a mid-season trade for Kevin Durant: a former MVP and champion, one of the most lethal shooters the sport has ever seen.
If you're unfamiliar with the tale of Kevin Durant, it goes something like this: Originally drafted by the Thunder, he led that team on several great playoff runs, but never won a championship. In 2016 he lost in the conference finals to an unstoppable, historic Warriors team; the Warriors won an astonishing 73 games that year. Those Warriors didn't actually win it all that year; LeBron and the Cavaliers just barely managed to stop them.
And then KD joined the Warriors in free agency. The Steph-Klay-Draymond-KD 'death lineup' was widely regarded as unstoppable, won two championships together, and may very well have won a third if not for some unfortunately timed injuries and a uniquely great Raptors team. KD joining the warriors drew a lot of hate; here's one of the very best players in the game joining the team that just beat him in the playoffs to form one of the most league-warping teams of all time.
After that Finals loss in 2019, KD left the Warriors in free agency to go join Brooklyn. I'll tell the story of how that team flamed out later, but suffice to say that KD didn't get very far there.
So, the specter that he can't win haunts Kevin Durant. It's an absurd situation – he's an MVP and two-time champion – but a lot of people will stand by the take that KD couldn't get anywhere on his own team, and needed Steph.
Phoenix is his latest, and probably his last shot at finding the success that has eluded him. KD is 35 now, and he's noticeably more stoppable than he used to be, but he's still incredibly threatening, and Phoenix is still a very legitimate team.
They also have a new coach, new ownership, and a new star in guard Bradley Beal, who replaces the aforementioned Chris Paul. They are probably the best candidate to challenge Denver in the West.
Sacramento Kings
Category: Definitely fun, mostly young
Sacramento was, for a long time, a sort of basketball hell. Longest playoff drought in major American sports. A catastrophic run of front office incompetence that had left them with nonfunctional roster after nonfunctional roster, perpetually failing to climb out of their eternal rebuild.
And then, last season, suddenly they were... good. They traded for Domantas Sabonis, a facilitating center that you might crudely describe as "the Jokić we have at home". They got Mike Brown as a coach, who immediately won coach of the year by running the league's best offense and making the playoffs. The playoffs! With the Sacramento Kings! Imagine!
This is the designated Fun Team now. They have a giant laser on top of their arena that they light when they win a home game. Their fans chant "light the beam". Every basketball nerd was watching this team last year, and this year everyone period will be watching them because the league is giving them 22 whole games on national TV. The Kings! Twenty-two nationally televised games! Imagine!
Are they going to be good enough to actually get somewhere in the playoffs? There is no indication of that whatsoever, and there's lots of reasons to be skeptic of Sacramento – last year they had a great combination of health and luck that noticeably improved their results. But they will be fun to watch.
Southwest Division
Dallas Mavericks
Category: The Chaos Zone
Ah, Dallas. Rapidly supplanting Portland as the team that's wasting a superstar player's prime years. Their best player, Luka Dončić, is only 24 years old and he's already getting MVP votes. Luka is a sort of basketball savant, an oversized point guard who slowly and deliberately outsmarts and overpowers everyone else on the court. He could easily be MVP one day, if he's ever on a good enough team. But that's been the problem: Dallas just struggles to give Luka a good enough supporting cast. So far, he's had three notable sidekicks. Kristaps Porziņģis, a tantalizing big man who was just injured too often until Dallas gave up and trade him; Jalen Brunson, who left to take a big contract with the Knicks last year; and, most recently, Kyrie Irving. Kyrie joined Dallas in a mid-season trade just this year.
Let's not mince words, Kyrie is an antivaxxer and a conspiracy weirdo. A few years ago he went to Brooklyn to form a superteam alongside James Harden and Kevin Durant. Then he refused to get vaccinated, resulting in him sitting out a majority of games during the 21-22 season, thanks to New York's vaccine mandate at the time. This alienated Harden so much that it effectively broke up that Brooklyn team and completely dashed their title hopes.
But people keep giving Kyrie a pass, and GMs keep taking a risk on him, because he is an incredible scorer. Can't really play much defense, and isn't all that great at the traditional point guard role of playmaking and facilitating. Is getting kind of old, too. But his nature as an undersized shooting guard makes him a theoretical fit with Luka – though defense is a concern.
Dallas had a horribly shallow roster last season, and they got nowhere even with Kyrie. And Kyrie's presence all portends drama and chaos. But, theoretically, they should be better this year.
Houston Rockets
Category: Young, and sure, let's go with 'fun' also
Houston blew it up a few years ago and are in the throes of their own rebuild. They have a couple of promising players, like high-flying guard Jalen Green. But they were terrible the last couple years, and they are really not close to being done with rebuilding.
But the nugget of drama here comes from two recent additions. The first is Dillon Brooks, a young shit-talking, shit-stirring, not very good player who was shed from Memphis after bricking a whole lot of shots in the playoffs. Brooks was ejected four minutes into his first pre-season game after seemingly slamming his hand into Domantas Sabonis' testicles while moving around a screen. Fresh off that magical run with the Canadian national team, he's bringing kind of a hockey vibe to the sport.
The other is Fred VanVleet. VanVleet is probably the greatest undrafted player of all time, an NBA champion with the Toronto Raptors, and an incredible success story. But last year he was abysmal, losing both his shooting touch and his defensive ability, and he had some nebulous interpersonal issues with the Raptors' younger players. The Rockets got him in free agency by giving him a colossal contract, which they could do because they had the cheapest roster in the league and the NBA has not only a salary cap but a salary minimum. He's been touted as a veteran presence to teach the young guns on the roster. Which, like, I don't know how he's going to gel with a team that's rapidly developing an apparent vibe of immaturity.
Memphis Grizzlies
Category: Young, dumb, and full of chaos
For the last several years, the Grizz have been a young, fun team led by Ja Morant – one of the most electrifying guards to ever do it, a player who combines blinding speed with incredible leaping ability and strength to dunk over much taller defenders in spectacular fashion. They put together a very capable core of tough, hard-working players around him, and they've won over 50 games in the last two seasons. This has been a team that's on the cusp of breaking through to serious playoff success.
Ja is also... well, he's been on a spiral of drinking and public bad behavior for couple of years. It was ignorable until it wasn't, and currently he's suspended for the first 25 games of the season after multiple incidents where he livestreamed handling guns while visibly intoxicated. I don't want to treat this as a fun wacky thing, because it isn't. It's apparent that Morant has a serious issue with alcohol at this point, and it also is apparent that the team, the league, and his own close circle all enabled this.
Memphis is kind of scrambling to figure out what to do. They added Marcus Smart as a replacement/backup, a defensively-minded point guard who had a significant role last year playing with the Celtics. But it's all a bit transitional at this point, and it's hard to predict what form Memphis will really take, or how Ja's various off-court issues will resolve.
New Orleans Pelicans
Category: Suffering pit
In 2019, after parting ways with Anthony Davis, the Pelicans got the first pick in the draft and selected Zion Williamson, a bruising, surprisingly speedy forward who combined guard-like skills with overwhelming dunks.
It's now 2023. Zion has signed a five-year max extension. He'll make 34 million this year and more in subsequent years. He's the unquestioned centerpiece of the franchise. In his four years of playing in the NBA he has appeared in 114 games. The NBA regular season is 82 games long.
The Pelicans basically skipped the 'young and fun' stage straight to the 'can this star stay healthy' stage. Zion has not shown the ability to stay healthy. The Pelicans chug along without him, talented and capable but missing that key piece. It is very possible that this is the year Zion manages to stay on the floor and the Pelicans contend for a strong playoff result, but the whole project remains unproven.
San Antonio Spurs
Category: The youngest and the funnest of teams
The Spurs are the main character of the NBA. What if a shōnen protagonist was a sports organization. Their success has been as predictable as it is implausible.
San Antonio drafted Tim Duncan in 1997 and then they won a lot for 20 years. Duncan won his first championship in 1999, alongside 90s legend David Robinson. He won his fifth and last championship in 2014 alongside Kawhi Leonard.
Typically, when a team gets a generational player like Duncan, their fortunes are tied to the arc of that player's career. This has not been the case for the Spurs. They won 67 games in 2016, which was Duncan's last season. And then they won 61 the following year. They simply smoothly transitioned from the Duncan era to the Kawhi era.
But Kawhi and Pop's relationship soured, Kawhi was traded to Toronto for the last year of his contract, and the Spurs' new era sputtered out. For a couple of years, it looked like this was it. Popovich was going to retire and ride off into the sunset. One of the many mentees that he'd left behind in his many years of coaching would come replace him – maybe WNBA superstar and coach Becky Hammon; maybe Tim Duncan himself. The team would finally, after 20 years of consistent dominance, go for a full rebuild.
And then something predictably implausible happened: After one season of losing a whole lot, the Spurs got the first pick in the draft. And they picked Victor Wembanyama. 'Wemby' has to be seen to be believed; a 7'4" human being who moves with preternatural grace and can shoot threes, pass, or handle the ball just as well as he can dunk over the top of other players or swat shots right out of the air. He is the most hyped prospect to come into the NBA since LeBron james. He was already a superstar playing for a professional team in his native France, and he's been a monster in every stage that he's been put on since. The Spurs, the most historically competent organization in the league, just had the greatest draft pick in a decade fall on their laps. For now, they don't have anywhere near the additional talent needed to actually be a playoff team, regardless of how good Wembanyama can be in his rookie year. But everyone is holding their breath to see what kind of damage this kid can do when he starts playing real games, and how far this new generation of Spurs can go with him.
