There has been a faint air of inevitability in the NBA over the last few months. While the league is never predictable, a first championship for the Oklahoma City Thunder — coupled with a historically strong start to 2025-26 and an embarrassment of draft assets to continue building with — created a spectre of impending dynasty.
Which is fine. Fun, even. It’s been years since we saw a champion repeat in the NBA, and having a top heel for the next wave of contenders to try to topple is Booking 101. The league is in a great place, mid-transition between eras of superstars and deep into the latest CBA, and even the heaviest of favourites are only a “blocked by James!” away from the conversation turning quickly.
The 2025-26 season may not play out how it feels today, or how it felt two weeks ago when the Thunder were at a single loss. We’re never going to see things clearly 12 months in advance. What we can do, though, is get a little bold instead of going chalk with our annual predictions.
Bold means you won’t hit on many of them, but where’s the fun in making bland-yet-sure predictions? What follows are a few swings at storylines that could emerge in basketball in 2026.
1. The Thunder do repeat, but the Western Conference playoffs show that there’s a tough path to ‘dynasty’
Look, Oklahoma City is just that good right now. Even after dropping a couple of games to West playoff teams, they are threatening records for regular-season record, scoring margin, defensive effectiveness, and more. Shai Gilgeous-Alexander is in a dogfight with Nikola Jokic for the MVP award again, and might be the toughest one-on-one check in the league. They are deep — their wild start has come with significant time missed for rotation players — and they have the ability to add mid-season, even if Sam Presti has been careful in that regard.
All told, I can’t remember ever seeing a team as a pick ‘em for the championship in late December. It would be a moderate surprise if the Thunder weren’t the first team to repeat as champions since the 2017-18 Golden State Warriors.
It will, in the moment, feel daunting, with a young, cap-flexible, asset-rich team ascending and repeating.
It will not, however, feel like the 2026-27 champion is a certainty. The San Antonio Spurs are already starting to look like another Team of the Future, with their timeline feeling closer and closer with each passing game from Victor Wembanyama, Stephon Castle, Dylan Harper and the rest. Jokic is not going anywhere in the next few years, Jamal Murray is still in his prime and looking as good as ever, and the Nuggets will remain a contender. The Rockets are huge, and outside of Kevin Durant, young enough to project at this level for some time if they continue to nail things at the margins. The list goes on.
The top of the Western Conference is always a gauntlet, and it’s never projected as deeper and more difficult at the top moving forward. Someone will have a player pop, a trade resonate, or a stylistic counter to OKC emerge, enough to put pressure on the Thunder to somehow continue nailing almost every move.
Sub-prediction: The Knicks win the East.
2. Offensive rebounds are the most talked-about stat in the playoffs
Once we get past how great the West is and how wide open the East seems (outside of New York, a clear favourite at this point), the post-season conversation will focus on two key strategic elements that are quietly defining the day-to-day of the season so far.
The first is crashing the glass, which is fairly straightforward. After a decade going the other way, offensive rebounding is back en vogue, with the league — and a few teams, namely the Rockets — threatening to set new league records for second chances.
This is borne of a few things, including analytics (the value of a second chance is quite high, and team success rate when crashing multiple players is higher than conventional wisdom may have suggested), transition defensive strategy (teams are more willing to cross-match getting back, dealing with mismatches or switching back later in a possession), and more threes leading to more long rebounds teams can attack. Not every team has embraced it, but with the league seeming to have reached the limit of “shoot even more threes” as a means of getting more efficient on offence, many coaches have embraced and even challenged the perceived trade-off between offensive rebounding and transition defence.
Particularly of interest is that this is one area the Thunder haven’t gotten an edge yet. They set a league record for shooting possession differential last year because of their turnover edge and solid defensive rebounding, but they more or less punt on the offensive glass, providing a small window that a team like Houston might be able to shrink the gap in a series.
Sub-prediction: “Peel switching” is a very popular tactical buzzword, as defences look to keep up with record scoring and rethink some conventional beliefs about where and when you can help on the court.
3. The NBA announces plans to expand to 32 teams, with Seattle and Las Vegas on board
This is mostly a bet that Adam Silver breaks after being asked in a 412th consecutive press conference and exasperatedly responds, “Fine, you can have expansion!”
Expansion has made sense in some ways for the league for some time. The talent pool is there, they have two (if not more) obvious markets, it increases the inventory of games they can sell, and from a media and entertainment perspective, it’s something other leagues have gotten good runway out of. One of the common counterarguments is often that it splits a very large revenue pie 32 ways instead of 30, but recent franchise sales have set a baseline that should allow the league to charge fairly large expansion fees, helping smooth that out.
Sub-prediction: Raptors assistant coach Jama Mahlalela is eventually hired as the head coach of one of the expansion teams.
4. All of these point guards available don’t really move at the deadline; July becomes a major point guard carousel
Take a read around pre-deadline NBA reporting and it feels like every team is shopping their point guard, shopping for a point guard, or at least willing to listen. Trae Young doesn’t have an extension yet and could be headed to unrestricted free agency. Ja Morant’s situation in Memphis is contentious, to say the least. LaMelo Ball’s name has been out there. And so on.
The guess here is that all that buzz is just buzz for February. Those are major trades, in some cases franchise-altering ones. This is the NBA, of course, so those happen even if we don’t have buzz ahead of time, but the point guard position, in particular, is one that requires fit, chemistry, and sometimes system reorientation. Combine that with the fact that trades of top-salaried players are much easier in the summer, when teams have more salary cap flexibility, and a major shakeup at the point should be much smoother then.
Sub-prediction: Young enters free agency and winds up being signed-and-traded as part of a massive, multi-team, Shawn Marion/Hedo Turkoglu-like deal.
5. Kon Knueppel holds off Cooper Flagg for Rookie of the Year
This would have been a mild take just a few weeks ago, but Flagg has really come on of late, and the Mavericks are starting to win some games. Knueppel won’t have team wins going for him — that’s an unfair barometer for any rookie — and he’ll have to climb uphill against the fact that Flagg was the No. 1 pick and presumptive ROY. It won’t be easy, and Flagg is really good already.
So what does Knueppel have to do? Well, he’s averaging almost 20 points per game on remarkable efficiency for a moderately high-usage rookie. This is more on his plate than almost anyone expected, and there’s been next to no learning curve. If he were just hot from three, you could dismiss some of the start, but Knueppel can finish at the rim, his passing is very advanced for a rookie wing, and he brings a level of physicality that allows him to be helpful on the glass and a non-zero on defence.
Even if this one ends up wrong, the Hornets have to be thrilled with their No. 4 pick and how a few of their young pieces have looked together early on. Things finally don’t feel as bleak in Charlotte.
Sub-prediction: It’s Harper, not Flagg or Kneuppel, who has the best sophomore year.
6. The Dunk Contest is the best it’s been since Toronto in 2016
Charlie Brown. A football. Lucy. Sue me, I remain a dunk contest believer.
The league has ample fun, young dunkers like Shaedon Sharpe and VJ Edgecombe who could use the event as a platform for popularity. You could throw the Thompson twins against each other. I don’t really believe the veteran stars who have teased participating, but Morant, Giannis Antetokounmpo, and the Dunking Rock-Austin of Zach LaVine and Aaron Gordon have all done just that. Wemby could dunk from where you’re sitting right now.
I get it. You’ve bit on the pump fake before. So many dunks have been done, there have been too many gimmicks, and the GOAT G League dunker is beating all the full-time NBA guys. There’s too much talent not to stumble into a great dunk-off once every few years, and this will be the one.
Sub-prediction: I’m never allowed to do All-Star week shows again if this one is wrong.
Quick hits
7. The Warriors trade Draymond Green. Jonathan Kuminga is the more obvious choice, but where’s the bold (or fun) in that?
8. Cam Boozer is selected ahead of Darryn Peterson. Both are great; passing on Peterson is a mistake.
9. A year or two early: The NBA investing in a European league further erodes the G League talent pool, in a way the league eventually needs to address.
10. Not particularly bold to close: The Raptors make the playoffs, lose in the first round, and trade at least one starter in July.
