NBA offseason grades for every West team: Rockets ace summer, Lakers and Mavericks fall short, one team fails

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Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. It’s the NBA offseason. The story of the Eastern Conference is how weak and vulnerable it is. The story of the Western Conference, however, is the escalating arms race between the seemingly endless list of teams eager to topple a nascent dynasty. We’ve been doing this for 25 years. Whether it’s been the Lakers or the Spurs or the Warriors or now the Thunder, this is a conference that’s never considered notions of weakness or vulnerability. It was and remains a bloodbath.

The maturing monster in Oklahoma City captured its first championship in June, but very few of its Western Conference rivals appear ready to lie down and accept a second. The top of the conference is better now than it was a year ago. Some teams in the middle will be better as well. The Jazz are the only team here that appears comfortable tanking. The Pelicans had the NBA’s fourth-worst record a year ago and even they’re trading unprotected picks. Almost everyone here wants to win, and most of them probably could if they played in cities closer to the Atlantic Ocean than the Pacific.

Alas, conference alignment is out of their hands, but their offseason moves were not. Everyone here understood the assignment: you’re either gearing up to challenge the Thunder now, or you’re gearing up to battle the Thunder later. We’re grading every Western Conference offseason largely on that metric. The teams that took meaningful steps toward eventually challenging the Thunder did well. The ones who did not? Well, scroll down a while, and that’s where you’ll find them.

The Rockets functionally changed three slots in their lineup this offseason: perimeter scorer, 3-and-D wing and third center. Let’s take a look at who came and who left.

• Kevin Durant, one of the greatest scorers in NBA history, replaces Jalen Green, whose shooting percentages from last season would represent post-rookie year career-lows for Durant in almost every category. Green played seven playoff games last spring and was held to single digits in four of them. Durant has played 170 playoff games and never been held to single digits in any of them, even the one in which he literally played 12 minutes before tearing his Achilles.
• Dorian Finney-Smith replaces Dillon Brooks. Finney-Smith has been the slightly superior 3-point shooter of the two for their careers. Brooks can create a bit more individual offense. Both are strong defenders, with the metrics mixed on who they prefer. Finney-Smith is three years older, but will make around $14 million less over the next two seasons and his contract beyond that is not guaranteed.
• Clint Capela replaces Jock Landale. Landale has started 11 games in his career and never averaged even 15 minutes per game. Capela has been a full-time starter in eight of his 11 NBA seasons.

Everything else is functionally the same, aside from the internal development of their young players. They’ve essentially only proved, and all they lost in these exchanges has been Cam Whitmore, a player they didn’t have minutes for anyway, and the No. 10 overall pick, whom they also wouldn’t have been able to find playing time for considering what happened to No. 3 overall pick Reed Sheppard last year. They paid nothing substantial and improved substantially. This was a practically flawless offseason for Rafael Stone. He even convinced Fred VanVleet to practically cut his salary in half.

Virtually everything is still on the table for Houston. If the Rockets want to patiently let their youngsters develop, they can do that. If they want to make another star trade, they can do that. Their roster is so deep that they’re insulated against any injury besides one to Durant. Capela is essentially here to keep Steven Adams fresh for the playoffs. Sheppard is a top-three pick facing almost no pressure. This roster is great at the top, remarkably deep and completely flexible. No notes. Keep crushing it, Houston.

The unprotected 2032 first-round Denver sent Brooklyn is immediately among the better owed first-round picks in basketball. Nikola Jokić will be 37 when it conveys. It was not to be traded lightly, but it needed to get traded. Denver will never have a better chance to win championships than it does right now. It might be 50 years before the Nuggets get another Jokić. They have to maximize him, and they’ve done their part this offseason.

Cam Johnson is a better player than Michael Porter Jr. in a vacuum. They’re similarly gifted shooters, but Johnson offers sorely needed creativity off the dribble and slightly superior defense. However, the $17 million difference in their salaries opened several significant doors for Denver. It immediately used some of that created flexibility to add Jonas Valančiūnas, perhaps the best backup center of the Jokić era, which is pretty important given what a problem area that has always been. 

Now, Valančiūnas may want to return to Europe. For now, they do not appear inclined to let him, but even if they need to, that trade comes with meaningful benefits. It got them off Dario Šarić, who was practically dead money, and the knowledge that Valančiūnas may want to leave could make him a valuable trade chip. Say they wanted to use his $10 million salary to match money in a trade. Another team could trade for him expecting to buy him out and avoid his salary. This might eventually be a sneaky way out of Zeke Nnaji‘s awful contract. Denver could aggregate the two of them, bring in a roughly $20 million player, and then the other team could immediately save a big chunk of that money through a buyout.

The Nuggets crushed the minimum market, adding former Denver champion Bruce Brown along with Tim Hardaway Jr., exactly the sort of bench gunner that the team that took the fewest 3s in basketball last season needed. Now Denver sits in an advantageous position. It is straddling the luxury tax line going into the season. There is a chance they try to duck it entirely, and they wouldn’t need to get meaningfully worse to do so in-season. Doing so would be helpful long-term for Denver, but that doesn’t necessarily impede more short-term improvement. If a genuine opportunity for a significant upgrade arises on the trade or buyout market, they can use the full mid-level exception, which they haven’t touched yet, to go up to the first apron and get even better. That’s where Denver sits today: better than last year already, and with even more room to pounce on the right opportunity. Even if they do wind up ducking the tax, well, to be frank, they’ve earned it.

The Clippers are a complicated team to grade because, while not finalized, the widespread expectation is that they are about to add Bradley Beal for practically nothing. Beal is, at this stage of his career, roughly a $20 million player. That’s disastrous at the $50 million or so he was earning last year… but it’s an enormous bargain at the $5 million or so left on their mid-level exception. We’re sort of splitting the difference with this grade. The Clippers move up to a “B+” with Beal and down to a “B-” without him.

Even if they don’t get him, this offseason has been a success. Their two biggest weaknesses last season were backup point guard and backup center. They addressed the latter in spades. Brook Lopez can’t play starter minutes anymore, but he’s an enormously valuable backup whose shooting unlocks a lot for a team with this many offensively deficient defenders (Kris Dunn and Derrick Jones Jr., specifically). John Collins may start at power forward. He may be a backup there, or he may play some backup center. Ty Lue will experiment with just about everything, and he can do it all under the right circumstances. He’s another look the Clippers didn’t have last year. An athletic big man like him is another valuable wrinkle, especially in pick-and-roll with James Harden.

All they’ve lost in that exchange is Norman Powell, whom they didn’t want to extend anyway. If they get Beal? Great. He’s replaced and the Clippers have their bench creator. Even if not, though, they have Bogdan Bogdanović in the short term and his salary to flip in a trade in the longer term. We just saw the Jazz pay a second-round pick to swap Collin Sexton for a post-prime Jusuf Nurkić. The Kings have been trying and failing to dump Malik Monk‘s contract. Small, offense-centric guards are frankly a dime a dozen right now. The Clippers can go get another one if necessary. That they’ve improved this much while also maintaining paths to max cap space in either 2026 or 2027 is the cherry on top. The Clippers were widely criticized for letting Paul George walk for nothing, but right now, that looks like a stroke of genius.

Thunder: B

Nothing flashy, but what did you expect out of a 68-win defending champion? The Thunder are bringing everyone that mattered from last year’s team and they’ve still managed to duck the tax. The moves on the fringes were nice. They got Jaylin Williams and Ajay Mitchell on three-year bargains by taking advantage of restricted free agency. Drafting Thomas Sorber was a smart way to try to get ahead of the likelihood that they lose Isaiah Hartenstein in a year. Oh yea, and Nikola Topić will be healthy next year, so good luck dealing with another Thunder lottery pick. So again, they didn’t do anything substantial. This was just Sam Presti performing routine maintenance on his Ferrari.

Spurs: B

As we’ll cover more thoroughly with another team in this state, you don’t get credit for luck. The Spurs did well to draft Dylan Harper, but that was a gift from the lottery gods, not exactly wise management, but San Antonio did do well in two other important areas that lead to this grade.

The first is, obviously, improving. Luke Kornet and Kelly Olynyk aren’t exactly stars, but they’re the sort of frontcourt depth San Antonio clearly needed. Harper may have been an obvious pick, but landing Carter Bryant, a prototypical 3-and-D prospect, was a real win at No. 14. They also managed to clear out most of the flotsam. This is a key moment for almost every aspiring contender that spent years stacking youngsters. Oklahoma City dumped most of its extraneous youth in the Gordon Hayward trade. Houston did it by sending Usman Garuba and TyTy Washington to Atlanta in 2023. 

It’s a necessary step in actually trying to win games. The Malaki Branhams and Blake Wesleys are gone now. Everyone who gets minutes is going to be either a legitimately good NBA player or a prospect with enough upside that playing time is still warranted. When we talk about young teams improving, we so often frame the conversation around stars developed or acquired. That is typically how the jump from “good” to “great” happens, but the jump from “bad” to “good,” which is the one San Antonio is actually trying to make this season, very often comes when a team just stops wasting minutes on players who don’t deserve them.

The other good decision here was not trading for Kevin Durant. Could he have helped them? Well… yeah… he’s Kevin Durant. But Houston had legitimate 2026 championship aspirations. San Antonio likely did not. The Spurs are still too young. They have no playoff experience. Waiting for a bigger, younger, Greek-er fish made more sense for them. It was wise restraint on their part. They don’t have to contend for the title yet. They’re going to be able to do it for a long, long time if they get the next couple of years right. This summer was a first step, and a good one. They got better without giving away anything that mattered.

The Desmond Bane trade was a win-win for both sides. Orlando credibly believed it was a Bane away from meaningful contention in the East. The Grizzlies wisely acknowledged that they were further away and got a significant return. I’m lower on the quality of the four first-round picks they got than most, but you can’t argue with the quantity and the unprotected nature of those picks. Memphis already used one of those Orlando picks to jump up to No. 11 and get Cedric Coward. The idea here is seemingly to recreate Bane in the aggregate. Practically half of the Memphis roster is now promising young players between the ages of 21 and 25 who have multiple years of team control on seven-figure salaries. Not a bad place to be as you attempt to figure out what’s next in a loaded West. Ty Jerome is underpaid based on a single bad playoff series, but on a per-minute basis, he was pretty easily the NBA‘s best reserve last season.

The fundamental question here is whether or not Ja Morant and Jaren Jackson can be the two best players on a high-level winner once both are earning market value. I’ve made my feelings clear on the matter in the past: I thought the Grizzlies should have rebuilt after the Bane trade, but there is an entirely reasonable argument for the other side. Jackson is a former Defensive Player of the Year who’s never been better offensively. Morant has shown up on MVP ballots when healthy. The Grizzlies now have the assets to trade for whatever they want around them if they want to go back all-in. They can also play this slowly, see how the younger players grow and adjust from there.

Where I ding Memphis slightly, and others likely wouldn’t, is in how much more difficult stepping back and rebuilding becomes a year or two from now if this doesn’t work. The difficulties in moving Morant are well-chronicled. I’d offer Utah as an example of where the Jackson contract could become dangerous. The Jazz are offloading veterans left and right. A year ago, they could have moved Lauri Markkanen for a bounty because he had a well below-market contract almost any team could fit onto its books. They elected to turn Golden State down and extend him. Now, there doesn’t seem to be nearly as much of a market for him on a max deal as there used to be. If Memphis does decide in a year or two they want to move him, it’s likely going to be far harder than it would have been this offseason on his pre-extension cap figure. That doesn’t make this a bad offseason, though, just one in which the team went in a different albeit defensible direction than I would have.

Jazz: C+

No matter where you fall on how Ace Bailey handled the draft process, getting his combination of physical tools and basketball skills at No. 5 is extremely rare. That is by no means a guarantee of NBA success, but just think of the players he’s compared to. Kevin Durant went No. 2, and even that was only because we thought the No. 1 pick would be the next Patrick Ewing. Brandon Ingram went No. 2. Michael Porter Jr. was the top prospect in his high school class and likely would have been a top-three pick if not his back injury. Healthy, big wings with elite shotmaking upside never fall to No. 5. That doesn’t mean he’ll realize that upside. It just means Utah got a level of prospect typically not available at its slot.

The returns for the veterans they moved were underwhelming, and you can certainly question the process that got them there. Utah has long allowed great to be the enemy of good, refusing to make trades they deem anything less than home run victories. They could have moved Collin Sexton or Jordan Clarkson for positive value at previous deadlines. Instead, they paid a second-round pick to turn Sexton into a worse player and just bought Clarkson out. The financial savings Utah got in the John Collins trade could be meaningful. The Jazz now have pathways into either the trade facilitator market or restricted free agency. Still, how they use that space remains to be seen, and Collins is on an expiring deal, so it’s not as though long-term savings are coming here.

Still, it was smart of Utah to just get rid of those guys however they could. Few teams would have been as brazen about tanking as they now are, and they badly needed to clear the veterans out to create minutes for their young guys. Doing so was good work. It wasn’t a groundbreaking offseason, but it was on-balance a good one.

The only new player on the roster so far is No. 17 pick Joan Beringer. Time will tell what he turns into, but the truth is, Minnesota did its work for the 2025-26 offseason back in 2024, when it aggressively moved up to land Rob Dillingham and then drafted Terrence Shannon Jr. later in the first round. The Timberwolves have understood for some time that they were likely to lose Nickeil Alexander-Walker. It just wouldn’t have been responsible for this team at this time to go into the second apron again next season. They have one more second-apron season in this stretch before a first-round pick drops to No. 30, and this wasn’t the time to spend it.

They prepared for that loss ahead of time. They kept everyone else. Without knowing how prepared Dillingham and Shannon are to fill in for that essential loss (and likely to nudge their way into some of Mike Conley‘s minutes as well), it’s hard to give Minnesota a good or bad grade. We’re in wait-and-see mode.

I’d nudge some front offices to get a bit more aggressive in reshaping the roster given the deficiencies Oklahoma City exposed, but truthfully, if Minnesota doesn’t make a big move, it’s because one isn’t available. The Timberwolves would likely have Kevin Durant right now if he’d wanted to play for them. That’s out of their hands. Tim Connelly is always willing and eager to take a big swing when available, so I’d fully expect one to come in the next year or two. Damian Lillard is an obvious fit here. The Timberwolves are the best team in the NBA right now that doesn’t have a long-term solution at starting point guard, and they have no other way of accessing his level of talent given their financial situation. If they could find a way to steal him after getting stretched, even if he has to miss this season, that would be an enormous win. For now, though? Average grade, but trust in this front office to figure things out.

Broadly speaking, the Suns did a good job when it came to player acquisition this offseason. Landing Khaman Maluach at No. 10 did involve luck, but it wasn’t lottery luck at least. Mark Williams was the right sort of risk for this team at this specific point. Health is obviously a major concern, but given their asset limitations, they just had no other way of landing someone this talented. After two years with absolutely nothing at center, there’s a promising rotation here. Jalen Green is flawed and was a mess in the playoffs, but his athleticism pairs nicely with Devin Booker‘s shotmaking. If he can ever harness it into the rim-attacking force he should be, look out.

It’s the financial stuff here that’s so perplexing. At least when Milwaukee waived-and-stretched Damian Lillard, it did so to add a high-impact player in Myles Turner. Phoenix is expected to waive-and-stretch Bradley Beal as well… but not to bring someone in. Rather, they’re just ducking the luxury tax and the second apron. Now, there are significant benefits to doing so. Phoenix doesn’t want another frozen draft pick, after all. The Suns will have their 2033 first-round pick at their disposal as a trade chip starting next summer, and if they stay below the tax line next year as well, they’ll fully reset their repeater tax clock. That’s worth tens, maybe hundreds of millions of dollars in real cash.

It just doesn’t make them a better basketball team. They’re not suddenly going to be flush with cap space. In fact, they’re going to have a dead cap hit in the neighborhood of $20 million for the next five years. With Devin Booker recently adding two supermax seasons to the end of his current deal, the Suns are going to be pretty limited financially for the foreseeable future. They don’t have draft picks to trade. They just don’t have obvious ways of improving. I was in the “trade Booker” camp before the offseason. Now, with that monster extension on the back end of his contract, that ship might have sailed. He has less trade value than he did a month ago, and the Suns seem destined to hover around play-in purgatory. Most of the damage may have been over the past few years, but this offseason was a possible inflection point. Instead, they doubled down on a Booker era with minimal remaining upside. They even seem like they’re planning to play him out of position again, though a potential reunion with Chris Paul could alleviate those concerns.

Lakers: C-

My feelings on the Lakers are somewhat similar to my feelings about the Suns. I like the players they added. Getting a Clint Capela or Luke Kornet really served no one. This team needed an upside play at center to compete. Deandre Ayton at a discount is a good one. Jake LaRavia isn’t the sort of player this team needed, but he’s good nonetheless and young enough to still meaningfully improve.

The question here is the vision and the execution. Think about the Ayton contract for a moment. If he’s bad, he’ll use his player option to opt in and clog the Laker books for an extra season. If he breaks out as hoped, his contract includes only one guaranteed year. He’ll opt out and the Lakers will only have non-Bird Rights on him, so they’ll have to pay him using cap space. That not only potentially limits what other moves the Lakers can make, but recreates the risk of him turning back into a pumpkin as he did after his last payday. There’s not much long-term upside here beyond potentially securing Ayton as a long-term starting center at market value. Considering their fixation on 2027 cap space, though, they don’t seem too eager to pay him long-term.

So really, the idea of adding Ayton is the enormous possible short-term surplus value he could generate if he turns back into the player he was at his Phoenix peak. That’s not a crazy bet. It’s just incongruous with the rest of the Laker offseason thus far. By all accounts, this is not a team focused on winning the 2026 championship, specifically. That’s what LeBron James is so mad about. That’s why they let Dorian Finney-Smith walk, and the irony of that is that he signed a contract in Houston that is structured without guaranteed money beyond the summer of 2027. Would he have signed such a contract with the Lakers? Probably not given the acrimonious rumors surrounding his departure.

It doesn’t seem as though the Lakers are actively building toward anything. It feels like they’re stalling, just waiting for the next famous guy to say “I want to be a Laker” rather than actively setting themselves up for meaningful improvement. This has been one of the great flaws in this front office for years now. Maybe Mark Walter fixes it. For now, though, the Lakers have assembled a team that seems like it’s heading for another first-round exit. Their relationship with James, the player who more or less saved them from the post-Kobe Bryant desert they were wandering in 2018, seems frayed, and that’s not exactly a great look with Luka Dončić awaiting extension-eligibility. Neither is losing one of his favorite teammates in Finney-Smith. They had months to come to some sort of positive resolution with James about his and their plans. If they’ve done so as of now, we haven’t heard about it. It seems as though we’re headed for another roller-coaster of a season in Lakerland. For Dončić’s sake, let’s hope Walter cleans up this organization before next summer.

The Jrue Holiday trade just didn’t make sense. They needed to move Anfernee Simons to open up minutes and shots for Scoot Henderson and Shaedon Sharpe, but they didn’t need to take on a 35-year-old with three years and more than $100 million left on his contract to do that. Even if he maintains his performance from last season, he was already meaningfully declining and the Blazers were already loaded with perimeter defense. Mentorship is nice, and Holiday is as well-regarded as any teammate in basketball. It’s just not something a team needs to pay nine figures for. Ironically, it might have been something they could have gotten for far cheaper anyway. If they’d known Lillard was going to get out of Milwaukee this offseason, it might have made sense for them to work with him on an arrangement in which he rehabs in their facility and with their doctors just to have him around the building for the benefit of their youngsters. He’ll presumably be in Portland while he recovers to be near his kids.

The Yang Hansen pick was simply a front office falling in love with a specific player. Did they overdraft him based on consensus? Yes. It will take years to figure out whether or not that decision was warranted. At least they picked up an extra first-round pick to do so in moving down from No. 11 to No. 16. The Ayton buyout made sense. They had too many bigs anyway, and clearing out the full mid-level exception was nice. They just haven’t been able to use it yet. It can be used as a trade exception, though, so there’s plenty of time. Hopefully they can find shooting with it, because right now, their offense just isn’t viable as currently constructed.

The best thing that happened for Portland this offseason was ironically something it did not control. Milwaukee didn’t trade Giannis Antetokounmpo, but its desperation following the decision to waive-and-stretch Lillard to add Turner is palpable. The Blazers control Milwaukee’s first-round picks from 2028 through 2030. Had the Bucks moved Antetokounmpo this offseason, they might have had time to recover in time for 2028 and send Portland less valuable picks. Now? It looks like this situation is going to drag out a bit. The longer it takes, the better for Portland. They want him moved as close to 2028 as possible so they can reap the immediate rewards of a Milwaukee rebuild.

As we made clear with the Spurs, you do not get credit for lottery luck. Despite what Nico Harrison said, fortune did not favor the bold here. It favored the foolish. Dallas made a historically bad trade and got bailed out of it by perhaps the single most stunning stroke of lottery luck in NBA history. That should have been a sign from the universe for the Mavericks to bail out of Harrison’s harebrained defense and Nike clients win championships scheme. Instead, they dug in further, extending Daniel Gafford and trading none of their surplus size.

The correct course here, especially with Kyrie Irving openly telling fans not to count on him playing this season, would have been to fire Harrison, tear down his team, and completely realign around Cooper Flagg‘s timeline. Anthony Davis could have netted a haul. There are still valuable role players here. But those players do not make a coherent team. This roster is entirely unbalanced. Even if you’re trying to win, why on Earth do you need this many forwards and bigs? D’Angelo Russell might have been decent value at the taxpayer mid-level exception, but he’s the only guard on the roster right now that can create anything off of the dribble. Is Flagg going to play out of position all year? Given the depth chart, he’s presumably starting at small forward. Jason Kidd has even talked about letting him play some point guard. That’s a fine developmental move. It won’t help them win games right away.

The ironic thing about this “defense wins championship” plan Harrison has concocted is that, for all he’s invested, he hasn’t built what is obviously a championship-caliber defense. The Mavericks are really, really big. That tends to lead to defensive success. But the team they’re trying to beat to reach the Finals is the Thunder. They beat them two years ago with Derrick Jones Jr. as their primary point of attack defender against Shai Gilgeous-Alexander. They don’t have a perimeter stopper near Jones’ level anymore. You could maybe squint and see a win-now scenario here. Maybe Davis stays healthy, Irving comes back and Flagg is even better than expected. But even if all of that happens, the roster just doesn’t make enough sense for this team to credibly compete for a title. They need more shot-creation, more shooting and more perimeter defense. The likelier course here is that Irving isn’t healthy enough for them to contend this year, and then age- and injury-related decline from Irving and Davis dooms any subsequent championship attempts. By the time they acknowledge their mistake, it will be too late to fix it, and rebuilding around Flagg’s timeline on the fly a few years from now will be that much harder.

We all made Bulls-West jokes at the deadline, and they were warranted given the deluge of former literal Bulls that Sacramento managed to acquire over the course of the 2024-25 league year. This summer represents something more spiritual though, a true passing of the torch in which the Kings officially embodied the “all that matters is the No. 10 seed” spirit that has defined Chicago for so long.

Dennis Schröder is a good NBA player. He is also on his 10th NBA team, a staggering eight of which have now come since the 2021-22 campaign. Building an offseason around landing him as the starting point guard for a franchise that recently employed both De’Aaron Fox and Tyrese Haliburton is deeply sad for one of the NBA‘s best fanbases. He’s well below average as a playmaker by starting point guard standards. He wants to try to score. So does everyone else on this roster. They tried and failed to move Malik Monk. Zach LaVine is a better, but older, more injury-prone and more expensive version of him. DeMar DeRozan is still here because there’s a limited market for soon-to-be-36-year-olds who don’t like to shoot 3s or defend. They’re even trying to get Jonathan Kuminga, checking both the Chicago “buy high on a former lottery pick” box and Vivek Ranadive’s “pursue a former Warrior” box. Does anyone here besides Keon Ellis plan to defend?

Speaking of which, let’s get nerdy for a second. The Kings had a team option for Ellis for essentially minimum money. Had they declined that option, they could have made him a restricted free agent, limited his market and re-signed him to a team-friendly deal. The Thunder do this basically every summer. They’ve locked up Lu Dort, Isaiah Joe, Aaron Wiggins and Jaylin Williams to long-term deals this way. Instead, the Kings picked up the option. That means they get Ellis for cheap this season… but he’s unrestricted next summer if he doesn’t extend. Suddenly, instead of Sacramento having the leverage, Ellis does. If they don’t extend him at the rate he wants, they lose him for nothing. As a general rule, a team that has made the playoffs once in the past 19 seasons should try to emulate Sam Presti’s roster-building approaches. That’s not what the Kings did.

Dallas has a poorly conceived plan… but at least it’s a plan. The Mavericks genuinely think what they’re doing will lead to a championship even if the odds suggest it won’t. But the Kings? It really seems as though their ambitions don’t extend beyond the Play-In Tournament anymore. That’s a really disappointing turn of events for a team that looked so promising a few short years ago.

Pelicans: F

I wrote 4,000 words about why hiring Joe Dumars was a bad idea and somehow I think I undersold it. His first move was to hire Troy Weaver, the architect of Detroit’s historic 28-game losing streak, as his top deputy. Let’s go through their offseason move by move…

• Took on over $40 million in 2026-27 salary by swapping the expiring contracts of C.J. McCollum and Kelly Olynyk for Jordan Poole and Saddiq Bey. Washington moved Poole at essentially the first opportunity. Bey is coming off of a torn ACL.
• Signed Kevon Looney to a deal that guarantees him more millions of dollars (16 over two years) than he averaged minutes last season (15). He is also a center that doesn’t shoot 3s. Speaking of which…
• Used the No. 7 overall pick on Jeremiah Fears. That was roughly his draft range. Except he shot 28.4% on 3s last season.
• Traded Indiana’s top-four protected 2026 first-round pick for the No. 23 overall pick less than a week before Tyrese Haliburton tore his Achilles tendon. Was there a reason to execute this trade before the Finals were over? Certainly not a visible one.
• Took that No. 23 overall pick and packaged it with their own unprotected 2026 first-round pick, which comes with swap rights with Milwaukee attached, to get the No. 13 pick, which they used on Maryland big man Derik Queen, who, yet again, does not shoot 3s.

Why do we keep fixating on the 3s? Because Zion Williamson is still on the team. The best version of Williamson is the one who has the ball in his hands and is surrounded by shooting. The Pelicans have mostly done the opposite this season, surrounding him with players that want the ball and don’t really space the floor. That would seemingly indicate that they plan to trade Williamson, except, you know what a team planning to give away its best player usually wants to have? Its own first-round pick in the subsequent season. So no matter what the Pelicans ultimately do here, it’s incoherent roster-building.

While we’re doing this, let’s talk about the manner in which the Pelicans acquired the Queen pick. If they were desperate enough to give up what is almost inarguably the single most valuable traded draft pick in all of basketball to get him… why did they only move up to No. 13? Surely at least one team picking between No. 8 and No. 12 would have been interested in such a trade, right? Yet there has been no reporting suggesting it was offered to them. Former Pelicans executive Bryson Graham is now with the Hawks. That seems like the likeliest reason Atlanta got the deal. But that means the Pelicans easily could have lost the player they were apparently desperate to get. They took an enormous risk by letting him fall to No. 13. They didn’t even execute their overpay properly.

The Pelicans were hardly in an ideal position when they fired David Griffin, but he had a strong draft track record and his teams played reasonably well when healthy. Dumars and Weaver have been on the job for a single offseason and the roster is already an incomprehensible mess. The pieces don’t fit. They overpaid for practically everyone they added. There’s just no obvious way to defend the moves the Pelicans made without blindly hoping that the rookies are just far better than we expect them to be. If that doesn’t happen, Dumars and Weaver have already done quite a bit of damage to the team and asset collection Griffin left them.

Warriors: Incomplete

The Warriors haven’t added a single player yet. It seems as though everything is getting held up by Jonathan Kuminga‘s restricted free agency, as their plans seem to be reliant on using him as a trade chip to add talent. They have been heavily linked to former Celtics center Al Horford, who would be a perfect fit given his shooting, passing and remarkable ability to defend the perimeter given his age. However, he’s not on the team yet, and until they actually add him, it feels unfair to actually grade Golden State. The likeliest explanation here is that they need Kuminga’s situation settled to know how much they can pay Horford while still avoiding either the luxury tax or first apron (depending on their goal). We’ll revisit Golden State when there’s some resolution here. However, the concept of adding Horford and getting assets back for Kuminga makes sense. If they can execute the plan, it’s a good one.

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Ansetzungen raus – Knallstart für SCM und Füchse in der Champions League

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