NBA Future of the Franchise Rankings

After a tumultuous trade deadline, which teams are most likely to win titles over the next 10 seasons?

Perhaps it’s appropriate that, in a world that increasingly seems to be accelerating in exciting and dangerous ways as we pass the quarter pole of the 21st century, we just witnessed one of the craziest NBA trade deadlines of all time.

No, nothing else matched the Lakers’ shocking deal for Luka Doncic. But seven other former All-Stars — Anthony Davis, Jimmy Butler, De’Aaron Fox, Zach LaVine, Brandon Ingram, Andrew Wiggins and Khris Middleton — also changed hands. Nothing is off the table: the Warriors even contemplated reuniting Kevin Durant with Steph Curry.

So, I want to survey the league’s reshaped landscape with an eye toward the future. Let’s ask a not-so-simple question:

Suppose I gave you $10,000 for every NBA title a team wins over the next 10 seasons — from this year (2024-25) through 2033-34. In which order would you draft the 30 franchises?

In other words, who has the most plausible pathway toward a title — or multiple titles?

This distinction makes a difference: it’s possible that, for instance, a veteran team that mortgaged its future has a 30 percent chance at a title this year but then is drawing nearly dead after that, while a rebuilding team has a 20 percent chance of drafting or acquiring a superstar that will bring them three championships. The latter squad would rank higher on this list since it has a higher expected value — 0.6 expected championships versus 0.3.

I can’t emphasize enough that titles are the only thing that matters here. Many of the teams that rank poorly on this list are, in fact, pretty good — but have few routes toward a title now or in the near future.

This is not entirely an original concept. Essentially, it’s a blend of Tom Haberstroh’s Title Tiers — which contemplate the same question but only for the current season — and ESPN’s Future Power Rankings, but the ESPN rankings only look three years ahead and don’t place the same emphasis on championships.

At first, I took an approach that closely resembled ESPN’s, building a spreadsheet that rated each franchise from 0 to 10 in various categories, giving half the weight to the quality of the players on the roster (or likely to be on the roster¹) at various stages over the next ten years, and the other half to four categories that concern how much of an arsenal it has to improve: a) its draft capital; b) its financial resources and the flexibility of its cap sheet; c) the quality of its management, coaching and player development capabilities; and d) its market and brand value, with an eye toward which teams can attract future talent in a player empowerment era.

That provided a helpful start — indeed, you’ll see me emphasize these categories throughout these rankings — but didn’t quite capture what I was going for. The spreadsheet approach underestimated the impact of two things: the disproportionate effect of superstar talent — empirically, superstars are far more likely to win titles than mere All-Stars — and the importance of timelines. A team whose stars are at different points on the aging curve may not have a plausible pathway toward a championship peak in any given season. And with 30 teams in the NBA, at least one of which already looks like a budding dynasty, title contention is a high bar.

Another approach was evaluating The Ringer’s list of the top 100 NBA players and Ringer boss Bill Simmons’s rankings of the top NBA trade value assets. Being roughly in the top 100 players — so the third- or fourth-best player on a team — is approximately the threshold at which players begin to contribute to “championship equity,” potentially elevating a team into a higher title tier. So, I devised a nonlinear formula that heavily emphasizes being toward the top of the list. The #1-ranked player is worth 100 points, while the #10 player is worth about half that (54 points), and the 100th-best player is worth much less (8 points). Here are those numbers:

This is helpful. The current value list lines up reasonably closely with each franchise’s title odds for this season. Even if you agree with Simmons’s rankings, though — and I mostly do — the future is murkier because the list ignores the other categories like draft assets. So while this provides for a reasonable gut check, there's no cute algorithmic workaround: we're going to have to do this by hand. Let’s start at the bottom of the list and move upward.

30. Los Angeles Clippers

29. Phoenix Suns

These teams went all-in on star trios — Kawhi Leonard, Paul George and James Harden for the Clippers, and Kevin Durant, Devin Booker and Bradley Beal for the Suns — and lost the pot.

Seriously, it’s too late. The Suns are only a game above .500 team this year and are +7000 (roughly a 1 in 70 chance) to win the title. The Clippers have been better and have slightly shorter odds (+3500) but are basically in the same bucket. In Phoenix, Beal was never a superstar to begin with and now probably has the worst contract in the league, and the Suns are waving the white flag to the point that Durant was reportedly on the block; in Clipperland, George is already out the door.

The Clipper bet looks better in retrospect. They got five seasons with the Kawhi-PG3 combo on the books, though Leonard missed one of them entirely due to injury. But they didn’t get much of a return. The Clips began the season as the title favorite in 2019-20, though the furthest they’d get was losing in the Western Conference Finals in the bubble playoffs of 2021. The Suns’ experiment was probably doomed from the start, conversely, essentially spinning gold into straw by turning a young team that had reached the NBA Finals in 2021 and won 64 games in 2022 into a geriatric one.

It’s hard to underemphasize how much each team has completely bared its cupboard. The Clippers don’t have control of any of their own first-round picks until 2030, and the Suns don’t until 2032. So even though a 10-year time horizon is pretty generous — and the Suns now seem to recognize the gravity of their situation — the rebuilds will take a long time. Nevertheless, I’d put money on the Suns before the Clippers if you gave me a free bet. The reason is simple: Durant and Booker are at least valuable trade chips, whereas the salvage value of anyone on the Clippers’ roster is lower.

28. Sacramento Kings

27. Chicago Bulls

These two frequent trade partners demonstrate the Future of the Franchise concept. They’ve emphasized being “competitive” over having championship equity, and so they rank poorly. The Kings just gave up their best young player, Fox, in a package centered around the Bulls’ Zach Levine rather than future assets. The Bulls have at least shown some capacity for player development, turning players like Coby White into capable starters, but mostly are a shop of spare parts. Both teams rank below average in draft capital despite not being remotely serious title contenders now; I rank Chicago a notch higher just because the Bulls have a better brand that could be more attractive to star talent toward the end of the 10-year window.

26. Toronto Raptors

Once a franchise I admired so much that I named my projection system (RAPTOR) after them, the Raptors now seem determined to follow a Bulls/Kings path. I dropped their ranking significantly after the Ingram trade; he’s a slightly above-average player who’s missed most of the year with injury in what’s supposed to be his peak, age-27 season and is now up for an extension would pay him north of $50 million per season. If the Raptors ink the max deal — and presumably, they wouldn’t have traded for Ingram if they didn’t plan an extension — they’ll have something like $175 million tied up in 2026-27 on Ingram, Scottie Barnes, Immanuel Quickley, RJ Barrett and Jacob Poetel (who has a player option). No, Stanley Bear, no!! That’s a roster that looks destined for the play-in game. While you could have made a glass-half-full case for the Raptors before the Ingram deal — they had decent draft capital plus Barnes, a young player who could figure onto a future championship-caliber roster, though probably as a #2 option — the Stanley Cup is now likely to return to Canada before another NBA title.

25. Dallas Mavericks