NBA Future of the Franchise Rankings III
Our 3 experts look 10 years ahead to rank all 30 NBA teams in future title odds.
A year ago, after a trade so shocking that it literally made me wonder whether I was hallucinating1 sent Luka Doncic to Los Angeles, I ranked all 30 NBA teams by a deceptively simple criterion: their likelihood of winning future championships over the next 10 NBA seasons. The Future of the Franchise rankings have since turned into one of my very favorite Silver Bulletin features. In fact, we repeated the exercise in July, inviting two additional judges, Jeremias Engelmann and Joseph George, to the panel. (Joseph is Silver Bulletin’s Assistant Sports Analyst; Jeremias is the developer of Real Plus-Minus and a former analyst for the Mavericks and Suns whose excellent work can be found at xRAPM.com and the highly recommended 5x5.)
The timing is perfect for another round of FotF. The NBA will return to action tonight after an All-Star break that featured more discussion about tanking than basketball. To be honest, we’ll probably invite ourselves to the tanking party at some point. (There’s an anti-tanking take halfway done in the drafts folder.) But today, let’s talk some hoops.
For most of the league — there are roughly a half-dozen exceptions — we can find at least something to feel optimistic about. But let’s get this out of the way: we’re unapologetically ringmaxxing here. Consistent with NBA’s ring culture taken to its logical extreme, titles are literally all that matter for FotF, not mere pretty-goodness.
More specifically, we’re looking at the span from this year’s championship (2026) all the way through … 2035. I used the plural of “championship(s)” because multiple titles count more.2 Although there have been seven distinct title-holders in the past seven NBA seasons, that’s, historically speaking, an outlier. We’re looking at which teams have the ingredients to build a potential dynasty.
The talent on the roster matters, obviously — especially high-end talent. But so does draft equity, the cap sheet, managerial acumen, the allure of each market in attracting future talent in the player empowerment era — and the timelines for getting all of these things to perfectly align when the default chance of winning a championship is just 1 in 30. Indeed, I don’t think there’s any strictly algorithmic way to do this3, and there’s quite a bit more disagreement among the panel than during the summer, especially on teams like the Pacers and the Hawks. You’ll see a few consistent themes in these differences: I (Nate) tend to weigh franchise prestige more heavily than Jeremias or Joseph; Jeremias puts more of a premium on management, and Joseph is very high on this year’s draft and so is more forgiving to teams that are tanking at all costs.
Teams are ordered by the average of our rankings, with ties broken by the median. The arrows indicate changes from the July version, with thicker arrows (⇧ or ⇩) signaling moves of at least 5 positions. The fancy charts we tried last time didn’t quite work, so we're going for a more retro look this time, emojis and all. (Yes, we’re aware that a 🦩 is a flamingo, not a pelican; please register your complaints with the Unicode Consortium.) In line with FotF tradition, we’ll start from the bottom of the league and count up. That means we’re going to force you to endure a few paragraphs about the Sacramento Kings before we get to the good stuff; the biggest disputes usually tend to be about teams that rank somewhere between #15 and #7 on our list.
30. 👑 Sacramento Kings ↔
(Nate: 30 ↓, Joseph: 27 ↑, Jeremias: 30 ↔)
Jeremias: The Kings remain a laughingstock — they’ve appeared in the playoffs once in 20 years. This year’s annual attempt to make the postseason landed so short that they essentially fell backwards into doing what it takes to get better: losing for a better draft pick. In fact, the Kings have the NBA’s worst record and best lottery odds.
I’d give them more credit if this were planned, but it’s basically a function of two things: a lousy roster and an injury to Domantas Sabonis. Given the owner’s rather ham-handed use of analytics and questionable decisions about who to put in power, the Kings will probably continue down the path of NBA irrelevancy.
Joseph: I’m slightly more optimistic on the Kings than consensus. Yes, they’re the worst team in the NBA — but that’s precisely the point. As long as they keep tanking, the floor is the fifth pick, and this draft isn’t the big three that mainstream outlets keep pushing. It’s more like a big five. (Our NBA draft player ranking model, PRISM, will launch soon — Nate.) The drop-off in expected value doesn’t hit until pick six or seven, which means Sacramento is in line for a great prospect regardless of lottery luck.
That alone should put them ahead of New Orleans, who doesn’t even own their pick, and Chicago, who seems hell-bent on stacking guards and making the play-in tournament every year.
29. 🦩 New Orleans Pelicans ↓
(Nate: 29 ↔, Joseph: 30 ↓, Jeremias: 27 ↑)
Jeremias: The Pelicans caught a lot of flak for their 2025 draft-day deal, giving away a future “superfirst” — the best of their own and Milwaukee’s picks in 2026 — to Atlanta in exchange for Derik Queen. While Queen’s rookie season has given rise to cautious optimism, he still doesn’t represent nearly the expected value of the pick the Hawks are about to receive, which lands in the top three in the NBA lottery in 50 percent of my simulations. And this is an especially talented and top-heavy draft class.
But this predicament is just a symptom of a bigger, underlying problem: the grandiose confidence and ineptitude of Pelicans management.
And with Zion Williamson’s impact fading and rookie Jeremiah Fears shaping up as one of the NBA’s worst defenders, the Pelicans have no true superstar talent to build around. Add it up, and it’s hard to imagine New Orleans winning a playoff series in the foreseeable future, much less a championship.
28. 🧙 Washington Wizards ↓
(Nate: 25 ↓, Joseph: 28 ↔, Jeremias: 28 ↓)
Nate: It was, I think, at a Super Bowl party where I encountered a Wizards fan who was excited about the Trae Young/Anthony Davis combination. It does improve the floor, but FotF is explicitly about the championship upside, and both Young and Davis are probably negative-value contracts.
It doesn’t negate the Wizards’ other assets — Alex Sarr is eventually going to be a solid rotation player, and possibly well above that. And in addition to Sarr, you’ve got … well, I’m not sure. This is typically the point at which I’d highlight an unheralded asset. But apart from Trae and AD, the Wizards don’t currently have any regular player with a positive EPM. OK, let’s round up on this one: Tre Johnson has an exactly league-average EPM (±0.0), and is shooting 38.6 percent from 3. That’s promising, offsetting perceptions that he was one of the more likely lottery busts. Still, I’m not sure there’s a plan here. Speaking of which…
27. 🐂 Chicago Bulls ↓
(Nate: 26 ↓, Joseph: 29 ⇩, Jeremias: 26 ↓)
Jeremias: I agree with Bulls GM Arturas Karnisovas, who said earlier this month, “It’s being in the middle. That is what we don’t want to do.” But the Bulls’ moves have not indicated much deviation from their multiyear approach of chasing a low playoff seed. When it comes to winning titles, the stated goal in Chicago, that’s probably the worst strategy to follow.
The Bulls did something peculiar at the deadline, trading for three of the worst defenders of the past three decades, according to 30-year Adjusted Plus-Minus.
Perhaps bad defense is part of the plan to become a truly bad team. But these players probably aren’t quite bad enough, in total impact, to sink the Bulls sufficiently in the standings. So the treadmill continues.
26. 🦌 Milwaukee Bucks ↔
(Nate: 27 ↓, Joseph: 23 ↑, Jeremias: 29 ↓)
Jeremias: Since the Bucks’ 2020 trade for Jrue Holiday — a successful move that led to an NBA title — their strategy has been to go all-in over and over again, mortgaging their future with win-now moves designed to placate Giannis Antetokounmpo.
But now it’s time to pay the fiddler. The Bucks are no longer even a likely play-in team, with the roster beyond Antetokounmpo sporting very few positive-impact players.
Giannis seems to perpetually have one foot out the door, with many expecting the Bucks to finally trade him this offseason. But even if he stays, that doesn’t augur an especially bright future, as he’s already 31 and now rather injury-prone. At least a Giannis trade would mitigate what appears to be a brewing disaster: The Bucks look sure to bottom out, and yet their high draft picks will keep going elsewhere, as they don’t control their first-rounders from 2027 to 2030.
Nate: For what it’s worth, I think the decision not to trade Giannis at the deadline was logical. Cap sheets and 2033 draft picks will free up in the summer. And currently-injured players present an asymmetric information problem that makes realizing fair value harder. But there’s been a paradigm shift around the league under the new-ish de facto hard cap toward recognizing that veteran max players with injury histories and/or obvious “fit” issues very much present franchise-crippling downside risk (as well as upside). You saw that in the low price for KD last summer. The apparent disinterest in Giannis from the likes if the Spurs, Rockets, Thunder4, Hawks, et. al., suggests the Bucks might suffer from a lesser version of the same phenomenon.
25. ⛵ Los Angeles Clippers ↔
(Nate: 28 ↓, Joseph: 24 ↑, Jeremias: 24 ↓)
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