NBA Future of the Franchise Rankings 2.0
After an unprecedented period of upheaval, which teams are most likely to win the title over the next 10 seasons?
Nate Silver: June 22nd was one of the craziest days in NBA history. Kevin Durant was traded to the Rockets. The Oklahoma City Thunder won their first championship since moving to The Big Friendly.1 And Tyrese Haliburton tore his Achilles tendon in the Pacers’ Game 7 defeat to OKC, not undermining what they’d accomplished but leaving their future uncertain.
Perhaps it was inevitable that the free agent period that followed would be an anticlimax.
Still, the league looks vastly different than when I last ranked the 30 teams after the trade deadline in February. Jayson Tatum is probably out for all of next season, and Jrue Holiday and Kristaps Porzingis are no longer members of the Celtics at all. Damian Lillard will miss the year too — and he’s teamless anyway, having been waived and stretched by the Bucks. But the Knicks reached their first conference finals in 30 years. And the Mavericks were redeemed from the most infamous trade in NBA history by landing the #1 pick and Cooper Flagg.
The goal of these, the Future of the Franchise rankings, is deceptively simple: to rank the teams in order of their projected number of championships over the next ten NBA seasons, from 2025-26 through 2034-35. Because it’s a hard task — how to balance the short term against the long run, franchise “intangibles” against the talent on the roster, and which teams have realistic timelines versus those that are likely to run into a Thunder-shaped brick wall — this time I’ve brought some friends to help.
Joseph George is the new Silver Bulletin Assistant Sports Analyst, and he specializes in the NBA as a consultant for the G League’s Mexico City Capitanes and the author of the newsletter The Zone Master.2 And Jeremias Engelmann, previously at ESPN, is the developer of Real Plus-Minus and a former analyst for the Dallas Mavericks and Phoenix Suns. His current site is xRAPM.com and he writes on Substack at the outstanding newsletter 5x5.
There’s a lot of analysis below, so I’ll cut the pregame show short in a few moments. Teams are ordered based on a simple average of our ratings, with ties broken by the median. We’ll publish the bottom half of the league (teams #16 through #30) this week and the top half next week. (Hopefully there’s no Giannis or LeBron trade over the weekend that forces us to reconfigure.) And pay careful attention to the author of each comment: we have our share of disagreements, and in these cases I assigned more than one of us to a team to articulate the glass-half-full and half-empty view.
One final point before we get started is that the singular emphasis on championship equity helps to makes for a more tractable set of rankings: if Silver Bulletin is still around in 2035, we’ll be able to evaluate them based on who hangs banners over the next ten seasons. But it’s also arguably a bit myopic, rewarding high-variance, all-in approaches over more patient team-building. You could claim that the line has become blurrier: last year’s Pacers, in particular, are a paradigmatic example of a franchise that seemed happy to settle for being pretty good, and yet they almost won a title anyway. But at least for me — I won’t speak for Jeremias and Joseph — this made a big difference in some cases.
Jeremias Engelmann: If the past two decades are any indication, Sacramento has tough odds to overcome: The Kings have made the playoffs just once since the 2005-06 season, when they lost in the first round in 2023.
The issue is that their 17 losing seasons in 19 years aren't just a product of bad luck. Instead, they stem primarily from a suboptimal decision-making process, leading to such blunders as drafting Marvin Bagley III (!!!) over Luka Doncic. Their biggest problem now, though, is the refusal to start a rebuild, repeatedly opting to chase the elusive No. 8 seed instead — one of the most "effective" ways of never becoming a true contender.
The result is a roster void of superstar talent. Instead, the Kings have several players of the type I’ve dubbed "quagmires" — players who move any team closer to an undesirable .500 win percentage by coupling high usage with very ordinary impact.
Jeremias: In the past three seasons, the Suns — for whom I worked briefly in 2013-14 — infamously went all-in and busted. Now they’ve traded Durant at a bargain price and are expected to buy out Bradley Beal at an exorbitant one. Meanwhile, Vegas has their over/under at 30.5 wins for next season, and they don't control their first-round pick until 2032.
They did get former No. 2 overall pick Jalen Green in the KD trade, but metrics such as xRAPM rate him as a bottom-rung defender. And their remaining star, Devin Booker, is a topnotch scorer but another defensive sieve — who happens to play the same position as Green.
Of course, the Suns’ big-picture problem is not the lackluster roster per se, but the extremely short-range thinking and poor process that put them in this position. That was summed up by Suns owner Mat Ishbia in a March interview with ESPN in which he expressed his disdain for the patient approach of other franchises: “I want to try to see the game today. I want us to win today, and we're going to try.”
Nate: Just so you get used to the rhythm here, this is where Joseph and I might step in with a rebuttal. But as you can see, we have very little overall disagreement on the bottom three teams in the league. (Spoiler alert for Part II — there wasn’t much disagreement on the top three teams, either; the middle is tougher.) I hadn’t seen that Ishbia quote, but as big defender of state schools in general and Michigan State University in particular — I grew up in East Lansing and my dad taught there — I’m a little embarrassed to see a Sparty alum be so proud of failing the marshmallow test.
Jeremias: Speaking of questionable decision-making, the Pelicans' trade that gifted the Hawks a “superfirst” — the better of New Orleans’ and Milwaukee’s unprotected 2026 picks — was, for most analysts, the most laughable development of draft night.
That's not the type of feedback you're hoping for when you’ve just hired a new front office. But herein lies the crux: New president of basketball operations Joe Dumars and GM Troy Weaver appear to be in over their heads, based on their track record. Weaver's aimless tenure in Detroit, for example, was immediately followed by the Pistons making a historically great leap, from worst in the NBA to solid playoff team.
It will probably take at least two or three years before Pelicans ownership sees the light and replaces them, but the damage will be done.
Nate: I had the Pelicans ranked a respectable 19th in February, and yet have them even lower than Jeremias this time around. I think the lesson is that teams that have a lot of “scrap metal value” — where if you melted down the spare parts, you might find something useful — won’t be in a position to maximize on that without competent management.
Joseph George: The Wizards’ young core as a whole, frankly, isn’t good — Alexandre Sarr could be a fine, versatile defender, but struggled as a finisher, rebounder, and despite his tendency to spray threes, isn’t a particularly efficient shooter either. I would’ve liked to see the Wizards draft someone with a little more defensive versatility this year, but they opted for more shot creation in the form of Tre Johnson. Their asset situation is fine, but I need to see them do more on the development front than just draft and hold prospects.
Nate: Despite being connected to politics, I’ve never had any desire to live in DC. It has its charms — I’m a sucker for French city planning and Ethiopian food — but I find it too much of an industry town and too formal. However, here’s the real problem: it’s possibly the worst sports town in America, with a series of problematically branded franchises that failed to bring home a championship from when the Redskins last won the Super Bowl in 1992 until the Caps finally took home the Stanley Cup more than a quarter-century later in 2018. So I’ll count myself as surprised that I’m writing in defense of Washington, but my #23 overall ranking for the Wizards was higher than the rest of the group.
But I wound up organizing my list into tiers, and the Wizards were at the bottom of my second-lowest tier, teams that I consider to be fully committed to the rebuilding process. (Conversely, my bottom six franchises are all teams I consider “distressed” or underwater in some fashion, with negative-value assets, inept management, or both.) I’m not sure there’s a player on the roster I’d count on to be the best player on the next good Wizards team. But they have a lot of lottery picks, plus a competent management team with a lineage in the budding OKC dynasty. I wouldn’t recommend Wizards Basketball: It Could Be Worse! as a marketing slogan, but at least they’re not still paying Bradley Beal — in fact, they got a pretty good haul for him.