NBA offense has steadily improved over the past decade, but it experienced its biggest year-over-year decline between the 2023-24 and 2024-25 campaigns in more than two decades (assuming you exclude the 2011-12 lockout season). What happened?
Well, offense improved steadily as league-wide shooting and shot selection improved. Layups and 3s replacing mid-range jumpers inevitably made offense more efficient. However, the closer we get to optimized shot selection, there is less room for growth and more defenses have been able to adjust to that style of offense. Yet last year got us back on track with the highest league-wide offensive rating in NBA history.
Instead, last year’s offensive growth came in a few subtler areas that took a backseat during the 3-point revolution:
- The NBA had its highest league-wide offensive rebounding rate since the 2012-13 season. After years of small-ball, the NBA is starting to get bigger again.
- The average NBA team played at its fastest pace since the 2019-20 season. Last season represented only modest growth on that front, but faster offense tends to be better offense, so more teams prioritizing pace has led to better offense.
- The average NBA team had its highest turnover rate since the 2019-20 season. This might seem counterintuitive. Why are turnovers helping offense? Well, it’s really more of a defensive trend. Live-ball turnovers create easy points on the other end of the floor, and more and more teams, led by the Oklahoma City Thunder, are prioritizing turnover generation as a foundation of their defense.
- Last season saw the third-most free throw attempts per field goal attempt of the past decade, and the most since the 2022-23 season. In other words, teams are drawing more fouls.
Having great shooting and taking the right shots are still probably the most important components of building an NBA offense. However, last year showed us that it’s no longer enough to outshoot your opponents. Teams are finding more and more ways to generate good offense.
And as we rank all 30 NBA offenses by predicting what the offensive rating leaderboard will look like at season’s end, we need to take all of those methods into account. So with that in mind, let’s dive into our rankings.
1. New York Knicks
- 2025-26 offensive rating: 118.7
- 2025-26 offensive ranking: No. 4
We all saw what happened to New York’s offense in the playoffs. Using Karl-Anthony Towns as a passing hub led to the greatest offensive postseason in NBA history. The Knicks were the No. 4 offense last season, and more thoroughly incorporating those principles this regular season should only make them better. They have shooting everywhere. They’re a relatively low-turnover offense. Perhaps most importantly, they’ve been among the NBA’s most durable teams over the last few seasons. There are just fewer health concerns here than there are with most of the top teams. The only real concern here would be how much Mitchell Robinson’s absence affects their dominant offensive rebounding. Without him last season, the Knicks were only average on that front. Andre Drummond should help, though, and small-ball lineups with OG Anunoby at center will thrive for different reasons. It’s a blow, but hardly an insurmountable one.
2. Oklahoma City Thunder
- 2025-26 offensive rating: 117.6
- 2025-26 offensive ranking: No. 7
The Thunder are known primarily for their defense, but remember, they were the No. 3 offense in their championship season and stepped back last season largely due to injuries. Well, Jalen Williams is presumably healthy now, and this is probably the best team-wide shooting the Thunder have had during this era with a full season of Jared McCain coming and Cason Wallace replacing Lu Dort in the starting five. Ajay Mitchell grew into the exact sort of secondary creator this team needed a year ago, and if he takes another step as it looked like he was about to in the playoffs, the Thunder will be that much more dangerous. The only issue here: Oklahoma City only gets offensive rebounds when Isaiah Hartenstein is in the game. If lottery pick Aday Mara helps on that front, the Thunder should once again have a dominant offense.
3. Los Angeles Lakers
- 2025-26 offensive rating: 117.0
- 2025-26 offensive ranking: No. 10
I mean… they have Luka Dončić. It’s basically impossible not to have a great offense with him. Lakers lineups featuring Dončić and Austin Reaves but no LeBron James were great last season, and that’s the baseline now. There’s a ton of ball-handling redundancy here. If Dončić or Reaves get hurt, Collin Sexton and Quentin Grimes can scale up pretty easily. The shooting isn’t quite elite, but the Lakers have more of it than they’ve had in a long time, which should help tilt the shot selection more toward what JJ Redick would prefer. Walker Kessler should help with offensive rebounding, and for all of the other flaws in his game, Kevon Looney still does that well. The biggest questions here relate to pace and lineup building. Dončić teams are almost universally slow. There’s also the issue of how much they’ll have to compromise offensively to field an acceptable defense. Matisse Thybulle has grown as a shooter. Jarred Vanderbilt hasn’t. These are relatively minor nits to pick, though. The Lakers are going to be great offensively.
4. Boston Celtics
- 2025-26 offensive rating: 120.0
- 2025-26 offensive ranking: No. 2
Here’s where Joe Mazzulla’s four regular-season offenses have ranked: No. 2, No. 1, No. 2, No. 2. His structure is bulletproof in the regular season. The Celtics are at or near the top of the league in 3-point attempts and offensive rebounds, and they never turn the ball over. They make sacrifices for those traits. They never get to the rim or the line and they never score on the break, for instance, but for 82 games, that has never mattered. They should veer even more toward these extremes this season. Mitchell Robinson supercharges their offensive rebounding. Paul George doesn’t pressure the rim anywhere near as much as Jaylen Brown, but he takes and makes the shots Boston wants. A hopefully-healthy Jayson Tatum is better than Brown, but how good will he be in his first full season off of a torn Achilles? The post-Brown questions knock the Celtics down a spot or two, but they’ll still be near the top of the sport.
5. Denver Nuggets
- 2025-26 offensive rating: 121.2
- 2025-26 offensive ranking: No. 1
There are a dozen reasons you could hypothetically drop the Nuggets. They’re always near the bottom of the league in 3-point volume, and they’re banking a lot on both Christian Braun bouncing back from deep and DeMar DeRozan’s refusal to shoot 3s not hurting them. They don’t really get offensive rebounds either, and they generate the fewest turnovers defensively in the NBA, so they have fewer chances for easy points than you’d like. The depth is perhaps worse than it’s ever been, and there are real injury concerns across the roster. I’m disregarding it all because they have Nikola Jokić. Denver has never finished worse than No. 7 offensively since making Jokić a full-time starter, and they were No. 1 a year ago despite missing him for a month and losing his 3-point shooting after his return. He’s the NBA’s truest trend breaker. Having him warrants automatic inclusion in the top five on a list like this. And hey, if Aaron Gordon has a healthier year and DeRozan gives them the bench ball-handling they need without cramping the spacing during Jokić’s minutes, there’s a real chance they’re just No. 1 again.
6. San Antonio Spurs
- 2025-26 offensive rating: 118.7
- 2025-26 offensive ranking: No. 3
The formula here is straightforward. They have three extremely dangerous ball handlers, a deep stable of shooters and Victor Wembanyama‘s unfair physical advantages near the basket. If Wembanyama and Dylan Harper take big enough steps, the Spurs could have the NBA’s best offense. Once Julian Champagnie moved into the starting lineup last season, San Antonio’s offense had no notable weaknesses. The questions here are pretty small. Was the shooting growth Stephon Castle showed down the stretch real? If so, good luck. If not, teams will keep putting their centers on him. When will Harper join the starting lineup? Will Champagnie keep his job or cede it to Tobias Harris? Pretty much every version here is quite good. We’re talking about degrees of greatness.
7. Philadelphia 76ers
- 2025-26 offensive rating: 114.3
- 2025-26 offensive ranking: No. 16
The on-paper talent is mind-boggling. There will be nights in which it proves genuinely overwhelming. There are still a lot of questions here. Some of them are health-related, obviously. How much Joel Embiid will we see? LeBron James turns 42 this season. Some health skepticism is warranted, especially as he deals with arthritis in his foot. There are basketball questions here, too, and they go beyond the “there’s only one ball” cliché. There’s a lot of overlap in the spaces these players want to occupy on the floor, especially in mid-range. Most of their offensive rebounding last season happened with Andre Drummond on the floor and he’s now gone. Embiid’s dip as a 3-point shooter stands out now more than ever. Everyone in the starting lineup can shoot 3s, but Tyrese Maxey is probably the only significant, positional plus in that respect, and James is the only elite passer here. It’s going to take time to sort all of this out. By the end of the season, they should be among the NBA’s best offenses. But expect some bumps along the way.
8. Minnesota Timberwolves
- 2025-26 offensive rating: 115.6
- 2025-26 offensive ranking: No. 13
Anthony Edwards took the third-most pull-up 3s per game in the NBA last season and LaMelo Ball finished fifth. Combined, they averaged more pull-up 3-point attempts per game than 20 teams. The spacing those two are going to generate will be unreal, and Minnesota has sorely needed a high-level passer since Mike Conley‘s decline. Ball provides it. The Timberwolves should get out on the break plenty, and Ball’s hit-ahead passing should be especially lethal in tandem with Ayo Dosunmu, one of the best floor-running guards in the NBA. They sacrificed a ton of size to get Ball, but Ball should help fill in the offensive rebounding gap, and Joan Beringer is ready for a real role. Jaden McDaniels took a real leap in the playoffs. Will that sustain? Will Donte DiVincenzo come back? And how healthy will Ball be? The best version of the Wolves could finish much higher than this, but there’s a lot of variance.
9. Indiana Pacers
- 2025-26 offensive rating: 110.1
- 2025-26 offensive ranking: No. 28
No team balances ball movement and minimizing turnovers as well as the Pacers do. That’s what having Tyrese Haliburton gives your offense. You get to be an up-tempo, “fling the ball around the court” shooting machine without giving away the ball at the rate that, say, the Warriors tend to. His game relies so much less on athleticism than most guards of his stature that he should be able to play himself back into peak form throughout the season, but that will probably take some time after his Achilles injury. So will the acclimation of Ivica Zubac. Haliburton is used to having five-out spacing through Myles Turner. He’ll need to adjust to not having it, but Zubac does everything else better than Turner. He introduces a degree of screening, hub passing, interior scoring and offensive rebounding that Indiana formerly lacked. Expect the Pacers to start out slow and climb up the offensive leaderboard throughout the season.
10. Utah Jazz
- 2025-26 offensive rating: 112.7
- 2025-26 offensive ranking: No. 22
There’s shooting everywhere. That’s the selling point, especially if they close games with Jaren Jackson Jr. at center and Ace Bailey in the fifth slot alongside Lauri Markkanen, Keyonte George and Darryn Peterson. All of the starters aside from Jusuf Nurkić will be able to consistently create their own shots, yet all of them are at least good, if not great, off the ball. They’re going to be a nightmare to gameplan against for that reason. Anyone can hunt a mismatch. If this number seems high, remember that Will Hardy had the Jazz all the way up at No. 4 at the 2023 trade deadline and No. 9 at the 2024 trade deadline. He has more talent than he’s ever had, and for the first time, he’ll actually get to use it to try to win games all season.
11. Houston Rockets
- 2025-26 offensive rating: 117.5
- 2025-26 offensive ranking: No. 8
The Rockets have landed in this range in each of the past two seasons purely on the strength of their offensive rebounding. Houston pulled in 36.4% of all available offensive rebounds last season, putting the gap between them and the No. 2 Portland Trail Blazers (33.2%) at exactly the size of the gap between those Blazers and the No. 14 Minnesota Timberwolves (30%)… and that was with Steven Adams out for more than half of the season. If he’s healthy, they could be even better. But it’s fair to wonder whether the relative advantage of their offensive rebounding will decline as more and more teams emphasize the boards. Neither Amen Thompson nor Alperen Sengun took the superstar leaps the Rockets hoped they would last season, and Kevin Durant just turned 38. It’s fair to wonder what they’ll get from him. Getting Fred VanVleet back will go a long way. The Rockets badly needed basic offensive organization. But will the arrival of Marcus Smart and Bogdan Bogdanović crowd out Reed Sheppard, one of the only reliable shooters here? They will be the best offensive rebounding team in the league. The questions are everywhere else.
12. Cleveland Cavaliers
- 2025-26 offensive rating: 118.3
- 2025-26 offensive ranking: No. 6
There’s an awful lot riding on the 37-year-old James Harden, isn’t there? Kenny Atkinson’s offense relies on having several ball handlers, but the guard depth here is concerning. Gone are the halcyon days of Ty Jerome nearly winning Sixth Man of the Year. The backups behind Mitchell and Harden are rookie Meleek Thomas, second-year pro Tyrese Proctor and Craig Porter Jr. So much of this offense is going to boil down to the forwards. Evan Mobley was a great shooter two seasons ago and a bad one last season. The shift from Jokić-ball to Harden-ball is going to be jarring for Peyton Watson, so expect an adjustment period. They only survive their depth questions at guard if Watson or Jaylon Tyson take big steps as creators, and it’s hard to carve out the space to do that on a team with Harden and Donovan Mitchell. Hopefully Watson helps this team generate a bit more in transition, but Cleveland has never drawn the sort of offensive rebounding advantages a team would expect out of playing two traditional big men. That means if they’re not making 3s at the historic rate they did two seasons ago, they’re more like an above-average offense than a great one, and they’re more vulnerable to injury now than they’ve ever been, given the state of their depth.
13. Toronto Raptors
- 2025-26 offensive rating: 115.0
- 2025-26 offensive ranking: No. 15
The Raptors had a dominant transition offense last season, scoring more fast-break points than anyone else in the NBA thanks to the turnovers their defense generated. The questions were mostly about their half-court offense and its ability to make tough shots late in games. Well… Kawhi Leonard really helps with that. Save perhaps Kevin Durant, he might be the single player in the entire NBA best-suited to fill the exact slot in their lineup they were hoping to address. He’s an apex shotmaker. But he tends to miss games. There’s still not enough 3-point shooting here. The offensive rebounding is unspectacular. The Raptors were far worse against winning teams last season and we’re about to head into a season without tanking. “Dominate transition and let Kawhi be Kawhi in the half-court” is a great formula on paper, but there are enough questions here to keep the Raptors out of the top 10.
14. Miami Heat
- 2025-26 offensive rating: 115.8
- 2025-26 offensive ranking: No. 12
The Heat ran a complete outlier of an offense last season, pushing the concepts Noah LaRoche brought to Memphis to the extreme by leading the NBA in pace and almost completely eschewing ball screens. The offense will almost certainly be more conventional this season, if only because asking Giannis Antetokounmpo to play at that pace with his calf issues seems dangerous. “Giannis plus shooters” has been a winning formula all decade. Is there enough shooting here? Bam Adebayo has started taking more shots, but his ability to make them has varied wildly month to month. Davion Mitchell has the opposite issue. He’s making his 3s, but not taking enough of them. Klay Thompson, Tim Hardaway Jr. and Bobby Portis are the reliable bets here, but they have serious defensive issues. Pelle Larsson and the younger players will be critical in this respect, and someone will have to step up as a secondary creator. Ultimately, though, the offense will be good if Antetokounmpo plays 70 games. The real concerns crop up if his calf issues persist, because there isn’t anyone else close to being a primary creator on this roster.
15. Charlotte Hornets
- 2025-26 offensive rating: 118.4
- 2025-26 offensive ranking: No. 5
This is a bet on structure more than anything else, especially since their offense nosedived when they played without LaMelo Ball last season. The bet here is that Coby White can be an adequate replacement in the starting lineup, and that the system Charles Lee built last season around guard-guard screening actions can still keep the Hornets around league-average offensively. Even without Ball, Charlotte genuinely has a chance to break the 3-point attempt rate record that Boston set two years ago. They’ll be near the top of the league in offensive rebounding again. The question here more or less comes down to how well they replace Ball’s creation. If White thrives as a starter, Kon Knueppel and Brandon Miller take steps forward and the absence of Ball and Miles Bridges helps them lower their terrible turnover rate, this will be a good offense. If those things don’t happen, they slip down these standings.
16. Detroit Pistons
- 2025-26 offensive rating: 117.3
- 2025-26 offensive ranking: No. 9
The Pistons were the NBA’s dominant paint team a year ago. They led the league in paint points and finished third in offensive rebounding. They’ve steadily added shooting as well, picking up Duncan Robinson and Kevin Huerter last year and adding Isaiah Joe and John Collins this summer. Could Collins play some small-ball center as a test to see how Ausar Thompson would look next to a big who can shoot? We’ll see, but given the defensive vulnerabilities these shooters have, Detroit will be cautious about putting any of them on the floor together. They’re still going to be at a shooting deficit most of the time, and what sort of ramp-up period will Jalen Duren need after spending the offseason holding out? They probably want to leave some runway for players like Thompson and Ron Holland to grow offensively, which should be a bumpy process, and most notably, they still haven’t found the secondary creator they’ll need behind Cade Cunningham. Despite their impressive performance without him last season, they’re still vulnerable to any absences from him. If you assume the relative advantages of offensive rebounding and turnovers decrease as they become bigger points of emphasis elsewhere, Detroit’s shooting and creation questions should loom larger this season than they did last.
17. Memphis Grizzlies
- 2025-26 offensive rating: 112.4
- 2025-26 offensive ranking: No. 23
This is admittedly something of a gut pick, and one that injuries could easily destroy. Memphis has perhaps the NBA’s best low-minutes offensive guard (Ty Jerome, who ranked eighth in the league in offensive Estimated Plus-Minus last season) and its best low-minutes offensive big man (Zach Edey, who averaged 19 points and just under 16 rebounds on 67% true shooting per 36 minutes last season). They’re both enormous health risks. They’re terrors whenever they play, and Tuomas Iisalo’s short-shift rotation management seems tailor-made for players like that. Of course, there are real questions about whether limiting players to four or five-minute shifts will affect their rhythm, and the Grizzlies will have to handle that on a player-by-player basis. But there is a lot of shooting on this roster. Top pick Cameron Boozer should walk into the NBA as a 20-10 big man, and he and Edey are going to own the offensive glass when they play together. Memphis is going to sneak up on teams if it can just keep its best players on the floor.
18. Atlanta Hawks
- 2025-26 offensive rating: 1150.0
- 2025-26 offensive ranking: No. 14
They’re going to be great in transition. The half-court offense is a much bigger question. If CJ McCollum slips even a little, there just isn’t enough high-level shotmaking here. They’re breaking in a rookie point guard in Kingston Flemings, and no matter how promising they are longer term, rookie point guards are almost always bad early on. Lu Dort and Dyson Daniels probably can’t play together offensively given their shooting woes, and the Hawks simply can’t handle another year of Daniels shooting 19% on 3s. Does Jalen Johnson have another leap in him after a disappointing postseason? The Knicks exposed how few tricks he has up his sleeve once the pace slows down, and he’ll have to grow in that respect if he’s going to be the centerpiece of Atlanta’s eventual contender. Their end-of-season success was a bit of a schedule mirage. Atlanta’s half-court offense ranked 12th against bottom-10 defenses, but 22nd against top-10 defenses in terms of points per play last season. They’re a prime “regression due to the absence of tanking” team.
19. Phoenix Suns
- 2025-26 offensive rating: 114.2
- 2025-26 offensive ranking: No. 17
Jordan Ott has the “take a billion 3s and get offensive rebounds” portion of the Celtics formula down. Unfortunately, it’s much harder to get away without scoring at the rim or the line when you turn the ball over as much as Phoenix did a season ago. The Suns will have to work on that, and of course, they’re at a talent deficit when it comes to playing that style. How much of the season are they going to waste starting Jalen Green because of stature and salary when Collin Gillespie‘s point guard skills are a much better fit next to their best players? How much of a step back will Miles Bridges take without LaMelo Ball? Last season, his true shooting dipped around nine percentage points when he played without his point guard, and the Suns have no playmaker at Ball’s level. Devin Booker‘s shooting has quietly declined over the last few years, and if he’s not a superstar-level shotmaker, the entire theory of this roster falls apart.
20. Portland Trail Blazers
- 2025-26 offensive rating: 113.1
- 2025-26 offensive ranking: No. 21
Portland ranked second in the NBA in offensive rebounding last season thanks in large part to Donovan Clingan, who’s primed for another jump this year. The Blazers spent most of last season at a massive ball-handling deficit. Deni Avdija did an admirable job lifting the team up singlehandedly. Getting Damian Lillard back certainly helps here, and he’ll give them a better shooter than they had by far last season. Ja Morant is much more of a question here. His inability to shoot is going to cramp the floor for Avdija. No team coughed the ball up more than Portland last season, and Morant has always been a bit of a turnover magnet. It’s not even clear at this point whether he’ll start (and frankly, he shouldn’t), but figuring out his fit will create issues. This is still a team with minimal shooting, and we have no idea how Lillard will look coming off of that torn Achilles. Morant basically has to be his old self for this offense to be above-average, and that’s a pretty tall order.
21. Golden State Warriors
- 2025-26 offensive rating: 113.8
- 2025-26 offensive ranking: No. 19
Last year, the Warriors ranked No. 13 offensively when Jimmy Butler tore his ACL and No. 21 the rest of the way. This year, they’re probably hoping for something like the reverse: hold on while Butler recovers, then make a leap midseason when he returns. I’m dubious of that happening. Kristaps Porziņģis is already dealing with a medical issue, and given his track record, it’s not clear what Golden State can rely on him for. Stephen Curry is the only remotely valuable creator here. If he misses any time — and he probably will, given the runner’s knee he dealt with last season — the Warriors are sunk. They have no other means of generating offense without Butler. We don’t even know what Butler will look like when he gets back. There’s not much of a track record for 36-year-olds returning to star-level performance following torn ACLs. Golden State’s motion offense almost always leads to a ton of turnovers, and we’re at a point in league history in which turnovers are hunted more than ever. The Warriors slipped from great to average as an offensive rebounding team last season. They never get to the line without Butler. Curry is an all-timer. At 38, it’s just not reasonable to expect him to lift this offense singlehandedly.
22. Orlando Magic
- 2025-26 offensive rating: 114.2
- 2025-26 offensive ranking: No. 18
The Magic did nothing to improve their roster beyond signing a probably-at-the-end Nikola Vučević to be their backup center. The idea here is largely that a new coaching hire in Sean Sweeney and superior health can get this group above average offensively while the defense actually drives most of the winning. The defensive side of the equation might hold up. The Magic were a turnover-generating machine in 2024 and 2025 before falling off last season, and Sweeney has a stellar defensive reputation. The bigger questions here are health and the half-court offense. There’s still barely any shooting beyond Desmond Bane. The Franz Wagner-Paolo Banchero fit has always been iffy, and neither Wagner nor Jalen Suggs has given us much of a reason to believe they’ll stay healthy. Orlando finished No. 18 a year ago, and that’s right around the range we should expect them to land until they prove they’ve improved.
23. Washington Wizards
- 2025-26 offensive rating: 109.7
- 2025-26 offensive ranking: No. 29
Washington is a tricky team to rank because much of its rotation consists of ascending young players who have shown a lot of promise yet, by most metrics, remain negative-impact players. There’s going to be some improvement. How much can we project? Trae Young‘s presence as an organizer certainly helps, but finding a balance in which he doesn’t monopolize the offense will be tricky. Historically, almost all of Young’s value has come on the ball. Can he adjust to playing more off of it? His unimpressive catch-and-shoot and cutting numbers suggest that’s not especially likely. Has he lost a step since his Atlanta peak? There’s not all that much shooting here beyond Tre Johnson and Kyshawn George, and who knows how long Anthony Davis remains on the team. They should take a step forward, but probably a modest one in an ultra-competitive Eastern Conference.
24. Dallas Mavericks
- 2025-26 offensive rating: 110.3
- 2025-26 offensive ranking: No. 27
The Mavericks, as Masai Ujiri teams so often have, over-indexed on size and defense at the expense of shooting. Max Christie and Santi Aldama are the only really reliable shooters here aside from Kyrie Irving, who is an obvious mid-season trade candidate. There’s very little playmaking here beyond Irving as well, though in the long run, forcing Cooper Flagg to grow in this respect could certainly prove helpful. They were a terrible offensive rebounding team a year ago, and while Daniel Gafford and the size they’ve accumulated help here, the questions surrounding Dereck Lively’s health are substantial. There are pieces that could be a part of a very good Mavericks offense a few years from now, but Dallas is very much still in the transitional stage between Nico Harrison’s version of the team and the one Ujiri is going to build.
25. Chicago Bulls
- 2025-26 offensive rating: 112.1
- 2025-26 offensive ranking: No. 25
The highlights here will be plentiful. Though they likely won’t generate many turnovers (at least they didn’t a year ago), they will have breathtaking transition moments. Josh Giddey‘s playmaking next to Caleb Wilson and Matas Buzelis is terrifying. But these are still very young players on a team without much shooting beyond Norm Powell. There are going to be bumps. The Nets were a bad offensive rebounding team during Nic Claxton’s minutes and a far better one when he sat. This year is going to be a learning experience. Where they actually rank means far less than the progress they show in getting there.
26. New Orleans Pelicans
- 2025-26 offensive rating: 113.3
- 2025-26 offensive ranking: No. 20
Trey Murphy and Saddiq Bey are really the only shooters here. The need to develop Jeremiah Fears supersedes the reality that Dejounte Murray, for now, is a far better player, and while Fears likely starts the season on the bench, the Pelicans are too invested in him to keep him there too much longer. Speaking of which… how are the Pelicans going to deal with the reality that Zion Williamson and Derik Queen seem stylistically incompatible? It seems as though Yves Missi will start next to Williamson for now, forcing Queen to waste away on the bench. Williamson was fantastic last season, but he’s in a bit of a catch-22. If he stays healthy, just by virtue of Queen’s presence, he’s a trade candidate. If he gets hurt, well, that’s self-explanatory. Either way, there’s just a lack of cohesion here. There are way too many players here who need and probably expect to have the ball in their hands quite a bit and not enough capable of supporting them once they have it. This roster has a lot in common with the groups Jamahl Mosley couldn’t generate consistent offense out of in Orlando. There’s talent, but it hasn’t been constructed in a thoughtful enough manner.
27. Milwaukee Bucks
- 2025-26 offensive rating: 112.2
- 2025-26 offensive ranking: No. 24
Here’s one of last season’s most unexpected stats: the Bucks ranked third in the NBA in effective field goal percentage. They still ranked No. 24 in offense because they were miserable at basically everything else, but the saving grace here is that this roster still has a lot of shooting. Without Giannis Antetokounmpo, sadly, there isn’t anyone here to take advantage of it. You could argue the Bucks have the worst primary creators in the NBA. Is the offense running through… Tyler Herro? Ryan Rollins? Myles Turner is among the worst rebounding centers in basketball. There are so many young players here not only fighting to establish themselves, but also aiming for contracts. Taylor Jenkins’ calling card in Memphis was his defense. The offense is facing an uphill climb.
28. Los Angeles Clippers
- 2025-26 offensive rating: 116.3
- 2025-26 offensive ranking: No. 11
One of their two proven veteran scorers, Brandon Ingram, has a partially torn Achilles tendon. The other, Darius Garland, has had persistent health issues. Speaking of health issues, Max Strus has a tear in his plantar fascia and Bradley Beal is still dealing with offseason inflammation. The Clippers offense might be able to survive when Garland is on the floor, but when he rests, and when he misses games, it’s going to fall apart. As we’ve covered, rookie point guards are typically negative-impact players, so no matter how much you might like Keaton Wagler, it’s probably going to take him time to grow into a winning player. Most of the role players here lean toward defense. There’s almost no offensive rebounding on this team, and while this year’s group is younger, last year’s almost never scored in transition. The Clippers are only at the beginning of their post-Kawhi Leonard rebuild. Things are going to be tough for a few years, even with Ty Lue, statistically among the best play designers in basketball, running the show.
29. Sacramento Kings
- 2025-26 offensive rating: 110.6
- 2025-26 offensive ranking: No. 26
Darius Acuff has plenty of long-term upside, but he’s still a rookie point guard. Domantas Sabonis and Zach LaVine have been All-Stars, but they’re nearing the ends of their respective Sacramento tenures. There are some promising younger pieces from last year’s roster like Maxime Raynaud and Nique Clifford, but they largely excelled on a tanking team and haven’t proven they’re ready for real roles on a team trying to win games early on. Don’t overthink this one. The Kings ranked 26th in offense a year ago, but three of the four teams behind them are getting big-name veterans back.
30. Brooklyn Nets
- 2025-26 offensive rating: 108.2
- 2025-26 offensive ranking: No. 30
Brooklyn was the NBA’s worst offense a year ago and has a chance to be again this season. They traded for Julius Randle in part to prevent that, but there was a reason the Timberwolves were so eager to dump him. Even if he’s the floor-raiser Brooklyn hopes he’ll be, he’s still taking on-ball reps away from young players who need them. In addition to incoming lottery pick Mikel Brown Jr., the Nets still have five 2025 first-round picks who are all hoping to make a name for themselves. Michael Porter Jr. set a lofty goal of being the NBA’s best off-ball player this season. There’s a good chance he’ll try to reach that goal by playing elsewhere, as the Nets have yet to extend him. Brooklyn’s two-year tank ended without an incoming star. They’ll feel the effects of that lottery misfortune over the next few years.
