As the NBA season gets started, be prepared to hear about holding patterns. That is, how a ton of teams are in them. With injury blows dealt to the would-be major competitors — the Celtics, Pacers, Rockets, Cavaliers — and roster unease felt by the likes of the Bucks, Lakers, Sixers and Mavericks, there appears to be a growing sense that the 2025-2026 NBA season will be anything from part limbo to a whole asterisk.
The blunt counter to that argument is that this season, in all its upheaval, is actually more rule than exception. Not the injury part — those are always cruel shocks — but the rapidly shifting competitive landscape. This is the real-time terraforming of Adam Silver’s parity-rich league, where dynasties are a thing of the past and the sheer level of skill vaults teams with talent, a solid development plan, and a vision to fuse the two together ahead by several seasons at once.
In that vein, rather than approach this season as a stop-gap to whenever Victor Wembanyama’s Spurs are ready to go, or the Eastern Conference is back at full strength, why not zero in on the teams and people who find themselves in the NBA’s fast lane, in some cases against their will, and whether they like it or not?
Houston’s lift off
Have you ever been to a place where there are signs that say WRONG WAY at the bottom of an off-ramp, placed there because at some point someone treated it as an on-ramp? That is more or less where the Houston Rockets find themselves to start this season.
Houston’s front office took a look at their fast, punchy and second-place Western Conference finisher — but first-round playoff exit roster — and made the big move of the summer: trading for Kevin Durant. Not so difficult, given the Rockets’ fiery trajectory and the real-life purgatory of Durant’s former team, the Suns. At first, it looked like Houston gained one of the most prolific shooters and basketball minds of his time, while Durant got a chance to do the thing he says he always wants to do: just play basketball (he had this chance in Phoenix, Brooklyn, The Bay, and OKC before, but I digress). And of course, there was the stoic and unflappable Fred VanVleet there to keep everything between the lines.
When VanVleet tore his ACL in a preseason mini-camp, and was assessed as effectively out for the season, the Rockets lost more than a floor general — they found themselves suddenly staring at the WRONG WAY sign. Ime Udoka may have shown his team the movie ‘Paid In Full’ to boost morale, comparing VanVleet’s injury to a gunshot wound, but without him the Rockets effectively face an entirely new direction.
That’s the major thing many seem to be missing, or willfully suspending from their minds, as they take stock of this Rockets team without VanVleet. Sure, Houston could pick up a point guard mid-season, or Ime Udoka could start playing Reed Sheppard — a person who seemed all but invisible to him last season — more, or they could just play really, really big, but this team has already punched their ticket to being the accelerationists of this season.
What’s more, with Durant in the locker room there are only so many seasons due to Houston. Whether his age (37 amidst a roster with an average age of 25) or his track record with coaches (he’s had six since leaving the Warriors), the Durant in Houston era fuse has been lit (even if they made that fuse a little longer by preemptively extending him). You can picture it like the cartoonish spark on ACME brand dynamite — especially if you doubt how Udoka’s heavy-handed approach will mesh with a mature athlete like Durant — or an elegant flame on a very tall, tapered candle, but however you see it in your mind’s eye, the countdown to a cartoonish kaboom has started. This is a team ticking down.
The Magic’s gone
For seasons, Orlando got to live within the grace period of being a young, up-and-coming team. This title, proffered in the past to clubs like the Thunder, the Cavs, and the Pistons, places teams within a bucolic basketball valley. There they are free to develop, make missteps and not be judged too harshly for them, over-achieve without worrying any would-be contender, and generally exist in the soft, golden light of public favor.
So, when I say the Magic’s gone, I don’t mean Orlando finds themselves without talent and propulsion, I mean they’ve been kicked from that magical valley and find themselves fully in reality’s stark light. The good news is Orlando seems poised, eerily as they were last season — but now with an Eastern Conference less a few main characters — to evolve into their final form.
Franz Wagner, fully recovered from last season’s oblique tear, led Germany to a Euro Basket Championship over the summer; Paolo Banchero is also back from the same freakish, funhouse mirrored injury and with a fresh contract extension to instil a lot of confidence for his place within the roster. The Magic gained Desmond Bane over the summer, and are so deep with talent he’ll likely be a secondary creator to start (the Grizzlies, in contrast, will miss him dearly as a primary engine), and Jalen Suggs is ramping up his practice play to full-contact, hinting at a return sooner than later. Mo Wagner should also be returning mid-season, and by then the Magic could well be sitting at the top of the East.
It’s not always a bad thing, to be booted from the NBA’s safe haven of youth and the low-to-no stakes classification that comes with it. Most teams have it foisted upon them or are else kicked unceremoniously out. The Magic have a bit of a grace period on their side, I think, before the majority of the league catches on to their transformation. That doesn’t mean they should hold anything back to start the season.
LeBron James, a forced outro?
It’s jarring, to look at the NBA and not see it cast in the formidable and very long shadow of LeBron James. To instead see it in the full light of a new day, where the guard of who carries the most competitive weight is no longer changing but thoroughly changed (the Thunder’s win secured that), and James himself no longer holds the same sway over the league or even his own franchise. It’s jarring because it’s entirely new territory. Not just for fans, but for the league, which has so long leaned on James as the perfect spokesman for its growth and optics; the impeccable, ideal figurehead.
For the first time in his long career, James finds himself starting a season on an expiring contract (also not starting a season — he’ll be out until at least November), and in someone else’s shadow. That shadow isn’t necessarily cold, but the temp’s noticeably dipped. Luka Doncic’s summer tour was meant to announce him as the new face of the league’s sunniest, mega-watt team, and it worked. We know it worked because James toggled his usual levers of media manipulation to wrest back some of the spotlight and failed.
James finding himself in the fast lane of time, perhaps in its whiplash of catching up, was always going to — eventually — happen. What he’s been so masterful about is controlling time’s relentless march, setting it to his own beat for so many seasons that to see him appear as sort of just human — unsure, annoyed, sore — feels unnatural, awkwardly out of step instead of the most relatable version of all.
Whether he chooses to stay with the Lakers or sign with a former franchise for one more run feels, for the first time, like an entirely spontaneous decision. One that he may have been forced into in ways new and uncomfortable to him, but novel in the grand scheme of his 23-year career.
And they said he’d run out of surprises.
