A year ago, Cooper Flagg and V.J. Edgecombe were rookies feeling their way into the league. They now begin their second seasons in very different worlds. Flagg, the reigning Rookie of the Year, averaged 21 points in a campaign that began with Dallas asking him to play out of position at point guard, and he finished it leading the Mavericks in points, rebounds, assists and steals. He turned up at media day an inch taller, now measuring 6ft 10in barefoot. He found a club rebuilt around him under new team president Masai Ujiri and head coach Dusty May, with Kyrie Irving back from a torn ACL and set to play alongside him for the first time. "Rookie season is done," Flagg said. Edgecombe, who averaged 16 points and made the All-Rookie First Team, faces the opposite challenge. The Philadelphia 76ers have added LeBron James and Jaylen Brown to a core of Tyrese Maxey and Joel Embiid, and the 21-year-old must now find his place in a team built to win immediately.
No team carries more scar tissue into the new season than the San Antonio Spurs. They knocked out the defending champions, the Oklahoma City Thunder, in a seven-game Western Conference final. Then they lost the NBA Finals to the New York Knicks in five games, with the series turning on the 29-point lead they squandered in Game 4, the biggest comeback in Finals history. Victor Wembanyama, the unanimous Defensive Player of the Year, has not hidden how much it still hurts. "I've had a few sleepless nights; maybe not sleepless nights, but hard to find sleep sometimes or hard emotions. Haunting, sometimes," the Frenchman admitted. Yet the most pressing question in San Antonio concerns the backcourt. Dylan Harper, the No. 2 pick in the 2025 draft, emerged as a playoff star and averaged 18 points a game against the Knicks, and he told GQ this summer that he has no intention of coming off the bench. That leaves All-Star De'Aaron Fox, whose new four-year contract begins this season, facing either a three-guard line-up alongside Harper and Stephon Castle or a move to a sixth-man role.
Trae Young's future, a running saga in Atlanta, has finally been settled in Washington. The Hawks traded the four-time All-Star to the Wizards in January for CJ McCollum and Corey Kispert. Back and quadriceps injuries limited him to five games for his new club, yet he still signed a four-year, $212 million extension in June. The deal raised eyebrows across the league, and Young starts the season with plenty to prove. This time, though, he has company. Anthony Davis, No. 1 draft pick AJ Dybantsa and Alex Sarr have turned a franchise emerging from three years of rebuilding into a team expected to win.
The Los Angeles Clippers, by contrast, begin the season under one of the heaviest punishments in NBA history. A near year-long league investigation found that the club had circumvented the salary cap, the limit on team payrolls, by arranging endorsement deals for Kawhi Leonard with four companies that did business with the team. The Clippers were fined $30 million and stripped of five consecutive first-round picks from 2029 to 2033. Owner Steve Ballmer was suspended for a year and basketball operations president Lawrence Frank for six months, while Leonard himself was fined $700,000. Leonard has since gone back to the Toronto Raptors, the club he led to the 2019 title, and even the return package has turned sour. Brandon Ingram, its centrepiece, was found to have a partially torn Achilles tendon during heel surgery in May and will miss the start of the season.
In Boston, this is Jayson Tatum's season. Ten months after rupturing his Achilles tendon, he was back on court last March, far ahead of schedule, averaging 21.8 points and a career-high 10 rebounds in 16 regular-season games. Knee stiffness then ruled him out of Game 7 as the Celtics, who had led 3-1, were knocked out of the first round by Philadelphia. Now comes his first full season since the injury, and the first of his 10-year career without Jaylen Brown, who was traded to the 76ers in July for Paul George and draft picks. "I feel great," Tatum said, explaining that he had spent the summer working on becoming more explosive. He sidestepped questions about whether this is now his team. Even so, the Celtics have been rebuilt around him, with George, Mike Conley and Mitchell Robinson arriving, and head coach Joe Mazzulla was clear that when Tatum is at his best, so is Boston.
