Since we last experienced NBA basketball games that count, we have seen:
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Six newly hired head coaches get to work, including JJ Redick taking stewardship of LeBron James’ Lakers and Mike Budenholzer trying to turn the Kevin Durant-Devin Booker-Bradley Beal Suns into a supernova;
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31 trades involving 70 players — including All-Stars Klay Thompson, DeMar DeRozan, Karl-Anthony Towns, Julius Randle, Russell Westbrook and Dejounte Murray — and a flotilla of future draft picks;
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An estimated $2.85 billion in contracts signed in free agency;
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31 extensions of existing contracts totaling nearly $5.9 billion, headlined by Celtics star Jayson Tatum’s five-year, $314 million deal — which stands, for now, as the richest pact in the history of the sport.
That’s a ton of business to sift through as we start the 2024-25 NBA season, and try to do some back-of-the-envelope math on which teams expect to find themselves in championship contention come June. So, as we do at the outset of each season, with high hopes for the eventual outcomes of all those deals still unscuffed by reality: let’s bust out those envelopes.
According to BetMGM, eight teams enter the season with championship odds of 15-to-1 (+1500) or better. Those teams feature seven of the 15 members of last season’s All-NBA teams … and they also feature major questions that must be answered between now and the postseason.
Let’s get reacclimated with the NBA’s expected upper echelon by considering the cases for and against those top eight teams. We begin where last season ended:
Boston Celtics (+325)
The case for: OK, good, starting off with an easy one: The Celtics just won the NBA championship, and might be even better this year.
Boston blitzed the league with a style of play that felt a lot like the solution to modern basketball — a means of wringing every ounce of value out of every possession without conceding a single damned thing. Head coach/contemporary philosopher Joe Mazzulla seems intent on pushing the team’s schematic embrace of creating math problems even further this time around. After taking a league-high 47.1% of their shots from 3-point land last season, 55.1% of Boston’s field-goal attempts this preseason came from beyond the arc; that share spiked to a whopping 64.2% on Opening Night, as the Celtics drilled an NBA-record-tying 29 triples in a ring-night annihilation of the Knicks.
Tatum, Jaylen Brown, Jrue Holiday, Derrick White, Kristaps Porziņģis and Al Horford remain the NBA’s best top six. Reserves Payton Pritchard, Sam Hauser, Luke Kornet and Xavier Tillman Sr. all made real contributions to the championship run. And they’re all back: Boston returns every player who logged at least 700 regular-season minutes for one of the most dominant teams ever last season, and every player to clock at least 60 minutes during a 16-3 playoff run.
All that talent comes at an exorbitant cost — an estimated $262 million in salary and luxury tax payments this season, with nearly half-a-billion in total outlay on the books for 2025-26. That’s why the franchise is for sale, and why the rotation as currently constructed will likely look quite different next year. But those are tomorrow’s problems; for right now, Boston is everyone else’s burden to bear.
The case against: It starts with historical precedent, which hasn’t been especially kind to defending champions of late. (My bad, Joe: “attacking” champions.)
Only three titlists in the last 20 seasons have successfully run it back: the Kobe-Pau Lakers (2009, 2010), the Big Three Heat (2012, 2013), and the KD Warriors (2017, 2018). It’s tough to survive consecutive 100-plus-game seasons without things going haywire … like, for example, your 7-foot-3 skeleton key missing the first couple of months rehabbing a rare ankle injury.
Maybe losing Porziņģis for an extended period stretches Horford too thin, and the weight of nearly 41,000 NBA minutes across 18 seasons finally starts to show. Maybe a somewhat shaky center rotation of a diminished Horford, Tillman, Kornet and Neemias Queta keeps the C’s from running away from the rest of the East again.
Maybe that puts more strain on Tatum, Brown and Co., forcing them to carry a large enough regular-season load that they get gassed and stumble late, as they did during the 2022 Finals and early in the 2023 Eastern Conference finals. Maybe leaden legs lead to misfiring jumpers, bringing back old concerns about the fitness of Boston’s crunch-time offense. And maybe that’s enough to allow someone — whether from a healthier slate of opponents in a stronger East, or whichever monster comes out of the West — to send the Celtics tumbling back down the mountain.
Oklahoma City Thunder (+500)
The case for: The Thunder trailed only the Celtics last season in regular-season wins and net rating, and joined Boston as the only other team to finish top-five in offensive and defensive efficiency. They fell to the eventual Western Conference champs in the second round of the playoffs thanks partly to two structural holes: a non-shooter/shaky defender in the starting lineup and insufficient beef on the glass. Then they turned Josh Giddey into Alex Caruso, a two-time All-Defensive selection who just shot 41% from 3-point range, and signed Isaiah Hartenstein, a 7-footer who’s finished in the top 20 in rebounding percentage two years running.
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