The Thunder and Spurs will each win about 2 championships over the next 10 years

Original statement

“NBA Future of the Franchise Rankings 4.0 SportsNBA Future of the Franchise Rankings 4.0 The Spurs and Thunder have the brightest futures. But what about the rest of the league after a crazy offseason? Nate Silver, Joseph George, and Jeremias EngelmannSep 28, 2026∙ PaidNate Silver: The 2026-27 NBA season begins on Oct. 20, when the New York Knicks will lift the championship banner to celebrate their first NBA title in 53 seasons. I’m looking forward to this season, and not just because I’m a Knicks fan. In fact, at some point during the regular season, we’re hoping to launch a new-and-improved version of RAPTOR, the NBA player valuation and projection system that I built for FiveThirtyEight.1 In the meantime, it’s time for one of my favorite Silver Bulletin features: our Future of the Franchise rankings. This is the fourth iteration of FOTF (#1, #2, #3), which began in February 2025 after the Luka Doncic trade and is now a biannual tradition. Our goal is seemingly simple: to rank the 30 NBA teams by their expected number of championships over the next 10 NBA seasons (2026-27 through 2035-36). This is unapologetically “rings culture” taken to the max: pretty goodness doesn’t matter, only titles do. That said, there have been eight distinct NBA champions over the past eight seasons, not all of whom looked like juggernauts heading into the year. The panelists are me (NS), Silver Bulletin Assistant Sports Editor Joseph George (JG), and Jeremias Engelmann (JE), the developer of Real Plus-Minus and a former analyst for the Mavericks and Suns, whose excellent work can be found at xRAPM.com and 5x5. Just speaking for myself, this was by far the most difficult time I’ve had making out my FOTF list. The top two teams have never been clearer — spoiler: it has to be the Thunder and the Spurs in some order. Joseph, Jeremias and I also exactly agreed on the teams ranked #30, #29, #28 and #27. But everything in the middle is a mess. Some of that is because the top two teams look so unstoppable. Despite league rules that make it increasingly impossible to keep a core together, the Thunder have 68 and 64 wins over the past two regular seasons, a back-to-back MVP in Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, and an abundance of role players and draft assets that should keep the treadmill running. The Spurs were one of the youngest teams ever to reach the finals, led by a 7’4” superstar the likes of which the league has never seen before. Sure, they wilted under the bright lights, but none of the core players are anywhere near their peak. “My” Knicks aren’t in this elite, long-term tier — but they’re the ones hanging a banner. (And charging a minimum of $1,172 for Opening Night when I last checked.) And the way they bulldozed through the playoffs last year raised questions about literally every other Eastern Conference contender. Not only about the three teams they beat (the Hawks, 76ers and Cavs) but also, by the transitive principle, teams like the Celtics and Pistons. Boston’s loss to Philly looks much worse after an undignified 4-0 Knicks sweep against the same team, and they traded Jaylen Brown after he finished 6th in MVP voting. The problem for the rest of the league is that there aren’t all that many championships to go around. Let’s say we assign 2-ish championships to each of the Spurs and the Thunder. (Joseph and Jeremias might disagree, but that’s about where I land.) That leaves just six titles remaining for the other 28 franchises, or around 0.2 per team.2 My back-of-the-envelope attempt resulted in a distribution that looks like this: The highest number I get for non-OKC/SAS teams is 0.45 titles. In other words, every franchise apart from the Spurs and the Thunder is probably a bad bet to win a title over the next 10 years at even money. In some cases, that feels really harsh. Since 1972, the Lakers haven’t gone more than 12 years without a championship. Recognizing the scarcity of chips on the table motivated me to rejigger my ratings some. If the average non-OKC/SAS team has an expectation of only 0.2 titles, then having any short-term championship equity at all — 5 percent or certainly 10 percent — can cause a team to rocket up the list. Since the colors give it away anyway, I can reveal that my “Mystery Team #1”, for instance, is the Knicks. Having traded the farm for Mikal Bridges and KAT, they’re probably going to be quite bad in, say, 2031. But having a 12 percent chance of repeating this year — honestly, that feels a little low — and 10 percent next year already puts them above the league median. Ranking every NBA team’s future Ordinarily, this is where I’d turn things over to Jeremias or Joseph. Flow-wise, it just works a little better if someone other than me writes the capsule for the #30 team. However, between when we assigned the teams and when this story was published, the NBA gave one of my assignments, the Los Angeles Clippers, the equivalent of the NCAA football “death penalty,” stripping them of five first-round draft picks for the Kawhi Leonard salary cap circumvention scandal. We all dropped them to #30, which is saying something in a league that also contains the Sacramento Kings. We will take a little pause, though, to show you an interactive graphic. Paid subscribers can click through every team to see how their rating has evolved over time. (For other readers, the graphic is limited to teams that are part of the free preview.) 30. ⛵ Los Angeles Clippers ↓ Individual rankings: NS: 30, JG: 30, JE: 30. Trajectory: 30→25→25→30.Nate: As you can see from the chart, I’ve always been bearish on the Clippers relative to the consensus, and my ranking in February was influenced by pricing in the expected price of the Aspiration scandal. But I suppose I spent too much time listening to the conventional wisdom that suggested they might get off with a relatively light punishment. I’m not quite sure why there was so much agreement about this, when it was just very obvious from the start that Pablo Torre had all kinds of receipts, and there was no rational way (other than cap circumvention) to explain why Kawhi was paid $28 million to do literally nothing for a fake tree-planting company. How bad is the situation now? Hear me out: I think the NBA should literally disband the Clippers. Have a dispersal draft. Or force a sale, move them to Las Vegas and give them a new name — the Las Vegas Fake Plastic Trees — and some of their draft picks back. And then immediately replace them with a new franchise to play in the Intuit Dome. The Clippers are ostensibly worth $7.5 billion, but that was before the magnitude of the NBA’s punishment became clear. The league is expected to ask for more than that for new expansion teams, and neither of them will be in a market as desirable as LA. You’d have to make Steve Ballmer whole somehow; maybe he can be reinstated after a few years and own the new Seattle team. But the Clippers have a below-replacement-level brand intangible: you’ll recall that the Aspiration scandal came on the heels of Donald Sterling. For the roughly three of you on the Silver Bulletin mailing list who remain committed Clippers fans, I will say I actually liked what this franchise had done for the past year or two, scandal aside. I didn’t get why swapping James Harden for Darius Garland, a player who was 10 years younger, wasn’t unanimously seen as a heist, for instance. The roulette wheel landed on black after the Ivica Zubac trade, and so the Clips picked up the #5 pick in the June draft (Keaton Wagler). Still, the overall situation looks hopeless. How couldn’t it be when the Clippers essentially gave up 10 first-round draft picks and SGA (!!!!) for Kawhi and Paul George? Who’s going to want to play for this team — or root for it? By the way, it was just revealed right as we were going to press that Brandon Ingram has a partially torn Achilles tendon. Adam Silver, please put this franchise out of their misery! It’s the humane thing to do! 29. 👑 Sacramento Kings ↑ Individual rankings: NS: 29, JG: 29, JE: 29. Trajectory: 28→30→30→29.Joseph George: It’s hard to say much about the Kings from a “championship equity” point of view. This past February, I ranked them at #28 because they were, ironically, the worst team in the league and would have had some upside if they could have lucked into one of Cameron Boozer, AJ Dybantsa, or Darryn Peterson. After February, the Kings managed to go 8-13, dropping them from worst to fifth worst, and they did not get lucky at the draft lottery, eventually moving down to the 7th overall pick. This is the Kings’ way. It is hard to think of a single professional team in the world that relishes its role as its league’s punching bag as much as the Kings do. 28. ⚜️ New Orleans Pelicans ↑ Individual rankings: NS: 28, JG: 28, JE: 28. Trajectory: 19→28→29→28.Jeremias Engelmann: Word on the street at this year’s Las Vegas Summer League — where executives and analysts from NBA teams congregate and spill copious amounts of gossip — is that the Pelicans are the worst-run NBA team, by a wide margin. Their decision-making process appears to be broken beyond repair, in both player acquisition and front-office hiring and firing. This isn’t exactly news: In 2025, the Pelicans were understandably lambasted for trading a “superfirst” — the better of New Orleans’ and Milwaukee’s 2026 picks — and another first-rounder to Atlanta for No. 13 pick Derik Queen. That, luckily, didn’t turn out to be disastrous: The Hawks ended up with the No. 8 pick, selecting Kingston Flemings. But the trade shows the Pelicans’ sense of how to project team performance and value draft picks is extremely poor. I will be surprised if the Pelicans make the playoffs more than two or three times over the next 10 years. 27. 🦌 Milwaukee Bucks ↓ Individual rankings: NS: 27, JG: 27, JE: 27. Trajectory: 15→26→27→27.Jeremias: I was critical of Bucks management for the last several years of the Giannis Antetokounmpo era. For a team with a top-5 player, Milwaukee’s moves around the edges were mostly blunders. Yes, the Jrue Holiday trade turned out to be the correct all-in move at the time. But that trade six years ago started a desperate cycle of moves — most famously the Damian Lillard trade — for which the Bucks are still paying: Milwaukee is not in control of its own draft picks until 2031. And I’m not a fan of the Bucks’ No. 13 pick, Nate Ament. He appears to have limited upside due to a severe lack of quick-twitch athleticism. The lone bright spot is the No. 10 pick from this year’s draft: During summer league, Brayden Burries looked like an absolute steal. I won’t be shocked if he’s the unofficial franchise player by December. 26. 🗽 Brooklyn Nets ↓ Individual rankings: NS: 25, JG: 26, JE: 25. Trajectory: 17→19→24→26.Joseph: I think I could understand being optimistic about the Nets. They have a good management team, Joe Tsai is one of the league’s better owners by my estimation, and they have a bunch of draft picks from the Mikal Bridges trade. Still, I’m a little bit wary of being bullish on a team that feels so hypothetical. Mikel Brown Jr. and Egor Demin might turn into something. Still, shooting for a superstar through the draft is not straightforward — even after winning the lottery, you have to draft correctly, which is difficult on its own. (And Houston owns swap rights to Brooklyn’s pick this year.) Not every season has a Wemby or Cooper Flagg. The Nets do have Jordi Fernandez — in my opinion, one of the best coaches in the NBA. If you want to adjust for a little bit of tanking, he’s outperformed the quality of his roster, and the Nets have seen value on the margins: they flipped both Mikal Bridges and Cameron Johnson for premiums, and they’ll likely do the same with Michael Porter Jr. and Julius Randle. The Nets, given their constraints, seem to be making decisions optimally enough, which is more than I can expect from any team ranked in the bottom five. But a team with no long-term projectable All-Stars (as of right now) is a little too theoretical for my taste. Nate: I have the Nets in a slightly higher tier than the bottom four. Not having much going on is more curable than having to dig out of a hole. With that said, it’s not a great sign that their FOTF ranking has declined in every edition so far. 25. 🧙 Washington Wizards ↑ Individual rankings: NS: 23, JG: 25, JE: 26. Trajectory: 23→27→28→25.This post is for paid subscribers Already a paid subscriber? Sign in”

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