
Tim BontempsOct 13, 2025, 07:00 AM ET
- Tim Bontemps is simply a elder NBA writer for ESPN.com who covers the league and what's impacting it connected and disconnected the court, including commercialized deadline intel, enlargement and his MVP Straw Polls. You tin find Tim alongside Brian Windhorst and Tim MacMahon connected The Hoop Collective podcast.
The NBA mightiness beryllium successful its extent era, but prima powerfulness inactive wins the day.
In a athletics successful which lone 5 players instrumentality the level for each squad astatine a time, a attraction of stars has been a wide mode to physique a championship-level team.
But adjacent erstwhile a squad doesn't person a trio of ready-made stars, looking astatine the apical 3 players connected each roster is simply a bully mode to measurement some the short- and semipermanent wellness of an enactment and wherever a franchise is headed implicit the adjacent fewer months and adjacent fewer years.
With that rubric successful mind, we not lone person laid retired the cores of each 30 NBA teams, but besides ranked them successful examination to 1 another. And we've done truthful by taking into relationship some the group's contiguous and aboriginal worth -- on with the likelihood that these players volition beryllium with their respective teams for the mean to agelong term.
Jump to a tier:
A league of their own | Knocking connected the door
Best of the East | Ascendant young teams
Gap Years | Old stars with large questions
Changing the course | Stuck successful the middle
Starting a rebuild | Rebuilding
Tier 1: A league of their own
Oklahoma City Thunder: Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Chet Holmgren, Jalen Williams
Who other could beryllium atop this list? Not lone did the Thunder triumph 68 games and their archetypal title past season, but they besides did truthful with 1 of the youngest title-winning rosters successful NBA history. Then, to headdress things off, wide manager Sam Presti went retired this summertime and proceeded to fastener each 3 of his young cornerstones into semipermanent declaration extensions -- officially cementing the Thunder arsenic the perennial favorites to assistance the Larry O'Brien Trophy for the foreseeable future.
Last year: Gilgeous-Alexander, Holmgren, Williams

3 weeks ago
3

























English (US) ·