NBA Teams Facing an Identity Crisis
NBA rosters and front offices change all the time, but a few organizations head into the 2023 offseason facing more upheaval than most. These teams find themselves at a crossroads, unsure of who they are and who they might become.
Several are recent champions, status which ironically tends to trigger identity crises. They were great—even the very best—in the past, and they know what earned them that success. Of course, sustaining a winning model in a league designed to sap a team of its advantages makes it hard to stay on top and harder to fight back to the peak after slipping from it.
These teams could stay the course, swap out parts on the margins, adjust organizational goals or even blow the whole thing up.
The only commonality is that each squad we'll cover has more questions than answers as it tries to decide what its future holds.
Golden State Warriors
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Team president Bob Myers' departure was the first domino to fall.
Though owner Joe Lacob's comments at Myers' farewell presser suggested the Golden State Warriors have no intention of lowering their championship aims, the exit of the team's principal architect affects everything about the offseason and the years ahead. Losing one of the people most responsible for the organizational culture matters in ways great and small.
The Warriors plan to keep winning as long as Stephen Curry is still a superstar, but Myers' exit makes implementing that plan tricky. Draymond Green has a player option, Klay Thompson is eligible for an extension and Jordan Poole probably needs to be traded after a brutally poor postseason showing. Myers' successor won't have his institutional knowledge or decade's worth of emotional equity with the team's most important figures.
Every negotiation just got thornier. Every tough conversation just got tougher.
Beyond the Green, Thompson and Poole-related issues that could fundamentally reshape the team, there's also the matter of building a supporting cast while constrained by the second-apron tax penalties. The Warriors likely won't have their taxpayer's midlevel exception to use, and they'll need to replace free-agent goners Donte DiVincenzo and JaMychal Green.
The Warriors have been too good for too long to lose their sense of self entirely, but they're going to look different next year. And for the first time in a decade, Myers won't be the guy authoring the changes.
Los Angeles Lakers
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Unless he gives up $97.1 million to accept a buyout, the CBA changes overnight and/or several other miles-apart stars align, LeBron James isn't leaving the Los Angeles Lakers to join Kyrie Irving with the Dallas Mavericks.
Unfortunately for the Lakers, that's just about the only eventuality we can rule out.
James' dalliance with the idea of retirement hangs over everything, and if he were to (improbably) hang it up, Los Angeles wouldn't so much have an identity crisis as an existential one. But assuming he returns, the team is still in a state of serious flux.
The Lakers could retain their own free agents—principally Austin Reaves, Rui Hachimura and Dennis Schroder—guarantee Jarred Vanderbilt's salary and pick up Malik Beasley's team option. They could even re-sign D'Angelo Russell with the intention of trading him. Running it back with the personnel that helped the Lakers secure the league's second-best record after the All-Star break seems like a decent plan.
But there's also the cap-space route, which would see Los Angeles renounce rights to its free agents, trim salary everywhere possible and clear enough room to throw $30 million at a third star.
The Lakers have sacrificed depth and continuity for a single high-profile acquisition before, and the Russell Westbrook experiment was an unmitigated disaster. Will they learn from that mistake and trust in the players they've got, or will they give in to their star-chasing tendencies and James' subtle pressure to make a move?
We've seen Los Angeles take both paths over the last few years. The one they choose this summer will go a long way toward determining whether they contend again before James really does call it quits.
Phoenix Suns
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Whether you start with the hiring of Frank Vogel to replace Monty Williams or the fact that the Phoenix Suns currently have just four players on fully guaranteed deals for next season, it's clear that this is a wildly unsettled team.
Kevin Durant and Devin Booker are stabilizers; the Suns know they've got two of the best players in the league anchoring things in 2023-24. But Deandre Ayton's future with the team remains uncertain, and it's anybody's guess what'll happen with Chris Paul once the Suns waive him, a surprising development reported by B/R's Chris Haynes. CP3 could return at a lower salary (but only if Phoenix doesn't stretch his current contract), or he could leave in free agency.
Who's to say another team with cap space wouldn't come way over the top of what Phoenix could offer? The Lakers, Clippers, Mavericks and host of other teams loom as potential landing spots—perhaps ones Paul would prefer over Phoenix even if the money were equal.
KD and Booker keep the Suns' floor high, but this group has to fill out a bench, decide which of its other starters are worth keeping and adjust to Vogel's schemes. At bottom, it's really hard to figure out what kind of team you're going to be when you don't know who'll be on it and haven't had experience with the man coaching it.
Toronto Raptors
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If a head coach sets a team's culture, then the Toronto Raptors are by definition lacking an identity. They parted ways with Nick Nurse on April 21 and didn't name a successor until hiring Darko Rajakovic on June 10, per ESPN's Adrian Wojnarowski.
If that weren't enough, starting guards Fred VanVleet and Gary Trent Jr. are both likely to enter free agency by declining their player options. That means the Raps could have an entirely new guard combo, which would necessarily change their style on both ends, or bring back the incumbents and hope they adapt to whatever tactical changes the next head coach installs.
Add to that the extension eligibility of starting forwards Pascal Siakam and OG Anunoby, and 80 percent of the first unit faces some level of uncertainty. The most Toronto can offer Anunoby is $116 million over four years, which is probably below his market rate and should land him in trade rumors for the second straight season.
Don't worry, we didn't forget about the Raptors' fifth starter, unrestricted free agent Jakob Poeltl. He makes it a clean sweep of question marks for the starting lineup.
It actually gets deeper than lineup questions and the coaching situation for Toronto. This is a franchise that has the ability (and maybe even the inclination) to blow things up. It wouldn't be a shock if the Raptors dealt away several veterans to pile up draft picks and trigger a rebuild. Everything from a teardown to a full "run it back" approach is on the table, making Toronto the hardest team to pin down this summer.
Washington Wizards
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We've framed identity crises as problems to this point, but the Washington Wizards' situation proves they're not all bad. Washington is in the midst of redefining itself after years of looking lost. This isn't a situation where the Wizards are fumbling around asking who they are.
It feels much more like maturation.
Washington moved on from president and GM Tommy Sheppard, who'd been the organization's top decision-maker for several years. Ownership probably had a hand in some of the ill-advised moves during his tenure (and Washington fans should keep that in mind to temper expectations going forward), but Sheppard's reign was defined by the pursuit of mediocrity. The Wizards seemed only to want a playoff berth, a goal that negatively affected their draft strategy, cap sheet and long-term future. The quarter-billion-dollar contract for Bradley Beal was the ultimate embodiment of the franchise's short-sighted approach.
Former Los Angeles Clippers GM Michael Winger is the new man in charge of the Wizards. Winger cut his teeth with the Oklahoma City Thunder, perhaps the most future-focused organization in the league. He'll be joined by former OKC executive Will Dawkins, with whom he worked from 2010 to 2017.
Those two had hands in making Oklahoma City what it is today: a franchise poised for major success over the next decade. Loaded with picks and young talent on team-friendly deals, the Thunder are a model of patience and big-picture thinking–basically the complete opposite of Washington under the previous regime.
The Wizards still have Kyle Kuzma and Kristaps Porziņģis headed for free agency. If they re-sign both to bloated deals that tie up the books and set an eighth-seed ceiling, we'll have to walk back all this talk of a new beginning. But it feels like change is in the air, and that's a good thing for Washington.
Stats courtesy of NBA.com, Basketball Reference and Cleaning the Glass. Salary info via Spotrac.
Grant Hughes covers the NBA for Bleacher Report. Follow him on Twitter (@gt_hughes), and subscribe to the Hardwood Knocks podcast, where he appears with Bleacher Report's Dan Favale.
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