Biggest Winners and Losers from Entire 2024-25 NBA Season
The 2024-25 NBA regular season is a wrap. While no official winners will be named for a while—via awards season and, eventually, the conclusion of the playoffs—we can still skim back over the 82-game slate that just ended and highlight the best and worst of what we saw.
We'll include teams, individuals and even branch out to themes that more broadly defined the year, summing up the campaign through the lens of winners and losers.
Note to anyone designated a winner or loser for their 2024-25 efforts: Don't get too high or too low. If we learned anything during a wild and unpredictable season, it's that nothing in the NBA stays the same for long.
Winner: Detroit Pistons
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This could have gone to Cade Cunningham, who made the leap to All-NBA status during a breakout year, or head coach JB Bickerstaff, who instilled a hard-nosed, defensive culture during his first season in the Motor City.
Instead, we're broadening the scope to include the entire Detroit Pistons organization.
This team more than tripled its win total from last season, skipping right past the play-in tournament and securing a top-six playoff seed by riding Cunningham on offense and finishing 10th leaguewide in defensive efficiency.
Free-agent addition Malik Beasley made the second-most threes in the league (319), Ausar Thompson ascended on defense, Ron Holland II and Isaiah Stewart embraced the rugged aggression that defined the best Pistons teams of the past, and the entire operation felt rejuvenated.
The Pistons are one of the NBA's marquee organizations. The league is better when they're bullying their way to relevance in take-no-prisoners style.
Loser: Dallas Mavericks
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The Dallas Mavericks weren't the only team to endure a season that fell below expectations. They weren't even the only one to abruptly trade away their best player.
However, they were the one organization that might have permanently alienated an entire generation of fans.
The Luka Dončić deal was this season's biggest, most shocking development. Even if Dončić's work ethic and off-court habits would have prevented him from leading Dallas to glory—which was management's explanation for trading him—you'll never convince any rational observer, let alone diehard Mavs fan, that general manager Nico Harrison made the deal at the right time or secured an acceptable return for a player who looked like the league's single most untouchable commodity.
"Fire Nico" chants will persist at high volume until Dallas' new ownership (the party ultimately responsible for the mistake) appeases the masses. Even then, it's going to be extremely difficult for the Mavericks to win back the trust of a fanbase in justifiable revolt.
In any other year, Kyrie Irving's torn ACL would earn placement in the first paragraph of the Mavericks' 2024-25 postmortem. That an objective catastrophe like that rates as an afterthought says everything about how the Dončić trade wrecked Dallas' future.
Winner: LeBron James
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Dallas' loss is LeBron James' gain.
Anthony Davis is a fine player, one good enough to feature prominently in the last championship James won. But Luka Dončić is the ideal teammate for James' last act. With Luka in the fold, James can pick his spots like never before.
That's critically important to prolonging what's already the most extended prime in NBA history.
Instead of having to run the show, James can facilitate and spot up for clean looks at his leisure. When he wants to attack, he'll do so against a defense that, for perhaps the first time in his career, is focused mostly on someone else. The presence of Dončić basically makes everything easier for LeBron, offsetting whatever declines he suffers in skill and athleticism by lowering the degree of difficulty.
If Dončić treats his trade away from Dallas as a wake-up call, and if the Lakers make a tweak or two to round out the rotation, James might get two or three relatively low-stress cracks at his fifth career championship ring.
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Loser: Mat Ishbia
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The Phoenix Suns missed the play-in tournament, do not control their own first-round pick until 2032 and are staring down an offseason that will almost certainly involve trading away Kevin Durant.
The "This is fine." meme is getting a little old. If we could get owner Mat Ishbia's claim from last May down to a more concise length, we'd have a pretty good replacement.
"Ask the other 29 GMs— 26 of them would trade their whole team for our whole team and our draft picks and everything as is," he told Doug Haller of The Athletic. "The house is not on fire."
Disconnection from reality. Total abandonment of logical norms. A profound failure to understand the consequences of overspending. These are the defining features of the Suns under Ishbia, who took a team that made the NBA Finals in 2020-21 and won 64 games in 2021-22, and turned it into the single most hopeless organization in the league.
Ishbia is at the wheel of a franchise barreling toward disaster.
Winner: Shai Gilgeous-Alexander
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Whether it earns him an MVP or not, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander's 2024-25 season will be remembered for a very long time.
Without exaggeration, it was one of the most productive campaigns ever produced by a guard. Among the highlights: a streak of 72 straight 20-point games, a scoring title, a league-leading 20.9 Estimated Wins Added, a 51.9/37.5/89.8 shooting split and the alpha role on an Oklahoma City Thunder team that set the all-time record for average margin of victory.
The postseason matters most, and there'll be holdouts who won't acknowledge SGA's season as a true all-timer unless he powers OKC through the playoffs en route to a title. That's why we're getting out ahead of things and giving him a nod now.
Whatever happens to cloud the issue (or clarify it) the rest of the way, Gilgeous-Alexander rates as one of the biggest regular-season winners we've seen in recent memory.
Loser: the Discourse
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2024-25 was a big year for complainers.
Whether it was ill-informed grousing about NBA teams playing homogenous offensive styles, out-of-touch "back in my day" shots at perceived player frailty, handwringing about ratings or whining about teams attempting too many threes, constant complaining about the state of the game felt like a defining feature of the year.
It was misguided, and it didn't serve anybody.
First-year Los Angeles Lakers head coach JJ Redick nailed it when he told reporters in December: "I don’t think we … have done a good job of storytelling, of celebrating the game. If I’m a casual fan and you tell me every time I turn on the television that the product sucks, well, I’m not going to watch the product. And that’s really what has happened over the last 10 to 15 years. I don’t know why. It’s not funny to me."
Anyone who spent time lamenting the state of the game—whether in the media or not—missed a spectacular season marked by historic individual performances and the highest collective skill level we've ever seen.
Maybe we should talk about things like that more in 2025-26.
Winner: Disruption
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This season, Atlanta Hawks guard Dyson Daniels became the first player since Nate McMillan in 1993-94 to average at least three steals per game.
Daniels has been a habitual thief since entering the league in 2022-23, when he rated in the 83rd percentile in steal rate at his position. Last year, he jumped to the 92nd percentile. And now, he's tops in the field and one of the best in recent NBA history.
Despite landing on the shelf for good in February, Victor Wembanyama still finished the season with the most total blocks in the league. His per-game rate of 3.8 is higher than any we've seen since Alonzo Mourning averaged 3.9 in 1998-99. Coincidentally, Zo appeared in just 46 games that year—the same number Wemby played this season.
For all the talk of offense taking over the league, defensive disruption certainly had its day this year.
Loser: Job Security
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With only nine games left in their season and a playoff berth on the horizon, the Memphis Grizzlies fired head coach Taylor Jenkins.
The Denver Nuggets then one-upped Memphis by firing Mike Malone, who won a championship ring in 2023 and had amassed more victories than any coach in franchise history, with only three games left in the season.
The writing was more clearly on the wall for Jenkins after the front office revamped his coaching staff prior to the season. That's not to say his ouster was easy to see coming. But it certainly felt more explainable than Malone's—that is, until reports came trickling out about him wearing on the locker room and coming to loggerheads with GM Calvin Booth, who also got the axe.
Jenkins was runner-up in Coach of the Year voting in 2021-22 and had guided the Grizzlies to the No. 2 seed in the West twice in his first four years with the team. Malone presided over the most successful era of Nuggets basketball in team history.
There's no such thing as job security in the NBA. The 2024-25 season proved it.
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 Bluesky and subscribe to the Hardwood Knocks podcast, where he appears with Bleacher Report's Dan Favale.
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