NBA Teams With the Toughest Paths to Improvement
There's no such thing as standing still in the NBA. You're either getting better, or you're getting worse. That's particularly true in an era of parity that seems to be opening and closing windows of contention faster than ever.
Here, we're going to take a look at the teams that will struggle most to avoid slippage in the coming season and beyond.
We won't cheap out and pick squads at the absolute top of the league. It's highly unlikely the Oklahoma City Thunder will collect more than the 68 wins they earned this season in 2025-26, but that's not really the idea here.
Instead, we're looking at squads that lack resources, direction and (sorry to say it so bluntly) hope.
All of these teams are likely to see things get worse before they get better.
Phoenix Suns
1 of 5
There are ways for the Phoenix Suns to get better, but the best one is trading Devin Booker, and they seem wholly uninterested in going that route.
Booker was involved in the head coaching search that landed on Jordan Ott, per Shams Charania of ESPN, which suggests he and the team are aligned on sticking together.
A Kevin Durant trade probably won't return a better player, Bradley Beal still wields a tragically hilarious amount of power with the franchise due to his no-trade clause, and ownership continues to be unfathomably out of step with reality.
Just try to digest the logic of owner Mat Ishbia responding to the capricious and future-mortgaging madness that has defined his control of the team by basically saying he's going to get more involved.
On Ishbia's watch, Phoenix has traded away virtually every pick possible, constructed an imbalanced roster, cycled through coaches and essentially made some kind of connection to Michigan State the main hiring criteria for powerful positions.
It's possible the Suns eclipse last year's 36 wins because the bar is so low. But the damage they have done to themselves over the past couple of years is going to wreck them for a decade.
Milwaukee Bucks
2 of 5
Start here: There's basically no way to trade Giannis Antetokounmpo while bringing back a better player. And that will be doubly true if the two-time MVP asks to be dealt to a specific destination, a move that always limits the quality of incoming offers.
A Giannis trade is the Bucks' smartest move from a dispassionate perspective, but it would mark the beginning of a long, painful rebuild that would surely result in lottery trips for at least a few years.
Alternatively, Antetokounmpo could choose to stick it out with the only NBA team he's known. That would be a fine sentimental story, but the Bucks can't meaningfully improve the roster around him for next season.
Damian Lillard's torn Achilles will likely cost him all of next year, meaning Milwaukee is essentially setting the $54.1 million it's paying him on fire. Worse still, he has a $58.5 million player option for 2026-27, his age-36 season.
Kyle Kuzma posted a minus-4.7 Box Plus/Minus in his time with the Bucks last season, doesn't defend and hasn't posted a true shooting percentage above the league average in any year of his career. That renders him, somehow, grossly overpaid at just $23 million (14.9 percent of the cap) next season.
The Bucks can only trade their 2031 or 2032 first-round draft pick, they have no young talent of note, indispensable free-agent center Brook Lopez is 37, and they’ve been bounced in the first round three years running.
This is all going to get much worse before it gets better, but that's the price of contending for a good chunk of a decade. Milwaukee got its title with Giannis, and the bleak years ahead are the natural fallout of that success.
Boston Celtics
3 of 5
The Boston Celtics were in for a talent drain before Jayson Tatum tore his Achilles against the New York Knicks in the second round of the playoffs.
Projected to be $22 million over the second apron and feeling the sharp pain of the repeater tax, they were ticketed for a payroll-plus-penalties bill of over $500 million in 2025-26.
Losing Tatum obviously brought Boston's ceiling crashing down, but it also made cost-cutting much more defensible. The Celtics aren't going to contend for a championship next season, so there's no justification for paying more for this roster than any team in NBA history ever has.
Jrue Holiday, Derrick White, Kristaps Porziņģis and Jaylen Brown should all be on notice. Any one of them could be traded, and the expectation should be that at least two actually will change teams.
The Celtics could treat next season as a gap year and hope a recovered Tatum will still be good enough in 2026-27 to lead a revamped core on deep playoff runs.
Realistically, though, the six-time All-Star might never get back to that All-NBA level following such a devastating injury. He earned the supermax contract he's currently on, but it's tough to imagine he'll play at a level that justifies such an exorbitant pay rate through the 2029-30 season.
Long story short: Boston could choose a half-measure reorganization in hopes Tatum regains his top form two years from now. Or it could confront the reality that this era is over, instituting a total rebuild.
Either way, the Celtics are going to lose major ground in the standings next season.
Los Angeles Clippers
4 of 5
If you think the Los Angeles Clippers are going to win more than the 50 games they did in 2024-25, you're making several improbable bets.
The first is that James Harden will again play at an All-NBA level in his age-36 season. Even if he somehow manages to approximate last year's 22.8 points and 8.7 assists, it's impossible to imagine he will log another 79 games.
And speaking of durability questions: Kawhi Leonard...
Everyone seems to have forgotten because he looked pretty close to his superstar self for a few postseason stretches, but the six-time All-Star only appeared in 37 regular-season games last year.
Signs of decline were easy to spot, as Leonard posted his worst two-point field-goal percentage in five seasons and the lowest free-throw-attempts-per-game figure in a decade. His pull-up was still money, but his burst and finishing ability looked, well…like they belonged to a 33-year-old with a laundry list of knee surgeries on his health record.
Can Ivica Zubac prove his career year is the new normal? Can L.A. really expect Norman Powell to reprise one of the best late-career statistical improvements anyone has ever seen?
Optimistically, one or two of the Clippers' improbable success stories from last year will be repeatable. But there's no way all of them are.
Sacramento Kings
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Any time you can bring back the executive who signed a 40-year-old Vince Carter, a 36-year-old Zach Randolph and a 31-year-old George Hill in the same 2017 offseason, only to leave months later as those veteran acquisitions grew frustrated on a bottom-feeding team, you've got to do it.
Scott Perry is back, and he's presiding over a head coach in Doug Christie he did not choose. The roster—aging, unbalanced, bereft of defenders and coming off a 40-42 season—could suffer further talent drain if Domantas Sabonis follows De'Aaron Fox's example and requests a trade.
The West is only getting tougher around the Kings, who can't meaningfully remake themselves because Zach LaVine and DeMar DeRozan aren't on positive-value contracts. Chaos and capricious management, held at bay for a couple of years while since-fired head coach Mike Brown guided the Kings to their only playoff berth in forever, are back in a big way.
Owner Vivek Ranadive has yet to prove he can empower the right people or stick to a plan. So he's turning to retreads in Perry and the recently re-emerging Vlade Divac while reeling in leaders seemingly on the basis of ties to Kings teams of the early 2000s. Former Sixth Man extraordinaire Bobby Jackson will join Christie's staff.
Keep an eye out for Lawrence Funderburke to join the medical team and Corliss Williamson to get a job in ticket sales.
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.
