Biggest Winners and Losers From the 2025-26 NBA Regular Season
The conclusion of the 2025-26 NBA regular season means we've got final win totals for all 30 teams. But if you think that's the only metric necessary to determine success, you missed the point of a campaign where one of the main storylines was tanking.
All year, we wrung our hands over the problem of deliberate losing, and we worried about what it meant that victories were sometimes failures.
Clearly, we need a more nuanced look at who actually won and lost.
Let's dig into the recently completed campaign, assess trends, point out pleasant surprises and highlight conspicuous mistakes. That'll get us much closer to the true winners and losers of 2025-26.
Winner: San Antonio Spurs
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Whether you go with "that escalated quickly" or "look at us!" to describe the San Antonio Spurs' spectacular ascent to contention, you're capturing the vibe of their 2025-26 campaign.
Politely but firmly, Victor Wembanyama entered the MVP conversation. Head coach Mitch Johnson put any doubts about his coaching acumen to bed, and virtually every young piece of San Antonio's core progressed ahead of schedule. Highlights on that front included Stephon Castle's ruthless competitiveness, Dylan Harper's slick finishing craft and Carter Bryant's preposterously athletic defense.
Rewind to October. High-end outcomes in which the Spurs snagged a top-four playoff seed during Wemby's third season were on the table, but almost nobody saw a 62-win campaign from a squad that now profiles as the greatest threat to the defending champion Oklahoma City Thunder.
San Antonio won 34 games a year ago. Plenty of fans would have been happy with 44 this season. A leap like this speaks not only to Wembanyama's generational greatness, but also to an organization that picked and developed tremendous talent around its megastar.
Loser: Defenders
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If it seems harder to play defense in the NBA than ever before, that's because it is.
Golden State Warriors head coach Steve Kerr broke down the impossible task facing NBA defenders these days. It's worth hearing his entire assessment of how specific rule enforcements have changed the game.
Offensive players have weaponized the off-arm to the most extreme degree of all time, while defenders have no way to counter it.
Players are better conditioned and more skilled than ever. Teams analyze troves of data to ensure they're deploying all their talent optimally. That doesn't completely explain why the league set an all-time record with a 115.7 offensive rating this season.
The other major factor: Defenders are at a greater disadvantage than ever.
Winner: Atlanta Hawks
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We're counting the Atlanta Hawks' draft heist as one of their victories this year, even if it came way back in June. That move, which netted Atlanta the better of New Orleans' and Milwaukee's 2026 first-round picks, will go down as one of the most lopsided transactions of the past decade.
The Hawks' successes didn't stop there.
They also moved on from Trae Young, perhaps a year too late, but still before they had to worry about giving him a lucrative extension. Though the return from the Washington Wizards didn't feature any draft picks, it did include CJ McCollum, whose shooting contributed to what became one of the best five-man units in the league.
McCollum joined breakout star Jalen Johnson and Nickeil Alexander-Walker, whose offseason signing at the mid-level now rates as one of the best contracts in the entire league, to propel the Hawks to a 46-win season.
Young, cost-controlled and toting high-upside future assets, the Hawks improved their state by as much as any team outside of San Antonio this season.
Losers: Giannis Antetokounmpo and the Milwaukee Bucks
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Giannis Antetokounmpo and the Milwaukee Bucks are equally to blame for the debacle that was their 2025-26 season, so they share this "honor" just as they shared the inability to have real dialogue that would have enabled rational, adult decisions.
Antetokounmpo talked out of both sides of his mouth all year, proclaiming undying loyalty and commitment in one breath and reserving the right to change his mind in the next. That put the Bucks in a difficult spot, but at least it was a familiar one. Antetokounmpo's conditional commitment to the franchise led to several future-mortgaging trades and signings over the years.
The two-time MVP acted as if he were a powerless bystander, unable to control his situation in a league where players constantly take ownership over their careers by demanding trades. James Harden does it every 18 months.
The Bucks weren't willing to move Giannis unless he officially demanded it or acted out like so many others. Giannis wasn't willing to play the bad guy. He wanted to be dealt, but wouldn't ask for it. The Bucks wouldn't pull the trigger without being told.
This was an embarrassing season for everyone involved. All of the controversy, bad blood and nonsense could have been avoided if Giannis and the Bucks had just faced reality.
Winner: Devin Booker
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Coming into the season, it was hard to find a superstar with a bleaker outlook than Devin Booker.
The Kevin Durant-Bradley Beal era ended with a whimper. The Phoenix Suns were so bereft of draft picks and young talent that the remainder of the decade seemed lost. The two-year, $145 million extension Booker signed over the offseason certainly eased the sting. But the thinking was that he'd be collecting all that cash while virtually never playing a relevant basketball game in Phoenix.
Instead of a listless, hopeless campaign that would only be the first in a long line, the Suns' season was a delight from the jump. They smashed expectations by playing rugged defense, pushing the tempo and generally disregarding the idea that the rest of the 2020s were doomed.
Booker wasn't an All-Star, but he now has reason to hope that he can actually achieve his "one career, one team" goals without enduring loads of losing seasons.
Loser: Sacramento Kings
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The Sacramento Kings thought they were going to be good, which is why they added veterans like Dennis Schroder over the offseason. They were predictably wrong about that, but instead of steering into the skid by trading costly vets as part of a rebuild, they kept Domantas Sabonis, Zach LaVine and DeMar DeRozan through the deadline.
Then, just when they were excelling at being bad, the Kings got a little too good and won several games down the stretch of the season. As a result, they'll be involved in a coin flip with the Utah Jazz to see who gets the No. 4 spot in the upcoming draft lottery.
Cherry on top: The Kings decided to retain head coach Doug Christie, whose decision-making was at the center of a tanking investigation in which the team was effectively forced to argue that it was dumber than it was duplicitous.
Kangz gonna Kangz.
Winner: Jalen Duren
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Jalen Duren reportedly wanted something in the neighborhood of $30 million per year during preseason extension negotiations, a pay rate the Detroit Pistons were not comfortable with.
In the wake of Duren's breakthrough season, the Pistons are going to wish they'd ponied up.
Cade Cunningham was the main driver of Detroit's success, but Duren made his first All-Star game on the strength of major offensive development. His face-up game became a real weapon. He utilized it to boost his scoring average from 11.8 to 19.5 points per game. He got to the foul line nearly twice as often, dramatically upped his usage rate and scored a larger share of his buckets without the benefit of a teammate assist.
Duren will be a restricted free agent this summer, which means the Pistons still have the leverage of matching rights. But he did everything necessary to inflate his market value at exactly the right time. If he makes All-NBA, he could command a five-year, $287 million deal from Detroit.
Loser: New Orleans Pelicans
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The Hawks were the winners of the season's most lopsided trade, which made the New Orleans Pelicans the losers. They gave up an unprotected future first-rounder for the right to trade up 10 spots because they couldn't live without Derik Queen.
Queen was available when New Orleans picked at No. 7 and probably could have been acquired by trading a pick with at least some level of protection. If the Pelicans had to have him, there were other ways. And, not that this is the most salient part of the analysis, Queen did very little in his rookie year to suggest he was worth targeting in the first place.
Unfortunately for Pels fans, that wasn't their only summer blunder. New Orleans also dealt away CJ McCollum's expiring contract for Jordan Poole, who's on the books for $34 million next season. He was unplayable almost immediately and has even less chance of helping than ever, now that the Pelicans have a healthy Dejounte Murray and a developing Jeremiah Fears in the backcourt.
New Orleans missed the playoffs, won't have the benefit of a high lottery pick and came no closer to establishing an identity or finding a cornerstone.
Winner: Boston Celtics
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So much for a cost-cutting gap year.
The Boston Celtics hit the postseason with the East's No. 2 seed and the best shot to represent the conference in the NBA Finals. That's a long way from even the rosiest expectations that pegged Boston as a Play-In team.
Most of this organization's offseason business was about trimming salary. Boston traded Jrue Holiday and Kristaps Porzingis. It also let Al Horford and Luke Kornet depart in free agency. During the year, it step-laddered its way beneath the luxury tax as Jaylen Brown turned in his best work ever. The wins piled up as Jayson Tatum returned with the Celtics looking more like contenders than anyone imagined.
This was an absolute masterclass in roster management and uncompromising competitive integrity. The Celtics didn't just defy expectations for this season; they signaled to the league that they could navigate the rules of the second-apron era without sacrificing success. That sets them up to compete indefinitely.
Loser: Common Sense
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The 65-game requirement for awards eligibility came about partly as a fix for load management, but mostly as a way to compel high bids from media rights providers who were concerned that their national broadcasts would too often be star-free.
This is why debates about whether the rule is "working" always miss the mark. It did work. The rights deals got done. The NBA is collecting billions.
The fallout is the problem, of course.
Devin Booker, Anthony Edwards, LeBron James and tons of other players logged more minutes than Victor Wembanyama, but none of them are eligible for awards or All-NBA nods because they didn't suit up 65 times. Cade Cunningham and Luka Dončić had to appeal their sub-65 cases under an Extraordinary Circumstances provision of the CBA. Several stars made perfunctory appearances late in the year just to hit the 65-game threshold.
The Players Association, which collectively bargained to include the rule, would like a do-over.
The rule wrecks the historical record, making it impossible to tell the true story of the season by excluding worthy candidates from awards. It costs players' earning potential by making them ineligible for supermax deals. It takes agency out of voters' hands. It may or may not be incentivizing more participation from stars. It might be producing more injuries.
The rule makes no sense. Well, except in one way, it was always supposed to: The NBA got the rights deal it wanted.
Bonus Winner: Charlotte Hornets
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Why split winners and losers evenly? Let's close out with an extra victor to commemorate a season that was, despite some flaws, still marked by more highs than lows.
San Antonio will be remembered as the biggest breakout team of the campaign, but it was actually the Hornets who made the largest season-over-season gain in net rating. This year's plus-4.9 figure blew away 2024-25's minus-9.1. Charlotte ran up that number on the strength of its elite offense.
Led by LaMelo Ball (who finally stayed healthy), Kon Knueppel (who should win Rookie of the Year) and Brandon Miller (who progressed nicely), Charlotte's attack ranked fifth in the league overall and first after Dec. 15. The Hornets' starters outscored opponents by 27.4 points per 100 possessions, the most dominant differential among lineups that saw at least 400 possessions.
The result: Charlotte now has a clear direction, cornerstone pieces and a trend line angling up for the first time in years.
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.
