The 2025-26 NBA Is Warped Beyond Recognition
Blowouts, skewed standings and historically bad bottom-feeders are twisting the entire season out of shape — and the tank race hasn't even started cooking yet.
Something extremely weird is happening in the NBA at the start of this season — and it will probably have far-reaching repercussions all year long.
For one thing, the distribution of NBA teams by points-per-game differential is completely out of whack relative to its usual norms — with better top teams, worse basement-dwellers and a weirdly strong middle class. As of Sunday, here’s a look at how the PPG differentials for this year’s teams compare with the average team at their ranking slot through 13 team games from 2004-05 (when the league last expanded) through 2024-25:
In some ways, this is a continuation of a theme that emerged last season, when I found that the NBA’s competitive spectrum was stretching in both directions at once — with a handful of historically-great contenders at the top, led by the eventual champion OKC Thunder, and a few truly hopeless stragglers at the bottom as well:
Indeed, in the 30-team era, the previous high-water mark for the leaguewide standard deviation of PPG differential through 13 games per team — a measure of how spread-out team performances have been from top to bottom — came last year, which beat out the early phase of the 2011-12 season, a strange year in and of itself (having seen its start delayed until Christmas due to a lockout between the owners and players). But even compared with last season, 2025-26’s standard deviation absolutely blows away the rest of NBA history going back to the 1976 ABA merger:
The only post-merger season that was especially in the same neighborhood as 2025-26 was 1982-83, but even then the standard deviation (7.4) was barely within 1 PPG of this year’s 8.2 mark. The distribution of teams this season has been historically skewed at both the top and bottom.
This year has also seen a ton of non-competitive games. The average winner’s margin of victory in an NBA game this year is +12.9, which is the highest value early in any season since at least the merger:
As part of this, the 2025-26 season has also seen the highest share of games decided by double-digits (58.8 percent), 15 or more points (33.5 percent) and 20 or more points (22.3 percent) to start any season since the merger. Any way you slice it, this has been one remarkably lopsided year.
Why is it happening? As always, it’s a bit of a chicken-or-egg matter: Are the best teams great, or the worst teams terrible? Usually it’s a little of both, and the three highest-performing squads of 2025-26 so far — the Thunder, Nuggets and Rockets — are each the best teams for their particular ranking slots since ‘04-05. Similarly, the No. 8 T-Wolves and Raptors are tied for the second-best No. 8 teams over that span:
But the main source of the weird spread in point differential across the league has been the terribleness of the teams at the bottom.
At No. 21, the Hornets are the fifth-worst team for that slot since ‘04-05. Next, going from Nos. 22 through 29, the Clippers, Jazz, Mavericks, Grizzles, Kings, Pelicans, Nets and Pacers are all the worst teams of the past 20 years at their ranking slot to start a season. And the No. 30 Wizards are the second-worst team — ahead of only the 2014-15 “Process” Philadelphia 76ers.
To put things another way, that means the bottom 10 teams in the NBA this season are almost uniformly the worst teams in the 30-team era for their leaguewide ranking, all at once.
That’s an incredible confluence of crappiness to be playing out at the bottom of the league in the same season, with a variety of different factors to blame. As usual, some teams are simply tanking: The Wizards were 30th in net rating last year, and they’re 30th in net rating this year. Ditto, the Nets and Pelicans (the latter of whom just fired coach Willie Green) were not exactly supposed to be setting the world on fire to begin with, barring Zion Williamson having an MVP season.1 The Kings and Grizzlies could have been better than this, but each seems to have thrown away its potential from just a few years ago. And I have zero clue what is going on with the Clippers.2
Meanwhile, we also have some cases of what might be called “selective tanking” in the grand tradition of the David Robinson-less 1997 Spurs, taking advantage of temporary setbacks by being as bad as possible for better draft positioning.
Chief among those are the Indiana Pacers, who have followed up what was nearly an NBA title run for the ages with an absolutely atrocious 1-12 start this year. Like many others, I’d hoped that Indy could still hold their own without Tyrese Haliburton this year — but given their many additional injuries, this seems to be a season to set up the Pacers’ future with a franchise-altering prospect through the draft. (Might I suggest AJ Dybantsa?) And after finally dumping Nico Harrison, the Mavs could be in the same boat — either trading Anthony Davis/Kyrie Irving to fully rebuild or reloading while both are still under contract.
Whatever the causes, this glut of awful teams is helping to fuel not only the top contenders’ performances but especially the abnormally good middle class of teams. Referring back to our table above, we already noted the No. 8 Wolves and Raptors were second-best for their slot, but the No. 10 Celtics, No. 11 Cavs, No. 12 Hawks, No. 13 Heat, No. 14 Sixers and No. 15 Magic are all the best teams for their slot to start a season since ‘04-05, and the No. 16 Bucks, No. 17 Warriors, No. 18 Lakers and No. 19 Blazers are ranked second for their slot, while the No. 20 Bulls are also ranked first for theirs.
All of this will warp our perceptions of teams throughout the year, potentially making regular-season stats and résumés even less predictive than they’ve increasingly become in recent seasons, and it’s already whittling down the field of playoff contenders just a month into the season. (Seven teams in my composite forecast already have a 93 percent chance to miss the playoffs, with two more at 83 percent or higher to miss out, meaning the 16 available spots are really only being fought over by something like 21 teams.) It could also lead to superficially historic-seeming seasons at the top that are, at least in part, propped up by beating up on a historically deep crop of bad teams.
And it’s still only November — imagine how bad the tanking might get for Dybantsa, Darryn Peterson, Cameron Boozer and company as the season goes on?
In other words, if this is what the NBA already looks like, we may end up with one of the most distorted seasons the league has ever seen. More than just a strange start, it’s shaping up to be a year where the standings, the stats and the greatness of the top teams all need a big asterisk. And with the tank race only just beginning, the weirdness is almost certainly going to get worse from here.
Filed under: NBA
Which has NOT happened, with him spending most of the season sidelined again.
You may say it’s as simple as Kawhi Leonard missing half of the team’s games so far, but L.A. posted 50 wins a year ago with Kawhi only suiting up for 37 of 82 games, so clearly the Clippers’ problems run deeper than the usual absence of their biggest star.
It seems to me that the broader problem is that teams continue to care less and less about the regular season. Even good teams will blow out other good teams due to load management, or just kind of giving up mid-game. The bad teams are just trying stuff, which is fine, but doesn't lead to day-to-day max competitiveness. Basically, the regular season is a joke.