The 2026 NBA offseason's most interesting remaining storylines

LeBron, Kawhi, holey teams, RFAs, and more

I was milliseconds from sending this article with a thousand words ranking LeBron James’ various potential destinations when the phone buzzed with news that all my effort wasn’t worth s***. Still, I would have been quite embarrassed to send five paragraphs about why I hated LeBron in Golden State, so the timing worked out beautifully.

Late July is when things typically start dying down in the NBA. But while the draft, Summer League, most of free agency, and a couple of big trades are already behind us, there’s a surprising amount of unfinished business the league needs to attend to. Let’s start with my favorite topic.

Jalen Duren’s contract

Do you ever get obsessed with something that everyone else tells you isn’t interesting at all, and then you look back a few months later, and you’re like, “Damn, yeah, that really wasn’t as cool as I thought?”

I have a feeling that will be me and Jalen Duren’s contract.

Right now, however, I’m still fascinated. Duren finished second in Most Improved Player voting and made Third Team All-NBA, capping a truly triumphant regular season. His defense took a jump, his offense was hyper-efficient, and he even rose to the occasion by dropping 22 points while shooting 65% from the field in 13 games without superstar running mate Cade Cunningham.

Then, it all came crashing down in the playoffs. While Duren’s defense remained solid, he looked utterly incapable of scoring against Orlando’s Wendell Carter Jr. in Round 1, a good but typically unremarkable defender:

He did no better against the thinner frontmen in Cleveland, a matchup that theoretically should have been better for Duren.

In all, Duren’s scoring dropped from 19.5 points to 10.2 in the playoffs. His field goal percentage fell from 65% to 51%. His turnover rate skyrocketed; his rebounding rate dropped. He was benched at the end of some games. It was a no-good, very bad spring, indeed.

Duren bet on himself last summer by refusing an extension, opting for restricted free agency this summer. That seemed bold at the time, but it looked brilliant for most of the year. Then, the playoffs happened.

Don’t get me wrong: Duren will still earn a bigger contract than he would have last summer. He made the right bet. But his preposterously bad postseason set the stage for some real fireworks. Duren will likely become the first-ever supermax-eligible player to not even get the regular ol’ max. Victor Wembanyama settling for the 25% maximum contract without supermax escalators gives Detroit another stone for the sling — “Do you think you’re better than Victor?”

Now, there aren’t any cap space teams left to make an offer sheet to the restricted free agent¹. Duren tried posturing for a sign-and-trade with the Kings, but that went nowhere quickly.

Rising teams like Detroit almost never cut bait with talented youngsters. You can’t throw away a player because of two bad playoff series. You can, however, pay them significantly less than they want. Would Jalen Duren really turn down, say, $180 million over five years to take a one-year, $9.6 million qualifying offer (which allows him to enter unrestricted free agency next year)? I doubt it, but it’s his only real leverage. Cam Thomas and Quentin Grimes both took the qualifying offer last summer. Neither was being offered anywhere near as much as Duren, but Thomas might be out of the league, and Grimes just signed with the Lakers for $60 million over four years — less than he’d once hoped for.

I’m unhealthily invested in seeing the final dollar value of Duren’s new contract. It will tell us a lot about the power of restricted free agency and the weight of recency bias in contract negotiations.

Aspiration resolution

Adam Silver has been mostly quiet on the Clippers/Kawhi/Aspiration front, but word on the street (i.e., The Athletic’s Mike Vorkunov going on a podcast) is that the NBA’s fact-finding is over. With the outside investigation complete, it’s up to Silver and the league office to determine what (if any) punishment is appropriate. Any decision will likely have to go through an independent arbitrator.

With a monster trade between the Raptors and Clippers hanging in the balance (and Bennedict Mathurin’s restricted free agency doubtlessly impacted, as well), I’d hope this gets resolved before training camp, but a fair amount of road needs to be pounded first.

My semi-educated opinion: even if it was all innocently minded, it sure looks, smells, and sounds bad. This is not a court of law, and the league has the explicit right to punish teams for things like this if the circumstantial evidence is strong enough. I’d be surprised at this point if they didn’t.

Regardless, your and my feelings on the matter don’t matter. It all comes down to Silver’s interpretation of the investigation’s findings, how much stomach he has for punishing a team (which, in turn, is partly driven by how bloodthirsty the league’s other owners are feeling), and how the case plays out in arbitration.

Make no mistake. This is the most important story in the league, and the precedent it sets could shape free agent negotiations for the next decade.

Choosing between Christian Braun, Peyton Watson, and Cameron Johnson

The Denver Nuggets have some tough decisions to make this offseason.

Right now, they project to be one of the most expensive teams in the league, facing repeater tax bills that could stretch into nine figures. We know the owner Kroenkes won’t be paying that much for a team that lost in the first round. Nikola Jokic ain’t going nowhere (for 2026-27, anyway), and it’s unlikely that Jamal Murray, coming off his best season ever, will be traded.

That leaves a trio of high-priced wings as the likeliest casualties of Denver’s salary crunch. Christian Braun is entering the first year of a disastrous five-year, $125 million contract that I hated the moment ink splattered onto paper. Braun is a solid defender and excellent transition player with limited on-ball and shooting skills, and he’s coming off a terrible year where he barely played thanks to injuries. Braun’s contract might not be the worst in the league, but it’s not far from it, and the Nuggets would have to pay a pretty penny to get off of it. Denver might be stuck with him.

Watson is a restricted free agent. Much of the environmental context from the Jalen Duren section above applies here, too; no one has the room for an offer sheet. I love his skill set, which boasts strong on-ball and off-ball defense, and he proved during a stretch without Jokic that he could have some burgeoning self-creation skills. Watch him statue Cooper Flagg like a basketball Medusa:

Plenty of teams have kicked the tires on a Watson sign-and-trade. That said, whichever team procures his services may be buying high, given that Watson’s hamstrings failed him right after Jokic returned. We don’t know if Watson was truly showing what he could do, or if he was simply riding a long hot streak. His three-pointer looked sharp, but the volume still wasn’t high enough to know if it’s real.

The Nuggets would like to keep Watson. But the two parties reportedly remain far apart in contract negotiations, ping-ponging preposterous numbers written on Applebee’s napkins; a reunion is not guaranteed. (The latest offer from Denver: five years, $70 million, which is actually less annually than the non-taxpayer midlevel exception. I have no doubt Watson’s representation is looking at Braun’s extension and wondering why their client is barely worth half of that).

Johnson, the centerpiece of the oopsie Michael Porter Jr. trade (a move I rather liked at the time), didn’t have a bad year. He helped stabilize non-Jokic lineups and shot a career-high 43% from deep. But he also didn’t deliver the hammer-strike impact the Nuggets were hoping for. On an expiring $23 million contract, he’s a potentially attractive trade piece for anyone looking for more shooting.

At least one of these three players will not be a Nugget for training camp. With Nikola Jokic declining to sign an extension this summer, the pressure is on the Denver front office not to f*** this one up.

Imbalanced rosters: the Mavs, Blazers, and Jazz

The Mavs have way too many frontcourt players. The Blazers have too many guards and centers. The Jazz desperately need a big man. Two of these three teams need to link up!

For example, Portland has Jrue Holiday, Ja Morant, Damian Lillard, Scoot Henderson, and, if you’re feeling generous, Shaedon Sharpe all needing backcourt minutes. Would Holiday to Dallas for PJ Washington and Caleb Martin make sense for both sides? Or could the Blazers flip Robert Williams (signed to a fully guaranteed three-year, $43 million contract after his first healthy-ish season in decades) to Utah for Brice Sensabaugh and some seconds?

I talked on RealGM radio a few days ago about a couple of potential iterations, so listen there [YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts] for more thoughts (and check that feed out for my initial LeBron-to-Philly reaction, too!).

There’s too much positional asymmetry in Dallas and Portland, in particular, for them not to be on the market as buyers or sellers or both. It just makes sense for them to be in business together.

NBA Europe

With expansion to Seattle and Las Vegas still a topic so hot it’s selling grunge-band T-shirts and spiky bracelets, it went a bit under the radar that the NBA wants to have its new European arm operating games by October 2027.

That’s an aggressive timeline!

It helps that the league expects to integrate existing teams and stadiums into the fold, but there had been talk about standing up new franchises in several of its 12 target cities.²

Basketball is popular in Europe, but it’s not the kind of commercial juggernaut it has been in the USA. The NBA believes management of the various leagues and divisions has been the problem. They think they know how to fix that.

A lot of the specifics have yet to be finalized, however. I know I have a decent number of readers from Europe, so please email me or comment if you have strong thoughts on what NBA Europe should look like (or if it’s even welcome!).

1. From 2020 to 2025, only five offer sheets from other teams have even been given to a restricted free agent, and only one was unmatched — and that was to N’Faly Dante, who barely counts since he was a two-way guy in Houston given a standard minimum from Atlanta. Teams giving out offer sheets have to tie up their cap space for 48 hours, and incumbent teams almost always match at the last second, so it’s rarely worth taking the shot. This summer, however, we did see Memphis snag Quinten Post away from the Warriors with an offer sheet too rich for Golden State’s blood, and OKC just cruelly ramped up Denver’s tax bill by forcing the Nuggets to match a two-year, $12 million contract on Spencer Jones. So that’s exciting!

2. Per the NBA’s website: Athens, Greece; Barcelona, Spain; Berlin, Germany; Istanbul, Turkey; London, England; Lyon, France; Madrid, Spain; Manchester, England; Milan, Italy; Munich, Germany; Paris, France; and Rome, Italy.