Very little about the 2023 calendar year in basketball went as predicted.
The Denver Nuggets rose as a new champion, despite Nikola Jokic losing his bid for a third consecutive MVP. Another new power arose internationally, with Canada knocking its neighbours off the podium for its first bronze medal. New stars emerged, torches were passed and LeBron James remained LeBron James, inexplicably pump-faking Father Time once again.
We’re never going to see things clearly 12 months in advance. What we can do, though, is get a little bold instead of going chalk with our annual predictions.
Bold means you won’t hit on many of them, but where’s the fun in making bland-yet-sure predictions? What follows are seven swings at storylines that could emerge in basketball in 2024.
1. The San Antonio Spurs make one of the five largest single-season win jumps in league history.
This all starts with Victor Wembanyama, who has been every bit as fascinating as advertised coming in. While the Rookie of the Year race remains open between him and Chet Holmgren, Wembanyama has made his upside very clear: He is going to be a transformative star for the Spurs. The bet here is that he does so sooner than later. His length, highlights and statlines haven’t yet led to wins; they will by 2024-25. So, I guess this is a 2024.5 prediction.
The previous biggest win jumps have a few things in common. The largest belongs to the 2007-08 Boston Celtics, who improved by 42 wins after adding Ray Allen and Kevin Garnett to their Paul Pierce-led team and eventually won a championship. The next two largest jumps belong to the same Spurs franchise: A 36-win jump in 1997-98, when they drafted Tim Duncan and got David Robinson back from injury, and a 35-win jump in 1989-90, when they initially added Robinson. Steve Nash helped lead the Suns to a 33-win jump in 2004-05, the first of his two MVP seasons. The Celtics also made a 32-win jump in 1979-80, when they added Larry Bird as a rookie.
The Spurs are on pace for 11.3 wins (as of Dec. 27). To crack the top five, they’ll have to get to 44 wins next year. That isn’t all going to fall on Wembanyama — Devin Vassell, Jeremy Sochan and others will have to take major steps forward as well. Around them, the Spurs are headed toward two additional lottery picks in June and will have plenty of cap flexibility to add via free agency or, more likely, the trade market.
2. The summer of 2024 is the last time we hear about a big cap-space off-season for some time.
This is a bit inside-basketball, CBA-wise, so I’ll keep it simple: Cap space itself is fairly overrated. Cap flexibility — the combination of cap space, room beneath the luxury tax aprons, Bird rights, exceptions and tradeable salaries — will always be important. Over the last decade, the league has slowly moved toward teams operating above the cap and instead using other tools, exceptions and loopholes to build their rosters. Even with a rising salary-cap level, that seems likely to continue.
The one exception to that was in 2016, when the league saw a huge spike in television revenue and decided not to smooth that impact over multiple seasons. The league is set to negotiate a new media deal this off-season (the current one expires after the 2024-25 season), and it’ll almost surely learn from that 2016 mistake and make sure this impact is more gradual.
Good teams usually can’t afford to build a roster with an eye toward cap space, because you need to win right now. (We’ll see if the 76ers disagree in February.) Bad teams have trouble attracting free agents. (The Rockets recently disagreed.) The league has mostly adjusted to those economic realities, and even the new, more strict tax penalties don’t figure to change free agency, they’ll open up more trade opportunities for teams with space to use.
3. Canada Basketball doubles up on bronze in the Olympics.
The Canadian senior men’s team winning its first World Cup medal in 2023 was the highlight of my basketball year. It wasn’t a mirage. Although the U.S. did not send its A-roster, the World Cup format is longer, deeper and more difficult than the Olympics. The high end of the tournament pool in Paris will be tougher, though, and the prediction here is that the Canadian men handle that just fine, repeating on the podium despite a tougher U.S. side and perhaps Nikola Jokic added to the mix.
On the women’s side, Canada has been seeing success at the highest international levels for years. Like the men, though, the women have never finished better than fourth at an Olympics. The program is currently ranked fifth in the world, with a No. 3-ranking on the youth side, and the talent pool is deeper than ever before, especially at the NCAA level.
I don’t care if it’s a homer prediction. There will be medals in Paris.
4. Trey Murphy III is the league’s next breakout young star.
I wrote about Murphy as one of the league’s potential breakout players in a recent piece, and Pelicans fans quickly told me he’s untouchable. (I’m not sure Willie Green agrees, but I digress.) Even if Murphy stays in New Orleans, where the path to a larger offensive role is fairly crowded, I believe he’ll be 2024’s version of Jalen Williams: A talented young player everyone knew was good who makes a firm statement that “great” is a better descriptor.
As a sub-prediction, Peyton Watson emerges as the next niche/NBA Twitter favourite as someone who isn’t a star by traditional standards yet stars significantly in his role.
5. The Thunder finally pivot and get aggressive.
Everything the Thunder have done to date makes sense. They built slowly, accumulating an incredibly deep pool of assets. They identified potential stars in trade and the draft, acquired and developed them in a positive environment under an excellent developmental coach in Mark Daigneault. They were careful with their cap space, renting it out to acquire assets rather than jumping too early for vets who could get in the way of developing players. They have a core — Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Holmgren and Williams — with fun supporting pieces and all the assets and flexibility in the world.
As they stand near the top of the Western Conference, people have reasonably asked when the building plan will shift from long-term to win-now.
I don’t think that quite happens at the 2024 deadline. Instead, Sam Presti will fortify around the edges, wanting to add enough to give his core Thunder players serious playoff experience and maybe further evaluate what kind of piece will take them to that next level. In the summer of 2024, it will be time to add meaningfully to a core that could (long-shot warning) triple-up with MVP, ROY and Most Improved Player awards this spring.
You get an MVP-level player only so often, and for so many years. You get players capable of driving winning right now while on rookie-scale deals only so often, and for so many years. To have all of that at once, with more likable pieces around them and a boatload of draft capital, it would be a shame to be a little too patient.
6. The league’s competition committee thinks about turning the tap from a fire hose to a super soaker.
The explosion in NBA offence is a good thing for the league. More offence makes for more exciting games, spicier statlines, deeper highlight packages and more comebacks that tell fans their team is never out of a game. It’s fun, entertaining and aesthetically pleasing.
It may not, however, be sustainable on its current trajectory. The league probably doesn’t want the playoffs to get similarly focused on offence, and a contrast between playing styles in the season versus the post-season could be uncomfortable. There is also an argument to be made that the skill of the league’s offensive players — operating in more space than ever before thanks to the increased rate of 3-pointers — has outstripped the need for some of the more strict defensive rules, whether it’s defensive three-in-the-key or hand-checking.
I’m not advocating for a return to Pat Riley’s Knicks, or saying that losing comparability in stats between now and the past is a death knell. I just think the league will look at offensive records league- and team-wide being shattered once again, and consider ways to slow that growth (not snuff it out entirely).
7. The Raptors lead a movement away from jersey minimalism.
Some of the biggest pieces of feedback around the In-Season Tournament had to do with aesthetics: The courts were too bold, the jerseys too plain.
While some of those courts made it look like players were playing on top of a large pool of blood, the league seems to like the obvious this-is-an-IST-game element, and courts are quite expensive. Plus, they grew on me, with the exception of the neutral-site court.
The minimalism involved with jerseys is a complaint fans have had for a while now. It takes a very sharp design for a minimalist jersey to stand out, and especially to stand the test of time. Not every team has an iconic look to simplify to. In reading my colleague Alex Wong’s excellent book Prehistoric, it was insightful to hear how the Raptors and Grizzlies (and NBA) marketing and design teams approached their aesthetic in 1995. They had to stand out, and the result was a pair of jerseys that stood the test of time (after a brief period of going out of style) and ushering in a brief era of over-the-top jersey design.
The 2024-25 season will be the Raptors’ 30th in the league. It’s more traditional to celebrate the 30th anniversary of an event than the start of its 30th year, but I think the Raptors should make the move back toward honouring their history with a return to a purple, clawed pinstriped, red-dino’d jersey for select games. They still have the retro court that was popular a few years back, too. The NBA seems too marketing savvy — and too willing to try bold aesthetics like with the IST — to stay with a less-is-more jersey approach. The Raptors should lead the charge.
Sub-prediction: The Scottie Barnes version of the jersey is one of the league’s best sellers following his first All-Star appearance this February.