Donovan Mitchell of the Cleveland Cavaliers celebrates during the first quarter of a preseason game against the Detroit Pistons at Rocket Arena on October 14, 2025. (Jason Miller/Getty Images)

It’s time for a bit of a quicker post this morning, since there have been many sports to tend to in my garden of forecast models over the weekend and into the week. But the latest of those to bloom is the new 2025-26 NBA Elo ratings page, which you should all check out — I adjusted the methodology slightly to improve the “dual-track” ratings (regular-season and playoff) from the past few seasons and I announced a major rebrand:

Anyway, the upshot of the new season forecast is that we can track each team’s chances of making and winning the NBA Finals, etc., just like always. And one major storyline that’s been on my mind for a while continues to be whether we will get another new NBA champion — continuing an already-unprecedented seven-year streak of different champs, which had never happened before in league history — or finally get a repeat, whether from last year or just one of the teams in the streak getting another to halt the trend.

In the “Composite” version of the model, which anchors a ratings-based simulation to FanDuel’s various odds, there is a 48 percent chance that the parity streak finally ends in 2025-26. That figure is led primarily by the defending champion Oklahoma City Thunder — scary as I said they’d be — at 29 percent to repeat as NBA champs, which would bookend the run of parity in fitting fashion (since it started right after another two-peat, the Warriors in 2017 and 2018).

If not OKC, it could also be the Denver Nuggets, who check in at 8.5 percent and shouldn’t be forgotten as we get distracted by the many other shiny objects in the league this year. (Don’t worry, Nikola Jokić will surely christen LAKER by leading the league in it just like he did the previous iteration basically every year.) And the old-guard trio of the Warriors, Lakers and Celtics check in at around 9 percent combined as well, despite their challenges.

Probably more fun, however — as much of a longtime OKC afficianado as I’ve been — is for the streak of different winners to keep rolling to eight years, especially considering the teams on offer who might pull that off.

Chief among those, with a 15 percent chance to win the title (second behind OKC), are the Cleveland Cavaliers, who looked primed to make a deep run before a stunning upset by the Indiana Pacers ended their postseason. Nobody would be surprised if they learned from the loss and got stronger this season.

The next group is also fascinating — with the New York Knicks, Minnesota Timberwolves, Houston Rockets, Los Angeles Clippers and Orlando Magic carrying a collective 26 percent to win the championship this year. All would be WILD stories of teams overcoming adversity and winning for the first time in decades, if not for the first time ever.

And I think that’s one of the things that makes this season so exciting. In the model, there’s a 16 percent chance that not only does the league’s extraordinarily bizarre run of parity continue — itself coming on the heels of a Warriors-dominated era in which we wondered whether Golden State would ever lose again — but that the team who extends it is a first-time NBA champ, whether that be Minnesota, the Clippers (hilarious as that would be), the Magic, the forever-underdog Pacers, or someone else entirely.

The single most likely way this season ends is exactly how it did last summer — with Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Jalen Williams, Chet Holmgren and company cutting down the nets as members of the back-to-back championships club. But until they (or anyone else) actually does it, ending the streak of unique champs, the league’s great experiment in competitive balance rolls on into what might be its eighth season, daring a dynasty to reclaim its place in the lineage of the superteam-ruled game we used to know.

Filed under: NBA