Loyalty in the NBA is basically an endangered species right now. Giannis Antetokounmpo spent 13 seasons building the Bucks into a contender and a champion, and this summer he’s a Heat player after an emotionally demanding season. Ja Morant and the Grizzlies, seven years together, and he’s in Portland now. And Jaylen Brown? He bled Celtics green for a decade, was literally a champion in 2024, and suddenly got shipped to the 76ers. Nobody saw that coming.

So yeah, the list of players who are still with the team that drafted them is getting shorter every summer. The ones who are left made it through rebuilds, injuries, coaching changes, trade rumors swirling around them, and rosters that turned over completely while they stayed put.

Stephen Curry is the name to watch heading into 2026-27. Seventeen years in the Bay, and there’s more tension around this partnership than we’ve ever seen. The Warriors finished 37-45. Jimmy Butler tore his ACL, Moses Moody went down too, the front office swung and missed on the big fish this offseason, and it still hasn’t brought in a real outside piece. Curry himself said he’s got to be a “realist” about where this roster actually stands.

But here’s the thing: Shams is reporting Curry and the Warriors both want to get an extension done once he’s eligible on August 29. He can add two years and $136.7 million, and according to Shams, there’s no read that Curry wants out. So even after an ugly summer, the bond’s still there.

With all that context, here are the nine active stars with the longest tenure with the franchise that originally drafted them.

 

9. Anthony Edwards – 6 Seasons With The Timberwolves

Antony Edwards is the youngest of this group, no doubt. But six years with one team is still enough to crack this list once you filter out everybody who got traded early. The Timberwolves took him first overall in 2020, back when the team basically still ran through Karl-Anthony Towns and was coming off a putrid 19-45 season. There was zero reason to think this franchise was getting anywhere near a deep playoff run.

Six years later, the whole operation runs through Edwards. He put up 28.8 points, 5.0 boards, and 3.7 assists last year, and he’s already one of the premier scoring guards in the league at just 24. Towns is long gone, the roster’s been reshuffled a dozen times, but Ant is the one constant everything else gets built around.

His loyalty hasn’t really been tested the way Curry’s or Devin Booker’s has, and that’s fair; he’s still early in his prime, still under team control, and there haven’t been years of drama or trade requests to push through.

But that’s kind of the point these days. A lot of stars don’t even make it this far without rumors starting to swirl. Edwards went from a lottery-bound disaster to leading real playoff runs without ever needing to look elsewhere. He’s the face of the franchise in every sense, and given his age, he’s got a real shot at climbing way higher on a list like this someday.

 

8. Bam Adebayo – 9 Seasons With The Heat

Nobody drafted Bam Adebayo 14th overall in 2017 thinking he’d end up being the anchor of the Miami Heat franchise. He started as a young big man stuck behind Hassan Whiteside, slowly turned into one of the best defenders in basketball, and became a central piece of the Jimmy Butler-era Heat. Nine years later, everything around him has changed except him.

He’s been through the end of the old core, Butler’s arrival, two Finals trips, a string of gut-punch playoff exits, and then Butler’s exit. Now Miami’s flipped the script completely again after landing Giannis this summer.

Adebayo’s still standing right there in the middle of it. He averaged 20.1 points, a career-high 10.0 rebounds, and 3.2 assists across 73 games last season. The efficiency dipped a bit at 44.2% from the field, 31.8% from three, but he’s still a three-time All-Star and six-time All-Defensive selection who gives Miami a level of versatility on that end most centers simply don’t have.

The Giannis trade could force another reinvention. Bam’s spent years anchoring the five, and playing next to Antetokounmpo probably means more time guarding different positions while the front office figures out the spacing. Now that they’re a title favorite again, I don’t see the Heat shopping him anytime soon.

Guys have cycled in and out of Miami nonstop since 2017. Adebayo just keeps adjusting to whatever version of the roster shows up next. After nine years in, he’s basically become the bridge connecting every era of this franchise.

 

7. Jayson Tatum – 9 Seasons With The Celtics

Jayson Tatum came in the same 2017 draft class as Bam, and his whole career has essentially been one long, dramatic Celtics playoff saga. Boston took him third overall, and he was already logging heavy postseason minutes as a rookie.

Since then, he’s lived through the Kyrie experiment, multiple Eastern Conference Finals heartbreaks, the 2022 Finals loss, the 2024 championship, and then the Achilles tear that flipped his 2025-26 upside down.

Somehow he was back on the floor less than 10 months after surgery. Only 16 regular-season games, but he still put up 21.8 points, 10.0 rebounds, and 5.3 assists before another injury kept him out of Game 7 against Philadelphia in the first round.

And then this summer delivered maybe the biggest organizational shakeup of his career. Jaylen Brown, his running mate for his entire career, the other half of that championship core, got shipped to Philly for Paul George and picks. Brown had put in 10 years in Boston and just came off a career-high 28.7 points a game, so if he wasn’t safe, nobody’s really safe except one guy.

That trade made the hierarchy crystal clear: the Celtics are Tatum’s team, full stop. He’s already got a ring, six All-Star nods, and nine years of absorbing every kind of pressure Boston can throw at a player. He’s never seriously pushed for the exit, not even when the roster looked broken, or the playoff losses kept stacking up.

After watching Brown walk out the door, that loyalty hits different.

 

6. Jamal Murray – 10 Seasons With The Nuggets

Jamal Murray’s run in Denver might be the best example of loyalty being a two-way street on this entire list. The Nuggets took him seventh overall in 2016 and committed early to building him up alongside Nikola Jokic. That looked like a genius plan right up until Murray blew out his ACL in April 2021 and missed the entire following season.

Denver could’ve bailed on the plan. They didn’t, and instead, they waited it out, kept the core intact, and it paid off big when Murray came back and became a massive piece of the 2023 title run.

Even after that, the questions never fully went away: his consistency got picked apart, his contract got debated, and for years people loved pointing out he’d never even made an All-Star team despite all those signature playoff moments.

Then 2025-26 happened, where Murray had the best regular season of his career: 25.4 points, 4.4 rebounds, 7.1 assists, shooting 48.3% from the floor and a ridiculous 43.5% from deep. He finally made his first All-Star team and followed it up with Third Team All-NBA honors.

Ten years in, the Murray-Jokic partnership is still humming. Murray’s never needed to be “the guy” on his own team, never made noise about splitting from Jokic, and stuck it out through the ACL rehab and plenty of painful playoff endings.

Denver’s shown him the same commitment right back. While half the league’s stars bail the second things get uncomfortable, Murray’s spent a decade proving that sometimes staying in the same partnership actually pays off.

 

5. Devin Booker – 11 Seasons With The Suns

If we’re talking about guys who had every right to get frustrated early, Devin Booker’s case is about as strong as it gets. The Suns took him 13th overall in 2015. His first four seasons produced win totals of 23, 24, 21 and 19. That’s four straight years of pure irrelevance while Booker was already becoming an elite scorer with nobody around him.

He built himself into a star while basically nowhere near the playoffs for four years straight, and there was never a big public push to get himself out. Eventually, Phoenix figured it out. Chris Paul showed up, Booker made a Finals run in 2021, and suddenly the Suns looked like real long-term contenders.

Then it all fell apart again. The front office went all-in on Kevin Durant, brought in Bradley Beal, watched that expensive experiment collapse, moved Durant, and started another retool around Booker. Through every single version of this roster, Booker never left, and averaged 26.1 points, 3.9 rebounds, and 6.0 assists last season, already the franchise’s all-time leading scorer.

He also backed it up with his contract, as Booker signed a two-year, $145.0 million extension in July 2025 that locks him in through 2029-30. The Suns literally called him the embodiment of the franchise when they announced it.

Eleven years, multiple rebuilds, one Finals trip, and just about every roster experiment imaginable later, Booker’s still there.

 

4. Nikola Jokic – 11 Seasons With The Nuggets

Nikola Jokic technically ties Booker at 11 NBA seasons, but Denver actually drafted him a year earlier, back in 2014, before he spent an extra season playing overseas. Since he finally showed up in 2015-16, Jokic’s turned into something nobody could’ve predicted out of pick No. 41.

Three MVPs. A championship. Finals MVP. Eight All-NBA selections. Eight All-Star nods. And now two separate seasons of averaging a triple-double, because why not. He was absurd again in 2025-26 with 27.7 points a night, while leading the entire league in rebounds (12.9) and assists (10.7). He was a unanimous First Team All-NBA, and he finished runner-up in MVP voting behind Shai Gilgeous-Alexander.

Denver hasn’t exactly surrounded him perfectly either. Big injuries, expensive contracts, constant rotation shuffles, and back-to-back early playoff exits since that title. None of it seems to have changed how Jokic thinks about any of this.

This summer produced maybe the strongest loyalty quote on this entire list. Jokic passed on a four-year, $278.0 million extension right now because waiting until 2027 makes him eligible for a possible five-year, $359.5 million deal instead.

Normally that kind of delay sets off a thousand trade rumors overnight, but Jokic killed them instantly. He said he wants to play for Denver “forever” and that he’ll deal with the extension talk next summer.

That’s about as direct as a superstar gets. He could probably pick almost any team in the league if he actually wanted out, but eleven years in, he clearly doesn’t.

 

3. Joel Embiid – 12 Years With The 76ers

Joel Embiid’s the weird statistical outlier on this list. The record books only credit him with 10 seasons of actual playing time because injuries wiped out his entire first two years. But the 76ers drafted him third overall back in 2014, which means he’s technically belonged to this franchise for 12 years now.

And those 12 years have been absolute chaos from start to finish. Embiid landed right in the middle of The Process. He watched the Sixers tank on purpose, waited two full seasons just to make his NBA debut, eventually turned into the 2023 MVP, and then watched basically every co-star he ever had cycle through the building.

Ben Simmons left on bad terms. Butler left. Harden came in and then forced his way out. Even Tobias Harris left. Coaches came and went like it was nothing. Embiid just stayed put to command their modern era as the franchise piece.

He’s also dealt with more injuries than almost any superstar of his generation. Even last season, limited to just 38 games, he still put up 26.9 points, 7.7 rebounds and 3.9 assists on 48.9% shooting, and now the Sixers have built yet another wild roster around him.

Jaylen Brown came over in the trade from Boston, LeBron James signed this summer as a free agent, and they join Tyrese Maxey, VJ Edgecombe, and Embiid in maybe the most talent-loaded group Philly’s ever put together during his tenure.

At some point, pretty much every Embiid offseason has come with speculation about whether he’s finally had enough of the injuries, the playoff heartbreak, or the constant instability. It still hasn’t happened. Twelve years after the draft, The Process himself is somehow still standing there.

 

2. Draymond Green – 14 Seasons With The Warriors

It’s honestly kind of funny that Draymond Green has managed to stick with one franchise for 14 seasons given how chaotic his career’s been. The Warriors took him 35th overall back in 2012. Nobody expected him to become one of the defining players of an entire dynasty, but within a few years, he was the defensive brain behind a team that completely rewrote how basketball gets played.

Four rings later, he’s made four All-Star teams, nine All-Defensive teams, and won a Defensive Player of the Year award. He’s also been suspended, ejected, fined, tangled up in more locker-room blowups than most franchise legends ever deal with, and floated in trade rumors more times than you’d expect for a guy this important.

And somehow he’s never actually left. Last season wasn’t great at 8.4 points, 5.5 rebounds, and 5.5 assists across 68 games. At 36, he’s obviously not the same athlete from the championship years, but Golden State still leans hard on his passing, his communication, and his ability to run the defense like a coach on the floor.

This summer nearly gave us a different ending. Draymond declined his $27.7 million player option, partly to give the front office extra flexibility during their failed run at LeBron. Instead of walking after that, he re-signed on another one-year, $27.7 million deal and is heading into season No. 15 with the Warriors.

Klay’s gone. Durant left years ago. Iguodala retired. Almost everybody from those title runs is either playing elsewhere or done entirely. Draymond and Curry are still standing there together.

 

1. Stephen Curry – 17 Seasons With The Warriors

There’s really no competition for the top spot here. Steph Curry landed with the Warriors as the seventh pick back in 2009, when the franchise hadn’t won a title since 1975 and had made the playoffs exactly once in the previous 15 years.

Seventeen years later, Curry basically is the Warriors. Four championships. Two MVPs. A Finals MVP. Eleven All-Star selections. The league’s all-time three-point record. An entire offensive revolution happened in the NBA because Curry became the greatest shooter the sport’s ever seen.

Curry put up 26.6 points, 3.6 rebounds, and 4.7 assists last season while shooting 46.8% from the field, 39.3% from deep, and 92.3% from the line. He knocked down 4.4 threes a night despite only playing 30.9 minutes. Somehow, at 38, he’s still producing like a top-tier star, which is exactly what makes the current situation so interesting.

For maybe the first time ever, it’s not crazy to wonder how frustrated Curry could get if this team stumbles out of the gate again. A trade request would still be genuinely shocking, though, and if an extension gets finalized, Curry could realistically play his entire career in one uniform.

After 17 years, four championships, and more organizational chaos than almost any superstar could reasonably survive, that would be one last example of loyalty we might not see again for a very long time.