It’s once again time for me to stick my neck out and project exact win-loss records for all 30 NBA teams. Fortunately, most fans agree with everything I write and believe that I am in no way biased or ignorant regarding their favorite team. Every year, I bask in compliments at the end of the process.

Historically, I have always started at the bottom and worked my way up. And when it comes to the bottom, the lower end of the Eastern Conference does it better than anyone. Last season’s East had five teams lose at least 50 games and two lose at least 60, including an 18-64 Washington Wizards squad that posted the third-worst scoring margin in NBA history.

The Wizards, Charlotte Hornets and Brooklyn Nets openly tanking are focusing on player development ahead of a strong 2026 draft. The Boston Celtics and Indiana Pacers are entering “gap” years after playoff injuries to their stars. The Philadelphia 76ers are crossing their fingers to avoid a repeat of last year’s tire fire. With several other meh rosters competing with those, the lower end of the conference should once again be fairly unsightly. Maybe this time their rewards can be one of the top three picks in the draft, after the 2025 lottery cruelly landed in favor of much stronger West teams (Dallas, San Antonio) with the top two picks.

Here’s how I see it shaking out, along with predicted records and order of finish, and how I see the big-picture team-building issues for each of these squads over the next nine months:

15. Washington Wizards (16-66)

The Wizards need to finish with one of the NBA’s four worst records this season to guarantee they keep their first-round pick, which is top-eight protected to New York. Alas, the roster should not impede them from pulling off this feat. (The Wizards will owe the Knicks second-rounders in 2026 and 2027 if the first-rounder doesn’t convey.)

Washington’s roster will be quite bad to start the season and likely even worse by the end of it, with veterans such as CJ McCollum, Khris Middleton and Corey Kispert establishing a modicum of respectability until they are likely either traded or bought out.

Once they’re gone, Washington is left with the grim reality of life as a rebuilding team: It doesn’t really end until you’ve found a player worth building the team around, and the Wizards haven’t hit upon that guy yet. Through two draft cycles in what were admittedly weak drafts, there isn’t one player you’d call a surefire long-term starter yet.

For now, all the Wizards can do is throw more darts and hope one hits the bull’s-eye. Nine first-rounders from the last three drafts dot the roster, with center Alex Sarr and rookie lottery pick Tre Johnson the two most prominent, and player development will once again be the name of the game.

Important questions abound for this season: Can Bilal Coulibaly advance his skill level consistently and be more than a periodic tease with his physical tools? Can Bub Carrington score more efficiently and defend more capably? Will Sarr score a basket in the paint this season? Is Tre Johnson just a gunner, or is there more to build around? Is Kyshawn George a potential starter with his 3-and-D game? Can A.J. Johnson deliver more than cool dunks? Can Will Riley fill out his body and straighten out his jumper?

The young Wizard I’m most excited about for the coming season isn’t a homegrown pick. Washington acquired forward Cam Whitmore this summer from the Houston Rockets after he couldn’t crack a deep forward rotation, but he has breakout potential in his third pro season. While prone to dribble blindness and erratic form from the perimeter, Whitmore has blast-off quickness and finishing skills and is a ballhawking defender. He might end up being the Wizards’ best player this season.

Otherwise, Washington will play the asset-building game again. They are $30 million below the luxury-tax line and have two large trade exceptions to take in unwanted salary in return for draft capital. A 2026 pick swap with the Phoenix Suns gives them two bites at the lottery apple come May, plus they have two futures firsts, three future swaps and a mountain of future seconds.

Expect the Wizards to continue building that draft pick war chest during the season, likely in deals that send out contributors such as McCollum, Middleton, Kispert and the wildly underrated Justin Champagnie. Don’t expect many wins just yet, but after two wasted decades spent chasing the eighth seed, Washington is doing this the right way.

14. Charlotte Hornets (25-57)

I’m mildly optimistic about the Hornets this season, who, much like Washington above, have pivoted from years of fruitlessly chasing mediocrity to try to build something more sustainable.

They won’t be awful as long as they can keep LaMelo Ball on the court for a majority of the schedule, and they have some helpful veteran talent in the likes of Miles Bridges, Grant Williams and Collin Sexton, the latter of whom could end up pushing for Sixth Man of the Year if the Hornets have a quasi-respectable record and Sexton isn’t traded to a contender at midseason.

Charlotte also has some intriguing young wing talent to build around with smooth small forward Brandon Miller, who missed most of last season with a wrist injury, and the fourth pick in the 2025 draft, Kon Knueppel. Having those two in the lineup, along with Sexton and backup point guard Spencer Dinwiddie, should give the Hornets more options if and when Ball’s fragile ankles cause him to miss time.

However, the Hornets left themselves with a giant void in the middle as a result of one of the most interesting trades of the offseason. Faced with paying oft-injured center Mark Williams a year from now, Charlotte instead sent him to Phoenix for two first-round picks.

Give Charlotte credit for a forward-thinking move rather than auto-piloting into his next contract, but the short-term consequence is that there are no qualified starting centers here. Mason Plumlee is back in town but is a fringe rotation player, while it seems like a huge stretch to expect second-rounder Ryan Kalkbrenner to start. Grant Williams is another option, but he’s only 6-foot-7 and is coming off a serious knee injury that may delay his start to the season.

Charlotte has the right process, but the Hornets are also licking their wounds a bit from a couple of 2024 offseason moves that didn’t quite work out. Tidjane Salaün, drafted sixth overall, is still young and raw, but the 20-year-old’s rough rookie campaign offered few signs that he’ll pan out, while the expenditure on Josh Green and his three-year, $41 million deal was a lemon. Green turned utterly invisible on offense (his 11.8 percent usage was second-lowest in the league), then suffered a late-season shoulder injury that will keep him out at the start of the new season.

Other interesting pieces dot the back end of the roster. Late 2025 first-rounder Liam McNeeley looked like a steal in summer league, Tre Mann is back to add some bench scoring if the Hornets trade Sexton and/or Dinwiddie for draft capital and low-skill, high-energy big man Moussa Diabate returns to fight for every single available rebound if the other centers are found wanting.

All that aside, the most interesting franchise-level question still revolves around Ball. He’s young, shoots deep bombs from 3, can throw every pass and has four years left on a max deal. But between his injuries, defensive indifference and weird shot selection, it’s fair to wonder if he’s worth it. One wonders if the Hornets — under new management since Ball signed that deal — would look for an escape hatch if another franchise makes a strong offer.

Hornets guard Josh Green drives to the hoop as Brooklyn’s Cam Thomas defends. (Scott Kinser / Imagn Images)

13. Brooklyn Nets (26-56)

The Nets have done some big-picture things right, turning Mikal Bridges into five first-round picks from the Knicks and parlaying a sea of cap space into a hugely valuable unprotected 2032 pick from the Denver Nuggets. But on their way to building whatever the next competitive version of this team looks like, they’ve ended up with this for 2025-26.

Brooklyn’s decision to use all five first-round picks on fairly similar players on draft night looks baffling, resulting in an entirely unnecessary roster crunch that forced it to jettison potentially useful players and leaving five rookies with little natural symbiosis to work out how to play with one another.

The Nets aren’t without talent. Michael Porter Jr. and Cam Thomas both can fill it up when they get cooking, Nic Claxton is a plus defender in the middle and “young vets” such as Day’Ron Sharpe, Ziaire Williams, Haywood Highsmith and Terance Mann may be able to give them something. But the pieces fit incredibly poorly. Porter and Thomas are both blinders-on gunners, nobody else on the team can shoot, and there doesn’t appear to be a natural point guard.

That at least should provide some opportunity for a few key youngsters to test their limits. Rookie Egor Dëmin, the most talented of the Nets’ five rookies, should get heavy on-ball reps as a “point forward” distributor if he can manage to wrest away the pill from Thomas and Porter. Kobe Bufkin, imported from Atlanta, and rookie Nolan Traoré will both get chances to prove themselves as real point guards and not just undersized combos. And after two years of development, it’s time to see if Noah Clowney is a real rotation big or just, um, “intriguing.”

Somewhere in here, the Nets have three other first-rounders — guard Ben Saraf, wing defender Drake Powell and ballhandling big man Danny Wolf — they’d like to get in the mix, with Saraf seeming the furthest along. Surely they’ll take calls on players such as Porter, Mann and Sharpe if they can convert them into draft capital. Thomas, alas, can refuse any trade after taking the qualifying offer this summer and will be an unrestricted free agent in 2026.

This is probably the point where I should mention that the Nets don’t control their 2027 first-round pick; Houston has the right to swap. So the Nets basically have one year and one offseason to turn this random assortment of flotsam into a credible NBA roster. Yes, they have some cap room next summer and a likely lottery pick incoming, but it’s hard to see this situation turning around quickly.

As for this season, can Jordi Fernández have this team overachieve its way to quasi-respectability again? Brooklyn won 26 games a season ago, an amazing feat when you consider that Jalen Wilson and Keon Johnson were the top two players in minutes and were underwhelming enough that neither is in the Nets’ plans (or anyone else’s) this season.

On paper, there’s a sliver of chance that this team can stay in the Play-In Tournament race in a soft East. In reality, the Nets are likely to have too many sub-replacement minutes from the youngsters and too many moments where Porter and Thomas are playing your-turn, my-turn with the ball to win more than a third of their games.

12. Indiana Pacers (31-51)

This is a bit deflating after where things stood in June. Long term, there’s a lot to like about where the Pacers stand, but the upcoming season will likely be a forgettable one with star guard Tyrese Haliburton out for the season and center Myles Turner gone without a replacement.

The double-whammy of Turner’s deal with the Milwaukee Bucks wasn’t just that he left, but also that the Pacers failed to generate a large trade exception out of it to help fill the spot later. Indiana could have sent the Bucks a second-round pick to turn Turner’s exit into a sign-and-trade, which would have created a $19.9 million trade exception that would have been good until July 2026. That exception is enough of a leap from the nontaxpayer midlevel exception (estimated at just a hair under $15 million next year) that it had value.

Instead, the Pacers are left with a lot of not much at center, trading for Jay Huff, re-signing Isaiah Jackson and James Wiseman off Achilles injuries (yes, the Pacers had three in one season) and likely finishing games with heavy doses of Obi Toppin as a small-ball five.

On a more positive note, the Pacers are pretty well-built to fill in Haliburton’s missing minutes with adequate-to-good play. Andrew Nembhard will move from his wing stopper role to full-time point guard, and Bennedict Mathurin will need to step up as a go-to shot creator. However, neither of those two provides the jolt of tempo that Haliburton’s hit-ahead passes and deep shooting allowed, and the Pacers could get more sluggish as a result, which is bad news when they’re likely to be undersized most nights and killed people with speed a year ago.

Of perhaps greater interest is how the Pacers pivot into whatever happens beyond this season, when Haliburton is presumably back in 2026-27. At that point, Mathurin will need a new contract, and the Pacers also will have to come up with a real starting center via either trade or free agency. However, the team is already just $20 million from the projected 2026-27 tax line, and that’s before accounting for a potential lottery pick. It seems likely that hard choices will need to be made among the Pacers’ many middle-class contracts; without a large trade exception, one or more of them may need to be matching salary in a trade.

The fun part for this season is that the Pacers’ young guys will likely need to play. In particular, 2023 lottery pick Jarace Walker seems likely to become a rotation fixture after two years of teasing us in short cameos. I’m also a big fan of Indy’s high second-round picks in 2024 (combo forward Johnny Furphy) and 2025 (pick-and-roll maestro Kam Jones) and hope they can figure into the lineup somehow.

Indy should still be fun, but it won’t be playoff-level fun this time. The lack of speed and passing from Haliburton is only one part of the issue; shooting is the other. Indy was only 21st in 3-point frequency a season ago, and more than a third of their triples came from Haliburton and Turner. A Mathurin-Nembhard backcourt pairs a 34.0 percent proposition with a 29.1 percent marksman, with T.J. McConnell’s non-existent 3-ball backing them up off the pine. Up front, Huff is the only Pacer big who can match Turner as a stretch threat.

Rick Carlisle will ensure that the Pacers will remain an annoying team to play, and Pascal Siakam will periodically remind you that he kicked everyone’s butts in the 2025 playoffs. That plus the depth will keep Indy around the fringes of the Play-In chase. But I’m not sure the Pacers can find enough points to prevail on most nights.

11. Boston Celtics (36-46)

To some extent, Jayson Tatum’s Achilles tear turned a difficult problem into an easy one; with Tatum out for much if not all of the 2025-26 season and the Celtics scheduled to pay a horrific repeater tax penalty if they didn’t cut payroll, the next moves were obvious. Boston knew it would have to cut 2026-27 payroll even as it was rolling over the Mavs in the spring of 2024, but the cuts are much deeper now because getting all the way out of the tax and aprons is Boston’s best way forward once Tatum returns.

As a result, it’s a gap year in Boston, and it’s amazing that it didn’t cost the Celtics more to divest all the salary they gave up. The domino on all the other moves for Boston was that it was able to trade Jrue Holiday without having to give up assets. Owed $105 million over the next three seasons, at age 34, for a team that was miles deep into the luxury tax and clearly desperate to get out of it, that didn’t seem to be the case. But Boston didn’t get leveraged into coughing up draft picks on the Holiday deal, turning him into Anfernee Simons’ expiring contract. Then the Celtics basically salary-dumped the final year of Kristaps Porziņģis’ deal (turning his $31 million slot into George Niang’s $8 million, then donating Niang and two seconds to the Jazz).

The Celtics also lost Al Horford, and even as the season beings, they might not be done. Boston is still $9.5 million over the tax line, and moving either Sam Hauser or Simons before the trade deadline seems like the obvious pathway to get all the way under.

In the meantime, the Celtics will begin this season with a strong perimeter core even in Tatum’s absence, as Jaylen Brown, Derrick White and Payton Pritchard can hang with nearly any perimeter trio; Simons, for as long as he is wearing green, figures to be one of the league’s best sixth men.

There just isn’t a lot to complement that in the frontcourt, and the switchability and shooting of Horford and Porziņģis were the keys to a lot of what made Boston click at both ends. The Celtics will hope to hit on at least one of several small bets on a grab bag of mildly interesting players (Luka Garza, Josh Minott, Chris Boucher, Neemias Queta, Jordan Walsh, Baylor Scheierman and late first-rounder Hugo González). But that’s a mighty drop-off from having Tatum, Porziņģis, Holiday and Horford, and it doesn’t account for the fact that the likely starting power forward (Hauser) might not be around all season.

Thus, the gap year. Boston is in a very interesting situation a year from now, when the Celtics can likely use their full nontaxpayer midlevel exception or a giant $22 million trade exception to acquire a starting center and likely still stay under the tax for another season and take the repeater tax out of play. They’ll also possibly be adding a lottery pick, which is why they probably aren’t going to sweat making the Play-In.

In the meantime, we’ll find out how good Brown can be when it’s entirely his show and whether the East is so bad that even a defanged Celtics team can make its postseason tournament. I’m guessing Boston will just miss, partly because I think it’s more likely it subtracts in-season than adds. That said, this has arguably been the league’s most creative and effective front office since Brad Stevens took over, and it will be fun to see how Boston approaches its situation.

10. Philadelphia 76ers (37-45)

Put down any number you want for the Sixers. I won’t fight you. There is probably wider variance on Philadelphia’s potential outcomes than for any team in the league. You can imagine a scenario where Joel Embiid can’t stay healthy, Paul George never gets back to full strength and things go off the rails so quickly that the Sixers try to tank their way out of donating a lottery pick to the Thunder for a second straight season, although they have to luck into the top four to do it this time.

On the other hand, you can just as easily convince yourself of a scenario where a healthy(-ish) Embiid plays 60-65 games, George comes back and looks like that Paul George, Tyrese Maxey takes his game up another level and guys such as Jared McCain and Quentin Grimes step up to give the Sixers the supporting cast it lacked a year ago. In a soft East, that might be enough to get you a high seed, and then who knows what happens in the playoffs?

Alas, my numbers say to be more cautious, and my instincts echo the same. George and McCain are already injured, Embiid is always one bad step away from joining them, there is a glaring hole at power forward after losing Guerschon Yabusele, and the frontcourt minus Embiid remains littered with question marks. Throw in head coach Nick Nurse entering the season with perhaps the league’s hottest seat and Grimes’ offseason drama that ended with him singing an $8.7 million qualifying offer to get his wings in free agency next summer, and the potential for a repeat of the 2024-25 disaster can’t be ignored.

However, in one key area, the Sixers are much better off: The too-old, too-limited supporting cast of a year ago has received some clear reinforcements. Lottery pick VJ Edgecombe may not make an instant impact, especially in a backcourt this deep, but his long-term upside is obvious, and by the second half of the season, he should be a plus contributor at worst. Grimes, stolen from Dallas in a February trade for Caleb Martin, has clear utility as either a trade piece or a 3-and-D wing if he stays in Philly beyond the season. And up front, the Sixers at least gave themselves options by signing discount free agent Trendon Watford and drafting Auburn star Johni Broome.

The Sixers still have some constraints. One reason they didn’t push harder for a longer, more expensive deal with Grimes was to stay below the first-apron payroll threshold and maintain their cap flexibility, which is also why they’ll open the season with 14 players. Given that three of them (Eric Gordon, Kyle Lowry and Andre Drummond) are limited graybeards, and five others are in their first or second seasons, it feels like a lot still rides on the health of the Embiid-George-Maxey core.

If things go badly, look for the Sixers to throw Kelly Oubre and his $8 million salary overboard in a bid to get below the luxury tax. However, there’s an alternate scenario where the Sixers are making in-season upgrades by dangling an unprotected 2028 Clippers pick; that’s part of the logic of keeping below the first apron and maximizing their potential trading options.

Every preseason prediction here is, to some extent, a presentation of a median outcome rather than a best-case or worst-case scenario. The Sixers just take that concept to the extreme. I’m saying 37 wins here because it’s the midpoint between 17 and 57, but really, any of those numbers seems just as likely as any of the others.

9. Chicago Bulls (38-44)

A home Play-In game! Schedule the parade!

The Bulls have won 39, 39 and 40 games the past three seasons while finishing ninth, ninth and 10th in the East. No team in history has won between 38 and 40 games for four straight seasons, yet for the Bulls, this feels almost preordained. They aren’t tragically bad as much as inoffensively mediocre; the enduring frustration is that they seemingly aspire to achieve little more than this, but in preseason, we can always hope.

Let’s start with the kind of good news: Though they’ve stayed relentlessly mediocre, the Bulls have been trending significantly younger. Their two best players, Josh Giddey and Coby White, are 23 and 25, respectively. Power forward Matas Buzelis is almost 21 and might have a breakout year ahead of him; wing subs Isaac Okoro, Ayo Dosunmu and Kevin Huerter are 24, 25 and 27, respectively, and underrated point guard Tre Jones is 25. If you still dare to dream, Patrick Williams is also 24. And coming up next is skinny teenage lottery pick Noa Essengue, a DeMar DeRozan-esque foul magnet who likely needs a year of seasoning in the G League before he’s game-ready.

Additionally, the Bulls’ cap situation is in great shape. Giddey is the highest-paid player at a reasonable $25 million a year, and the Bulls will have max cap space next summer even if they pay White and Dosunmu as unrestricted free agents. (The cap holds for those two will only soak up $39 million of Chicago’s protected $75 million in cap room, a number that increases if they ever find a taker for their five-year, $90 million mistake on Williams.)

Alas, that doesn’t do anything for the 2025-26 version of the Bulls. While Chicago’s depth in the backcourt and on the wings gives it a solid floor, especially in a soft East, there just isn’t much upside here when Giddey is the closest thing to a star and the center position is bottom five in the league. The Bulls can’t quit Nikola Vučević, but don’t have elsewhere to turn, with undersized Jalen Smith and veteran Zach Collins the only other realistic options on the roster. Solving the center riddle, whether via in-season trade or the copious offseason cap space, is by far the biggest obstacle if the Bulls aspire to anything beyond Play-In qualification in 2026-27.

While they won’t be good, the Bulls will at least be watchable; Billy Donovan has them playing breakneck fast and letting it rip from 3, Buzelis has major highlight potential, Giddey slings nifty passes from weird angles, and White can go on electric scoring jags. It should be a more entertaining drive to 38 wins than the norm, but the road still leads to a familiar spot in mid-April and to the golf course shortly thereafter.