\n\t\t\tAugust 21st 2025 at 10:00pm CST by Alex Kirschenbaum \t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
Heading into the 2025\/26 season, Zach Harper of The Athletic has taken stock of both the NBA\u2019s top 40 big men<\/a> and the league\u2019s 40 best lead guards<\/a>.<\/p>\n Harper divided the players into seven tiers for each list. While three All-NBA superstar guards \u2013 Shai Gilgeous-Alexander<\/a>, Luka Doncic<\/a>, and Stephen Curry<\/a> \u2013 qualified for his top tier among lead guards, only one player is in the top tier for big men \u2014 three-time MVP Nuggets center Nikola Jokic<\/a>. For what it\u2019s worth, two-time MVP Bucks forward Giannis Antetokounmpo<\/a> was not listed as a big for this exercise.<\/p>\n Here\u2019s more news and notes from around the NBA:<\/p>\n Zach Kram of ESPN<\/a> runs through one statistic that could make or break this season\u2019s goals for all 30 NBA squads. Among some of the interesting numbers of note: the Kings were outscored by 120.9 points per 100 possessions during the 1,000-plus possessions that stars Domantas Sabonis<\/a>, DeMar DeRozan<\/a> and Zach LaVine<\/a> shared the floor; and the reigning champion Thunder are bringing back the players who logged 99.2% of all their playoff minutes from last season.
\nThe new CBA\u2019s brutal second tax apron has come under renewed scrutiny this summer, after effectively compelling the breakup of the Celtics\u2019 2024 championship roster. Steve Bulpett of Heavy.com<\/a> spoke to several league executives about the mechanism\u2019s impact on team-building. \u201cBefore, they just kept hiking the price of being over the tax limit,\u201d one executive said. \u201cBut now you have things like limitations on trades and loss of draft position [teams in the second apron for three years in a five-year span have a first round pick moved to the end of the round]. These are all new in the apron system. Now the cost gets too expensive. It\u2019s not just money; it\u2019s limiting to your operations.\u201d
\nSeven of the 10 teams listed among David Aldridge of The Athletic<\/a>\u2018s most improved rosters this offseason are in the Western Conference. The No. 1 club on Aldridge\u2019s list, the revamped Rockets, may not be much of a surprise, but the No. 6 Hornets certainly are.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"August 21st 2025 at 10:00pm CST by Alex Kirschenbaum Heading into the 2025\/26 season, Zach Harper of The…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":87265,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[557],"tags":[64,63,590,85],"class_list":["post-87264","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nba","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-nba","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87264","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=87264"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87264\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/87265"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=87264"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=87264"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=87264"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}