Offseason Preview Rumors

2025 NBA Offseason Preview: Oklahoma City Thunder

June 25th, 2025 at 6:16am CST by Luke Adams

The Thunder didn't exactly coast through the 2025 playoffs, having had to pull out a pair of Game 7 victories (over Denver and Indiana) in order to win their first NBA championship since the franchise moved from Seattle to Oklahoma City.

Still, the history books will show that this year's Thunder were one of the NBA's most dominant teams ever. Only four clubs have compiled more wins in a single regular season than the 68 victories Oklahoma City racked up in 2024/25, and the Thunder's +12.7 regular season net rating ranked second all-time, behind only the 1995/96 Bulls.

OKC's remarkable season is a testament to a rebuild that was executed nearly perfectly. Of course, Sam Presti and the Thunder got a nice head-start on that rebuilding process in 2019 when they were able to acquire future MVP Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, five first-round picks (four unprotected), and two pick swaps from a Clippers team willing to overpay for Paul George in order to secure Kawhi Leonard's free agency commitment.

Even though that move was the catalyst for this year's championship run, many of the decisions Presti has made in the years since then have paid major dividends as well. That was especially true on draft day in 2022, when the team used its own first-round pick and one from the Clippers in order to select Chet Holmgren and Jalen Williams, who have since become franchise pillars and were the team's second- and third-leading scorers behind Gilgeous-Alexander this year.

After bottoming out with a 22-60 record in 2020/21 and a 24-58 mark in '21/22, the Thunder hit the fast-forward button on their rebuild when they added Holmgren and Williams to their roster, increasing their win total by double-digits in each of the next three seasons. They went from 24 victories to 40 to 57 to 68, earning the No. 1 seed in the Western Conference in both 2024 and 2025.

We've heard repeatedly over the last year or two that the NBA has entered its parity era. The league has had seven different champions over the last seven seasons, with no team repeating as champs since the Warriors in 2017 and 2018.

A 2016 salary-cap spike allowed Golden State to sign Kevin Durant away from Oklahoma City, adding him to a team coming off a 73-win season. But a move like that would be virtually impossible to pull off under the current system, which has eliminated the possibility of a huge single-year cap jump (annual increases are capped at 10%) and has implemented more punitive roster-building and financial penalties for teams with top-heavy rosters.

Given those new restrictions, it has become more difficult than ever for an NBA front office to build and maintain a dynasty, but if any recent champion has the makings of a dynasty, it's these Thunder. Oklahoma City is the second-youngest team in league history to win a title, shouldn't face any serious salary-cap or financial obstacles anytime soon, and is armed with enough future draft picks to continue adding affordable talent to its roster for years to come.

It's a good time to be a Thunder fan.

The Thunder's Offseason Plan

No NBA team enters the 2025 offseason with fewer short-term question marks than the Thunder, who have 13 players from their championship roster on guaranteed contracts for next season and hold team-friendly options on the other two. If they want to, they could bring back literally the exact same roster in 2025/26 while remaining well below the luxury tax line.

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2025 NBA Offseason Preview: Indiana Pacers

June 24th, 2025 at 6:52am CST by Luke Adams

The Pacers appeared in the Eastern Conference Finals in 2024, but benefited from injuries to key Bucks and Knicks players during the first two rounds, then were swept out of the third round by the Celtics. While they were viewed as a solid team, the Pacers were also a No. 6 seed that had only avoided a play-in game due to a tiebreaker edge over a Philadelphia with an identical regular season record.

In other words, when they decided to run it back with a pretty similar roster in 2024/25, few fans or experts were projecting the Pacers to make another appearance in the conference finals, especially in the wake of a 10-15 start that had them outside of the top 10 in the East in mid-December.

But the Pacers proved during the final four months of the regular season and two-plus months of the postseason that last year's run to the Eastern Finals was no fluke after all. The club went 40-17 following that 10-15 start, ranking in the top seven in both offense and defense during that stretch, and secured a top-four seed in the East with its first 50-win season in over a decade.

Indiana's second consecutive first-round series win over Milwaukee wasn't a surprise this time around, but the results of the next two rounds were -- the Pacers defeated the heavily favored 64-win Cavaliers in five games, then knocked off the higher-seeded Knicks in six games to set up an NBA Finals matchup with the 68-win Thunder. Huge underdogs once again against the league's best regular season team, Indiana pushed Oklahoma City all the way to a Game 7 before its magical playoff run finally came to an end.

The Pacers' depth was a major part of their success. Although Pascal Siakam was the team's leading scorer, he averaged a relatively modest 20.2 points per game in the regular season and 20.5 PPG in the playoffs, with role players like Myles Turner, Bennedict Mathurin, Aaron Nesmith, Obi Toppin, Andrew Nembhard, and T.J. McConnell all helping to carry the scoring load.

Still, while Siakam led Indiana in scoring and the club's depth was arguably its greatest asset, point guard Tyrese Haliburton was its star. Haliburton, who ranked third in the league with 9.2 assists per game, earned a spot on the All-NBA third team, then had one of most clutch playoff runs in recent history, repeatedly hitting game-winning or game-tying shots in the final seconds of fourth quarters to help the Pacers complete improbable comebacks and steal games they had no business winning.

Haliburton's playoff heroics made it all the more heartbreaking that he tore his right Achilles tendon in Game 7 of the Finals vs. the Thunder. Without their star point guard, the Pacers couldn't pull off the upset in Oklahoma City, and now they face the prospect of playing the entire 2025/26 season without him, given that Achilles tears typically sideline NBA players for at least nine-to-12 months.

Just how significantly that injury will affect Indiana's offseason plans is a crucial question that the front office will answer with its actions in the coming days and weeks.

The Pacers' Offseason Plan

During his time as the Pacers' owner, Herb Simon hasn't made a habit of operating at either end of the spectrum too often, having avoided tanking and tax-paying in equal measure. But after his team's unlikely run to the NBA Finals this season, there were rumblings that Simon was preparing to go into luxury tax territory in 2025/26 for the first time in 20 years in order to keep the core of this roster intact.

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2025 NBA Offseason Preview: Minnesota Timberwolves

June 22nd, 2025 at 6:03pm CST by Luke Adams

After making it to the Western Conference Finals in 2024 for the first time in 20 years, the Timberwolves found themselves at the center of a battle over team ownership and facing an increasingly concerning long-term salary cap situation entering last summer.

Glen Taylor was fighting to stop minority stakeholders Marc Lore and Alex Rodriguez from gaining majority control of the franchise at the same time that Anthony Edwards' Rose rule rookie scale extension took effect, which gave the Wolves a trio of max-salary players and pushed the team's salary above the restrictive second tax apron.

A year later, much has changed in Minnesota. Longtime Timberwolves star Karl-Anthony Towns, the club's No. 1 overall pick back in 2015, was traded to New York before the 2024/25 season began; Lore and Rodriguez ultimately won their protracted struggle with Taylor for ownership of the team; and Edwards is now the only maximum-salary player on Minnesota's roster after Towns was traded and Rudy Gobert took a pay cut on his latest contract extension.

But there was one notable constant that carried over from 2024 to 2025: the Timberwolves made it back to the conference finals for a second straight time this spring.

It wasn't just the first time in franchise history that the team had accomplished that feat in back-to-back seasons -- it was the first time the Wolves had won even a single playoff series in consecutive years. The club, which made its NBA debut in 1989, has compiled just six postseason series victories in its history, and four of them have occurred within the past two years.

As talented as some of those Kevin Garnett-led Timberwolves teams in the late 1990s and early 2000s were, you could make a strong case that this 2020s iteration of the Wolves is the best the club has ever been.

Still, there's work to be done, not just to get the Wolves to the next level but to make sure they don't drop off at all from their current level. In Julius Randle, Naz Reid, and Nickeil Alexander-Walker, Minnesota will have three of the NBA's top 15 free agents this summer and may not be able to bring all of them back. And even if the front office can retain that trio, more upgrades may be necessary to turn the Wolves from a perennial playoff team into a legitimate championship threat.

Figuring out how to take that next step will be the challenge facing president of basketball operations Tim Connelly this offseason.

The Timberwolves' Offseason Plan

Technically, there's a possibility that Connelly won't be the one making the roster decisions facing the Timberwolves this summer. He has an opt-out clause in his contract that gives him the ability to leave the team if he so chooses. However, there has been absolutely no indication he's thinking about taking that route.

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Hoops Rumors’ 2025 NBA Offseason Previews By Team

June 21st, 2025 at 2:24pm CST by Luke Adams

In advance of the NBA’s 2025 draft and free agent period, Hoops Rumors has been previewing the coming offseason for all 30 teams, looking at their salary cap situations and the roster decisions they’ll have to make this summer.

Our Offseason Preview articles are linked below, sorted by conference and division. While a Trade Rumors Front Office subscription is required to read most of them, our Jazz preview is open to all.

Eastern Conference

Atlantic

Central

Southeast

Western Conference

Northwest

Pacific

Southwest

2025 NBA Offseason Preview: New York Knicks

June 20th, 2025 at 10:22pm CST by Luke Adams

After winning 50 regular season games in 2023/24 for the first time in over a decade, the Knicks came within one win of advancing to the Eastern Conference Finals last spring before injuries caught up to them.

Rather than running it back and seeing if a healthier version of that roster could make a deeper playoff run, the front office took an aggressive approach to the 2024 offseason, parting with five first-round picks in a trade for Mikal Bridges, then sending a pair of starters - Julius Randle and Donte DiVincenzo - and another first-round selection to Minnesota in a blockbuster trade that landed Karl-Anthony Towns in New York.

Those weren't the first major roster moves the Knicks made under president of basketball operations Leon Rose. New York made a nine-figure free agent investment in a pre-All-Star Jalen Brunson in 2022 that was viewed as a risk at the time. There was also a mid-season trade in 2023/24 for OG Anunoby that required the team to give up a pair of former first-round picks -- one was a former No. 3 overall pick (RJ Barrett) and one had just been a Sixth Man of the Year runner-up (Immanuel Quickley).

But the deals for Bridges and Towns represented all-in moves for the Knicks, who had stockpiled extra draft assets over the years, biding their time as they waited for the right opportunity to cash them in. The hope was that adding Bridges and Towns to a core led by Brunson and Anunoby, who both signed long-term contracts in 2024, would be enough to push the club to another level.

And you can make a case that's exactly what happened. The regular season was up and down, as Bridges took some time to adjust to his new team and New York - facing a restrictive hard cap after completing mega-deals - struggled to find effective depth to complement its talented starting lineup. But the Knicks won more games (51) than they had a year earlier, then beat the Pistons in the first round of the playoffs before upsetting the defending champion Celtics in round two.

Yes, Boston lost Jayson Tatum to a season-ending Achilles injury, but the Knicks already had a 2-1 lead and were on their way to winning Game 4 when that injury occurred. Their series victory over the Celtics wasn't a fluke. Unfortunately for the Knicks, their first Eastern Conference Finals appearance in 25 years ended in disappointment, as they couldn't recover from a pair of tough home losses to open the series and fell to the Pacers in six games.

Despite a pretty successful postseason run that included an unexpected second-round win, the Knicks decided a change was necessary after the conference finals loss and parted ways with head coach Tom Thibodeau. It was a somewhat controversial move -- while Thibodeau has faced plenty of criticism for relying too heavily on his top players and not using his bench enough, he helped change the culture in New York, where the club had posted seven consecutive sub-.500 seasons prior to his arrival.

The first order of business for the Knicks this summer is to hire Thibodeau's replacement. After that, they'll have to decide whether the roster needs another facelift or whether they'll move forward with the core they established last summer, betting on that group's ability to take another step forward under a new head coach and perhaps with some tweaks around the edges.

The Knicks' Offseason Plan

The Knicks' head coaching search has been unorthodox so far, to say the least. Rather than compiling the usual list of former NBA head coaches, current assistants, and perhaps some candidates from the college ranks, the Knicks sought permission to speak to at least five head coaches already employed by NBA teams.

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2025 NBA Offseason Preview: Golden State Warriors

June 20th, 2025 at 12:21am CST by Luke Adams

As they scoured the market for another star last summer, the Warriors attempted to engineer an opt-in-and-trade scenario to acquire Paul George from the Clippers before the veteran forward instead declined his player option in order to sign a maximum-salary free agent contract with the Sixers.

Golden State subsequently shifted its trade-market focus to Jazz forward Lauri Markkanen, but came up short in that pursuit as well, with Markkanen signing a long-term extension in Utah that made him ineligible to be traded prior to the 2025 deadline.

Although Golden State's front office ultimately pivoted away from its star search and added a handful of quality role players - De'Anthony Melton, Buddy Hield, and Kyle Anderson - to the roster, Melton suffered a season-ending injury in just his sixth game with the team and the Warriors showed during the first few months of the season why the front office so badly wanted to trade for another impact player.

Stephen Curry was being asked to carry a heavy workload on offense, with secondary scorers like Andrew Wiggins and Hield having up-and-down years, Jonathan Kuminga missing an extended period due to an ankle injury, and midseason trade acquisition Dennis Schröder struggling to find his fit.

So, after striking out on the trade market during the 2024 offseason, and with his team sitting at .500 (25-25) through 50 games, general manager Mike Dunleavy Jr. went out and took a big swing at February's trade deadline, reaching an agreement with the Heat to acquire Jimmy Butler and then immediately signing the star forward to a two-year, maximum-salary extension.

The move was a risky one. As talented a player as Butler is, he was in his age-35 season, has dealt with a series of injuries over the years, and had earned a reputation for acting out when he felt his time with his current team had run its course, as was the case in Miami. Before being traded to Golden State, Butler had been serving an indefinite suspension imposed by the Heat for conduct detrimental to the team and withholding services.

However, Butler has also repeatedly shown he can be on his best behavior once his trade request gets met, which is exactly what happened in Golden State. In the 30 regular season games Butler played for the Warriors, they went 23-7 and posted the NBA's defensive rating. They then won a play-in game to earn the No. 7 seed in the Western Conference, knocked off the No. 2 Rockets in round one, and took the first game of their second-round series against the Timberwolves.

Unfortunately, Curry suffered a hamstring injury in that Game 1 win over Minnesota that sidelined him for the rest of the Warriors' postseason run, which didn't last much longer without their leading scorer on the court -- Golden State lost its next four consecutive games to the Wolves.

As deflating as the end of their season was, the Warriors were rejuvenated by the addition of Butler and now enter the 2025 offseason without the same urgency they had a year ago to find their Robin to Curry's Batman. Butler can be that player. The goal this summer will be to figure out how to supplement the team's veteran stars (Curry, Butler, and Draymond Green) with enough effective complementary pieces to get back into title contention.

The Warriors' Offseason Plan

With Curry, Butler, and Green on deals that run through 2027, the biggest contract decision facing the Warriors this offseason will be what exactly to do with Kuminga, who is eligible for restricted free agency.

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2025 NBA Offseason Preview: Boston Celtics

June 18th, 2025 at 4:20pm CST by Luke Adams

The Celtics enjoyed one of the NBA's all-time great seasons in 2023/24, racking up 64 wins and posting the fourth-best single-season net rating in league history in the regular season before winning 16 of 19 playoff games en route to the franchise's 18th championship.

Unsurprisingly, the Celtics decided to essentially run it back in 2024/25, retaining nearly the exact same roster, with one or two minor tweaks around the edges. Boston compiled 61 more regular season wins in 2024/25 and while they finished the year as the No. 2 seed in the Eastern Conference, the C's would've been the clear betting favorites over the No. 1 Cavaliers if they had met in a postseason series.

And it sure seemed like we were headed for a Celtics/Cavs showdown in the conference finals after no other team in the East finished within 10 games either of them in the regular season. Both clubs breezed through the first round and had plenty of momentum entering round two.

But while the Pacers were in the process of upsetting the Cavs on one side of the Eastern Conference bracket, the Celtics had their own issues with the upstart Knicks, who pulled off a pair of improbable comebacks in Boston to open the conference semifinals. Even after those two losses, the Celtics were still widely expected to take the series, especially after comfortably winning Game 3 in New York, but that early hole they dug came back to haunt them when star forward Jayson Tatum sustained a season-ending Achilles tear near the end of Game 4, another Boston loss.

The Celtics made it a little interesting by winning Game 5 at home, but without Tatum, they didn't have enough firepower to get past the Knicks in Game 6 -- their season ended that night in New York.

Whether or not the Celtics could've pulled off the comeback with a healthy Tatum is a moot point now. There are much bigger issues to worry about in Boston, where the team is facing a financial crunch and can't necessarily assume that its perennial All-NBA first-teamer will be able to play at all next season. Achilles recoveries typically take upwards of a year.

With a new ownership group incoming, there's not necessarily a mandate to slash costs, but it doesn't make sense for a Tatum-less Celtics team to continue operating over the second tax apron in 2025/26. Maintaining a team salary in that range imposes major roster-building restrictions and generates massive tax penalties, and those restrictions and penalties only increase the longer a club stays above the aprons. That's fine for teams with realistic championship aspirations, but the Celtics can't honestly put themselves in that group until Tatum is back to 100%.

The Celtics' Offseason Plan

Getting under the second apron won't be easy for the Celtics. If we assume they retain their nine players on fully guaranteed contracts, plus Neemias Queta and Jordan Walsh (who have partial guarantees), then fill out their standard roster using their No. 28 and No. 32 picks, plus one minimum-salary veteran, they'd be at about $231.9MM for 14 players. The second apron projects to come in at around $207.8MM.

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2025 NBA Offseason Preview: Denver Nuggets

June 17th, 2025 at 8:20pm CST by Luke Adams

A lot has gone wrong for the Nuggets over the past 12 months.

Less than three weeks after Denver gave up three second-round picks to move up six spots in the 2024 draft to nab DaRon Holmes at No. 22, the rookie forward sustained a season-ending Achilles tear during his Summer League debut.

The Nuggets' only other trade during the 2024 offseason saw them give up three second-round picks to get Reggie Jackson's contract off their books. With that newly opened salary slot, they used their taxpayer mid-level exception to sign Dario Saric, who ultimately logged just 210 total minutes across 16 outings, failing to emerge as the sort of reliable frontcourt reserve the front office envisioned.

Kentavious Caldwell-Pope, a key part of the roster that won a title in 2023, walked in free agency and Denver, already operating in tax-apron territory, wasn't in position to acquire a veteran replacement for him.

The relationship between head coach Michael Malone and general manager Calvin Booth became so strained that the Nuggets decided to fire both of them with less than a week left in the 2024/25 regular season.

Somehow, despite those personnel missteps, the unlucky breaks, and the organizational turmoil, Denver earned a guaranteed playoff spot in a competitive Western Conference, won a hard-fought first-round series against a talented Clippers team, then took the eventual conference champion Thunder to a Game 7 in round two before bowing out of the postseason.

It's a testament to the talent at the top of the Nuggets' roster that, in spite all that went wrong, Denver was just a Game 7 victory away from making the NBA's final four and potentially carving out a path to another title. That top-end talent starts with Nikola Jokic, who has been named the NBA's Most Valuable Player in three of the past five seasons and had a strong case for the award in the two years he didn't win it.

As long as the Nuggets have a healthy, prime Jokic on their roster and surround him with enough complementary talent, they're capable of contending for a championship. In Jamal Murray and Aaron Gordon, the club has two clear pieces of that puzzle, and Christian Braun made a strong case with his breakout 2024/25 season that he should be considered a part of Denver's core, too.

The question for the Nuggets is whether they'll be able to get enough out of the rest of their roster to supplement those impact players in the starting five. Having lost important depth pieces like Caldwell-Pope, Bruce Brown, and Jeff Green during the previous two summers, the new-look front office will have to figure out a way to use the club's limited assets to replenish that depth and get the roster back to a championship-caliber level.

The Nuggets' Offseason Plan

While I assume Denver views Jokic, Murray, Gordon, and Braun as core players going forward, I'm not sure the same can be said for Michael Porter Jr., who has been the subject of trade rumors for the last year or two and struggled mightily in the postseason as he attempted to play through a shoulder injury.

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2025 NBA Offseason Preview: Cleveland Cavaliers

June 16th, 2025 at 12:19pm CST by Luke Adams

There was widespread skepticism during the 2024 offseason about the Cavaliers' decision to continue moving forward with their four-player core of Donovan Mitchell, Darius Garland, Jarrett Allen, and Evan Mobley after the team struggled to get past the upstart Magic in round one of the playoffs and then was defeated soundly in round two by the eventual champion Celtics.

Garland was coming off an injury-plagued down year, while Allen had been unable to suit up for the Cavs' final eight playoff games due to a rib issue. There was a sense among many league observers that Cleveland would be better off trading one or both players to better balance the roster, given the overlap in skill sets between Garland and Mitchell in the backcourt and Allen and Mobley up front.

But president of basketball operations Koby Altman and his front office decided to double down on the quartet, signing three of them to new contract extensions in 2024 (the fourth, Garland, was already on a long-term deal). Rather than shaking up the roster, the Cavs made their most significant offseason move on the sidelines, where new head coach Kenny Atkinson replaced J.B. Bickerstaff.

The Cavs responded by making Altman look like a genius from day one of the 2024/25 season. They raced out to a 15-0 start and was 56-10 in mid-March before stumbling a little in the season's final weeks, going 8-8 down the stretch. Atkinson's impact was immediately evident, as a Cleveland team that ranked 16th in offensive rating (114.7) in 2023/24 put up the league's No. 1 mark (121.0) in '24/25 without sacrificing anything on defense. The club finished eighth in defensive rating, with Mobley earning Defensive Player of the Year honors.

Although the Cavs essentially didn't make any veteran roster additions ahead of the 2024/25 season, Ty Jerome returned from a season-ending ankle injury and made a greater impact than the team could've hoped for, averaging a career-high 12.5 points per game on .516/.439/.872 shooting and finishing the season as a Sixth Man of the Year finalist. Outside of Jerome and trade-deadline acquisition De'Andre Hunter though, this was essentially the same group that had won 48 games a year earlier.

Atkinson was named Coach of the Year for turning the Cavs into a 64-win team, and after demolishing the Heat in the most one-sided playoff series in NBA history, they appeared poised for a deep postseason run. Instead, they once again fell to the eventual Eastern champs in round two -- this time around, it was the Pacers who eliminated them in five games.

Cleveland was banged up in the second round, with Garland, Mobley, and Hunter each missing at least one game while Mitchell battled calf and ankle problems. But it would be hard to say definitively that they would've beaten the Pacers with better health luck. And even if they believe that to be true, the Cavs will face some difficult roster decisions in the near future, with their team salary poised to soar past the second tax apron in 2025/26.

Since the NBA's current Collective Bargaining Agreement went into effect, teams have exhibited a reluctance to operate above the second apron for more than a year or two at a time, having been willing to surpass that threshold only if they feel that they're capable of contending for a title.

The Cavs' 64 regular season wins suggest they're legitimate contenders, but their inability to get past the second round of the playoffs casts doubt on that belief. With massive tax penalties and major roster restrictions looming, the front office will have to think long and hard about whether it makes sense to run it back once more with the current group or whether it's time to entertain more significant roster changes.

The Cavaliers' Offseason Plan

Mitchell, who finished fifth in MVP voting this past season, and Mobley, a first-time Defensive Player of the Year in his age-23 season, are clearly the long-term cornerstones the Cavaliers plan to build around. They won't be available via trade this offseason. But the same can't be said about Garland and Allen. A May report indicated that the Cavs appear more open than in the past to listening to inquiries for those two other members of their "core four."

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2025 NBA Offseason Preview: Houston Rockets

June 14th, 2025 at 2:25pm CST by Luke Adams

After getting back to .500 (41-41) in 2023/24 for the first time in four years following a full-scale rebuild, the Rockets were expected to take another step forward in '24/25. After all, six of their top eight players in minutes per game in '23/24 were still on rookie scale contracts, so it seemed safe to assume those players hadn't yet reached their respective ceilings.

Still, there were relatively modest expectations for just how big a step forward Houston would be capable of taking after a pretty quiet offseason that involved no real roster additions besides No. 3 overall pick Reed Sheppard. Oddsmakers set their over/under at 43.5 wins, and when we asked our readers last September to make their predictions, a slight majority took the "under" on that figure.

Given that context, it's hard to call the Rockets '24/25 season anything but a huge success for the franchise. Houston won 52 games, its highest single-season total since the James Harden years, and held the No. 2 seed in a competitive Western Conference for much of the season, including from March 19 onward.

Fourth-year big man Alperen Sengun followed up his breakout '23/24 campaign by earning his first All-Star nod, while second-year wing Amen Thompson displayed star potential as a two-way player, boosting his scoring total to 14.1 points per game on 55.7% shooting and emerging as one of the NBA's best defensive players -- he claimed a spot on the All-NBA first team and finished fifth in Defensive Player of the Year voting, receiving nine first-place votes.

Notably, the Rockets managed to make a significant move up the standings without major breakout seasons from any of their other young players besides Thompson. Jalen Green, Jabari Smith Jr., and Tari Eason all had good years, but their numbers were in the neighborhood of ones they'd posted in previous seasons. Meanwhile, Cam Whitmore's role was inconsistent and Sheppard had a hard time getting off the bench and cracking Houston's crowded rotation.

In other words, there's reason to believe that all of those players have room to continue improving, especially since they're are still so young -- Eason, who turned 24 last month, is the oldest of the bunch. And if some of them still have another level to reach, it stands to reason that the same is true of the Rockets as a whole.

As we enter the 2025 offseason, the big question in Houston is just how much confidence the front office has in the ability of those young players to take the next steps necessary to turn the team into a legitimate contender. Because, despite their second-place finish in the West, the Rockets weren't a legitimate contender in 2024/25 -- they had trouble generating half-court offense in the postseason and were eliminated by the seventh-seeded Warriors in round one.

The Rockets repeatedly insisted ahead of the 2025 trade deadline that they no interest in breaking up their young core to add win-now help. Will that stance change now that general manager Rafael Stone and his group have had another year - and a seven-game playoff series - to assess this roster? If so, what sort of player will they be targeting on the trade market and which young players and/or draft picks would they be willing to give up to get that player?

The Rockets' Offseason Plan

The two superstars most frequently cited as potential trade candidates this summer are Giannis Antetokounmpo and Kevin Durant. The Rockets have been linked to both players. However, Antetokounmpo has yet to actually request a trade and the Bucks aren't planning to exploring dealing him unless that happens. The Durant sweepstakes, on the other hand, appear to be heating up, with Houston among the teams engaged in discussions with the Suns.

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