Ranking NBA’s 10 most interesting teams of the second half: Can Knicks regroup? Will Suns keep rising?

We’ve reached the halfway point of the 2025-26 NBA season, and, as it looks right now, we’re in for one hell of a stretch run and postseason. The Thunder initially looked like they were going to run away from everyone and break Golden State’s 73-win record in the process, but they’ve come back to earth. On the flip side, the Clippers looked like they were dead in the water but have resurfaced of late. The Feb. 5 trade deadline looms.

With the latter point in mind, will anyone make a move that swings the proverbial needle? I don’t see it at the top, unless Detroit gets a shooter like Michael Porter Jr. or Trey Murphy III. Oklahoma City is set. The same goes for Denver, Houston and San Antonio. I know what these teams are at this point. I don’t care about what seed they end up getting. They’re contenders.

The teams that interest me are the ones that could go either way. And even among those teams there are, for me, varying degrees of intrigue. Before I get into detail on the five teams that really have my eye me in the second half, below are five on the lower end of my interest scale.

• 6. Boston Celtics: I have a pretty good idea of what they are. They’ve been the best story in the league so far along with the Suns, but while Phoenix could still fade in the West, Boston is going to be a playoff team at worst and probably a top-four seed. The intrigue is whether they’ve seen enough internally to commit to a buying position at the trade deadline, or whether they’ll still look to cut their tax bill and maybe move off of Anfernee Simons. And of course, will Jayson Tatum come back?
• 7. Los Angeles Lakers: I don’t think the Lakers are a threat unless they pull off something unforeseen at the deadline. But of course there is interest in what is potentially LeBron James’ final season, and whenever Austin Reaves returns we’ll all be watching to see if he and Luka Dončić and rediscover their dominance together. When Dončić and Reaves have shared the court this season without LeBron James, the Lakers have outscored opponents by 14.2 points per 100 possessions, per Cleaning the Glass, with what would rank as the best offense in the league. Add LeBron to the equation, and that number falls off a cliff to -7.4 with the fifth-worst offense. If that doesn’t change in a major way, the Lakers don’t interest me much.
• 8. Los Angeles Clippers: As noted at the top, the Clippers were a dumpster fire for first two months but have since turned it around and are now well within range of a play-in spot. This is a super talented team that is capable of playing its way in to the playoffs and giving someone a hell of a time in the first round, but not if Kawhi Leonard is hurt again. This is sort of a watch-out-the-corner-of-my-eye team.
• 9. Cleveland Cavaliers: This is basically the same team that won 64 games last year, and for all the trouble they’ve had this season they’re still tied in the loss column for the No. 4 seed. But now Darius Garland is hobbling again. It just doesn’t feel like Cleveland’s year, but obviously they are worth monitoring with as high as the No. 2 seed still well within reach.
• 10. Toronto Raptors: I’m interested in this team if they get Ja Morant. Otherwise the Raptors are just a nice story.

And with that, let’s get to my five most interesting second-half teams.

Two straight losses to the Cavs has dampened some of the vibes, but prior to that the Sixers had won six of eight. Entering play on Monday, they’re tied with the No. 4 Raptors and one game back of the No. 3 Knicks in the loss column with the sixth-easiest remaining schedule, according to Tankathon.

I don’t think anyone is catching Detroit, but from the 2-seed down it’s wide open. If Joel Embiid can stay in the lineup on a consistent basis (yes, I realize this is a massive IF), why not the Sixers, who had pretty much been left for dead beneath the weight of Embiid and Paul George’s contracts?

For starters, Embiid is dominating again. It’s not just the numbers. It’s the decisions he’s again forcing defenses to make. Single cover him, he goes right to the basket on Anthony Davis. Double him when a smaller player has wound up in a mismatch and he skips it cross court, gets you into rotation, and it all flows from there.

Remember when Embiid first took the court this season and literally couldn’t jump? We’re a long way from that.

Embiid has scored at least 20 points in his last 13 games. Dating back to his season-high of 39 against the Pacers on Dec. 12, he’s averaging 28 and 8, and over that span, as they primary defender, he’s forcing scorers to shoot 11.7% worse on shots inside of six feet than they normally would, per NBA.com tracking. That’s better than Victor Wembanyama.

Embiid has settled into a smooth flow with Tyrese Maxey, who is officially the leader of the offense now. Paul George has embraced the fact that he isn’t a go-to player anymore even though he’s paid like one. The Sixers need him to focus on defense and complimentary offense.

To the former, his pick and rolls, drives and pull-up shots per game are all down, while spot-up shots are accounting for 22% of his offensive diet, the highest that mark has been since his second season in the league.

This isn’t to say the Sixers want him standing in the corner spacing the floor and/or don’t need a player of his abilities to attack offensively (which he has done more of in recent weeks as he’s noted his body feeling better), but it’s not a consistent primary option, and, at least from the outside looking in, George appears to be increasingly settled and comfortable in that space.

As far as the defense, the Sixers are holding opponents to 111.1 points per 100 possessions with George on the floor, per Cleaning the Glass. When he goes off, that number goes to 116.5. That’s the difference in the third-best defense in the league and the 17th.

There’s a reason everyone was so excited about this Maxey-Embiid-George Big 3 in Philly. They’re all different sizes, different players, filling different roles. This isn’t a Luka-LeBron-Austin Reaves situation where they all do the same thing. And now that they’re all figuring out how to play their roles while also functioning in service of each other, it’s not impossible to imagine this team becoming a serious factor down the stretch and into the playoffs if everyone somehow manages to stay healthy.

2. New York Knicks

The Knicks have lost eight of 10. Since winning the NBA Cup, they’ve gone 7-10 with the 28th-ranked defense. For the season, 60% of their wins have come against below-.500 teams. They’ve only won eight road games, the fewest of any East team currently among the top seven seeds.

Sure, Jalen Brunson being out for the last two losses against Phoenix and Golden State is an excuse if you want it, but the Knicks had lost five of previous last seven with Brunson playing. One reason why? Karl-Anthony Towns is having a dreadful shooting season.

The first two numbers are career lows, as is Towns’ 52.3 eFG%. You have to go back to his rookie season to find a 3-point number lower than 35. And Towns isn’t alone in his shooting woes of late. Mikal Bridges, who hovered around 43% on his 3s through the first three months, has fallen to 35.6% in January. Across December and January, OG Anunoby has been ice cold from deep.

Brunson can perhaps cover for some poor shooting in the regular season. The Knicks have still been a top-10 offense through this rough patch. But Towns and the wings have to be clicking if they’re going to be true contenders.

Here’s the good news: When Josh Hart plays, the Knicks tend to win. Miles McBride is having a sensational year. Mitchell Robinson can swing a series with his rebounding. Throughout NBA history, 18 teams have endured a 2-8 stretch and still managed to make the Finals. Six of those teams have won it all. The 2022 Warriors did it. So did the 2011 Mavericks and the 2004 Pistons. A stretch like this is not a death knell.

But it has to clean up over the second half, and given the expectations with which the Knicks entered this season, this is one of the big storylines to watch as we see what, if anything, they do at the trade deadline and make their way into March and April.

Why aren’t more people talking about the Timberwolves? Whenever Western Conference contenders come up, it’s OKC and Denver at the top, the Spurs have arrived, the Rockets aren’t far behind, the Warriors need this, the Lakers need that, the Suns are the darling overachiever. Meanwhile, it’s the Timberwolves who have been in the last two conference finals and are currently one of just four teams who rank in the top 10 of both offensive and defensive rating.

Entering play on Monday, Minnesota is percentage points ahead of the Rockets for the No. 4 seed. Rudy Gobert is pushing for his fifth Defensive Player of the Year. Jaden McDaniels will surely join him on an All-Defense team barring a long injury. Julius Randle is one of six players averaging at least 22 points, seven rebounds and five assists per game. Naz Reid leads the league in total bench points.

Oh by the way, they also have that Anthony Edwards guy.

Edwards is playing MVP basketball. The guy is averaging a tick under 30 PPG on 50/42 shooting splits. He had 55 against the Spurs on Saturday. He’s shooting 49% from 3 on nine attempts per game since the turn of the calendar.

Every year Edwards has added something to his game. He went from an inefficient shooter to leading the league with 320 made 3-pointers last year at almost a 40% clip. This year he’s at 41.8% from deep with a top-shelf (and by far career-high) 63.1 TS%.

He’s made huge strides as a playmaker; if you double him now, he understands the power of getting off the ball and letting someone else tally both the bucket and the assist.

The one frontier Edwards had left to conquer was clutch time consistency, and this season he’s doing that and more. Entering play on Monday, Edwards is shooting a remarkable 71.7% overall, including 61% from 3, in the “clutch” — which is defined as any possession inside the final five minutes when the score is within five points. Nobody else who has taken at least 15 clutch shots is even close to those marks, and they are a huge jump from Ant’s 37.5/29.9 combined clutch shooting splits over the previous three seasons.

This started on opening night. The Wolves, who are 11-7 in clutch games so far after going 20-25 last year, were trailing Portland with just over a minute to play when Ant dropped Jerami Grant on a step-back 3.

On Christmas, the Wolves trailed the Nuggets by 15 halfway through the fourth quarter only for Edwards to score 11 points over the final five minutes including this fadeaway corner 3 to send the game to overtime.

How about down two with inside a minute to play against the defending champs?

These are the types of shots that Inpredictable tracks as part of its Clutch Win Probability Added metric — in which Edwards ranks fourth league-wide when factoring in all box-score stats and No. 1 overall based solely on made and missed field goals. By Inpredictable’s count, Edwards has attempted 51 shots so far this year that have had an “elevated impact on win probability,” and on those shots he has posted a truly staggering 81.4 eFG%.

All told, Minnesota’s starting five of Edwards, Donte DiVincenzo, McDaniels, Randle and Gobert has the best point differential (+83) of any lineup on any team in the league. Do they need a true point guard to actually win the title? Maybe. And maybe they’ll address that, and/or their relatively thin bench, with a trade-deadline move.

But again, even as currently constructed, the Timberwolves are one of just four teams who rank as a top-10 offense and defense. The other three (Oklahoma City, Houston and San Antonio) are widely considered top-tier contenders. The second half will tell us a lot about whether the Wolves belong in that same class.

4. Phoenix Suns

Nobody saw this coming from the Suns when they traded Kevin Durant and waived and stretched Bradley Beal. They were expected to be a total mess if we’re being honest. Instead, they’re one game back in the loss column of a top-four seed with a top-five net rating and the second-best defense in the league.

You could throw a dart blindfolded and have a good chance of hitting a Suns player having an incredible who is not being talked being talked about nearly enough. Collin Gillespie. Mark Williams. Grayson Allen. Royce O’Neale. Jordan Goodwin. Honestly, Devin Booker is flying under his relative radar; if he starts to shoot 3s at his normal clip, as opposed to the 30% mark he’s put up through the first half, Phoenix can become a real threat to finish above the play-in and possibly upset someone in the first round.

But the guy really worth highlighting here is Dillon Brooks, who is near the top of a short list of guys having All-Star seasons who have no chance of actually making the All-Star team, and whose villainous prints are all over a pestering defense that annoys you into submission; Phoenix leads the league steals and ranks in the top five in both deflections and loose balls recovered.

The Suns win by out-hustling you, and say what you want about Brooks, but whatever team he’s on plays hard. He’s a culture setter in that way. Memphis isn’t the same without him. There was a reason Houston brought him in to establish its competitive, defensive-minded mantra under Ime Udoka last year, and now he’s having the same effect in Phoenix.

We knew this about Brooks, though. He’s going to defend. He’s going to compete. He’s going to talk his talk. But he’s never scored like this. He’s putting up over 20 a night. True, it has plenty to do with Brooks’ ballooned usage rate (his overall scoring efficiency is still pretty meh), but he’s never been short on scoring confidence and this season he’s showing that maybe it wasn’t always so irrational after all.

This guy gets buckets. Tough ones. He gets his body into you and converts shots that sometimes look like he shouldn’t even be able to get them off cleanly. He does it on and off the ball. Over 30% of his field-goal attempts are spot-up jumpers, per Synergy, and his 1.09 PPP as a pick-and-roll scorer ranks right in line with Anthony Edwards and better than a long list of superstars that includes Luka Dončić, Stephen Curry and Kevin Durant.

In isolation, he scores at the per-possession rate of Jalen Brunson.

In the post, he’s more efficient than Shai Gilgeous-Alexander.

His 8.1 PPG on pull-up jumpers ranks near the top of the league and is notably more than the likes of Cade Cunningham, Austin Reaves and De’Aaron Fox.

Brooks is probably destined to shoot the Suns out of a playoff game, but if they get there in the first place, he’ll be a big reason why. Personally, I’m fascinated to watch them try because I, like many others, thought this team would be a disaster. Now they’re one of my favorite watches and should be one of yours, too, as the best underdog story the NBA has going.

5. Golden State Warriors

Steve Kerr took a beating from the bloggers when he said the Warriors are “not in the same class” as teams like the Thunder and Spurs anymore, as if he was saying he’s given up on the team. Taking any sort of long view, he was right. Those teams are where the Warriors were a decade ago, at the start of what looks almost certain to be an extended reign atop the competitive landscape.

That said, Kerr elaborated by saying the Warriors are still a “good, competitive team” that is simply looking to give itself a “swing at the plate.” That’s what the Warriors gave themselves in 2022, and they connected for the fourth championship of the Steph Curry era with a team absolutely nobody considered to be a real threat halfway through the season.

Can they do it again? Probably not. But this team is more dangerous than its 24-19 record entering play on Monday. Curry remains at or very near the height of his powers. There is real depth here. A bunch of guys can shoot the ball. Draymond Green remains extremely impactful. Jimmy Butler is having a great season and perhaps might be willing to assert himself even more in the second half.

Meanwhile, the defense has ranked in the top five for much of the season. The offense has been top five since Christmas. As their brutal early schedule has stabilized, they’ve won 11 of their last 15 games. This remains the same team that went 22-5 after the Butler trade last season and was a good bet to make the conference finals had Curry not gotten hurt against the Wolves in Game 1 of the second round.

Actually, this is a better team than that one. De’Anthony Melton is a huge addition from last season who’s been playing great. Al Horford still has chance to make the impact he wasn’t really able to during the first half of the season as he dealt with injuries. Jonathan Kuminga will probably be traded at the deadline, so whoever comes back in that deal is going to be a bonus as Kuminga is currently a zero. If they get really frisky and give up some draft capital for, say, Michael Porter Jr. or Trey Murphy III, buckle up.

But again, even as currently constructed, the Warriors can make a lot noise over the second half and into the playoffs (which, at the moment, would have to come via the Play-In Tournament yet again). To continue with the baseball analogy, over time, the Warriors are no longer in a position to hit for a high championship-contending average. But if they can work or even luck themselves into a favorable count (somehow get to the first round of the playoffs, get the right matchup, have the bracket break their way, get super hot from there), it’s at least fun to imagine that Curry and company might still be capable of connecting on one last swing for the fences.