While there are still several talented young players left looking to resolve their offseasons, LeBron James’ signing with the Sixers likely marked the end of the needle-moving moves of the 2026 offseason.
The move to bring in James and Jaylen Brown at the cost of Paul George and a handful of picks makes Philadelphia one of the clear winners of the offseason, Chris Mannix writes in a winners and losers column for Sports Illustrated, though he notes that many players on the team will need to sacrifice individual touches to make the team construct work.
On the flip side of the coin, the Celtics helping to create a contender in their own division while hurting their own chances at winning a championship makes them one of the year’s losers, according to Mannix, along with teams like the Clippers, who face an uncertain future, the Cavaliers, and the Trail Blazers, among others.
We have more from around the basketball world:
- The NBA team in London may soon be owned by American billionaire Nikesh Arora, the CEO of cybersecurity company Palo Alto Networks, as The Athletic’s Amelie Claydon and Leon Imber report that Arora is in ongoing talks to buy the team with a group of investors who are poised to offer over $1 billion for the team. The NBA is hoping to launch the inaugural NBA Europe season in the second half of 2027.
- After seeing year-after-year success, Ice Cube has big ambitions for the BIG3 league he co-founded nine years ago, Mark Medina writes for Forbes. The league is valued at $290MM and recently became the first publicly traded professional sports league in America, but Ice Cube doesn’t plan on slowing down. “We want to expand,” Ice Cube said. “…We want to get to 24 (teams), maybe even 34,” Ice Cube told me. “We want to grow the league. We don’t want it to be irresponsible. But we want to grow the league at a pace where we feel that it’s going to get a bigger footprint in people’s minds when it comes to the BIG3.” One area he’d like to see growth in is potential partnerships with the NBA, but the NBA’s non-compete clause has so far prevented any collaborations, and Ice Cube says that ultimately it comes down to commissioner Adam Silver and deputy commissioner Mark Tatum. “We’re trying to tell them to be reasonable. We could do a lot together,” he said. “Their athletes love us. Their coaches love us. Their owners love us. Their GMs love us. Everybody loves us, but those two guys at the top. It shouldn’t be like that.”
- Tax Aprons have become an incredibly important calculation in team-building efforts in the NBA over the last few years, and agent Greg Lawrence believes they essentially function as a hard cap that squeezes the middle class of players, Gary Washburn writes for the Boston Globe. Lawrence said it’s difficult for players to negotiate CBAs with an eye to the long-term downstream impact in mind, which has created an advantage for owners. “It’s unbelievably rare for a player to play more than 10 years, and so inherently, I think players are not always going to be looking at the long game and where some of these (salary) steps are going to lead to,” he said. “Now, I’m really hopeful that the new leadership of the union is going to take a tougher stand and, really, it comes through making the investment to educate the players on how we got here … why the system is in the state that it’s in, and how can we start to chip away in the players’ favor.”