The 2026-27 NBA Season Preview: Everybody Is Coming for the Knicks

NEW YORK — The New York Knicks are the champions, and for the first time in a generation, nobody is laughing at that sentence. Last June’s five-game Finals win over San Antonio ended decades of punchlines and started something the franchise hasn’t felt in forever: the burden of being the hunted.

Because everybody spent the summer hunting. The 2026 offseason was the wildest in recent memory — a top-five player changed conferences, a 41-year-old icon picked a new superteam, a Finals MVP got traded for a division rival’s future, and the Lakers handed their franchise to a 27-year-old genius. Training camps opened with more legitimate contenders than the league has had in years, and the preseason has only sharpened the arguments. Here’s the landscape as the real games approach.

The East: a four-team arms race

New York starts where it finished: on top. The Knicks’ title run answered every question about toughness and depth, and the core that beat San Antonio is back. The challenge for defending champions is always hunger — and the schedule does them no favors, opening Oct. 20 at home against the new-look 76ers in a game that will feel like a statement either way.

Philadelphia is the story of the season until proven otherwise. The Brown trade and the James signing (see our deep dive on the superteam) turned a 45-win second-round exit into a 62-win projection with +850 title odds. The talent is absurd; the questions — Embiid’s health (96 of 246 games the last three years), James’s age (42 in December), one basketball for five stars — are just as real. If it clicks, nobody in the East can match the top-end talent. That’s a big if wearing a tailored suit.

Miami might be the scariest version of a team nobody saw coming. The Giannis Antetokounmpo acquisition was the summer’s defining blockbuster, and Saturday’s 129-105 preseason rout of Toronto in Quebec City was a loud first data point: 19 first-half assists, seven from Giannis in 14 minutes, 47.8 percent from three. Add Klay Thompson, Andrew Wiggins, Bobby Portis and Tim Hardaway Jr. to Bam Adebayo and Erik Spoelstra, and the Heat have the league’s most intriguing two-way ceiling. (Full breakdown in our preseason weekend roundup.)

Cleveland remains the team nobody talks about and everybody fears. The Cavaliers ended Detroit’s 60-win season in seven games last spring and return a core that knows exactly who it is. In a conference full of new experiments, continuity is its own weapon.

San Antonio: the Finals hangover test

The Spurs were five games from a championship in June. They open camp trying to get back — and already down a key piece. Tobias Harris, the 34-year-old veteran signed for two years and $31 million to steady the second unit, strained his left calf in camp and will miss the preseason, leaving him questionable for the Oct. 20 opener against Oklahoma City (more in our injury report).

The core is young and proven, which is the best combination in sports. But the West doesn’t wait, and the margin between the Finals and the play-in is thinner than it looks. How San Antonio handles the Harris absence — and whether the young stars make the traditional post-Finals leap rather than the post-Finals slump — will define their winter.

The West: Luka’s world, everyone else’s problem

The Lakers are the conference’s great unknown. LeBron James’s departure to Philadelphia ended an era; Luka Dončić’s first full season as the undisputed No. 1 begins it. The hamstring that ended his 2025-26 is healed, the $185 million extension for Austin Reaves is signed, and nine new faces — including Walker Kessler, whose $30-million-a-year, four-first-round-pick acquisition is the franchise’s biggest bet — need to become a team by opening night. Dončić and Reaves were the league’s highest-scoring duo last season. If the supporting cast coheres, the Lakers’ ceiling is the conference finals. If it doesn’t, the floor is the play-in. (Our full look at life after LeBron.)

Oklahoma City remains the West’s most complete team on paper — young, deep, and hardened by deep playoff runs. Denver still has Nikola Jokić, who needed 14 preseason minutes to remind everyone he’s closing in on the all-time assists record, but the supporting cast questions persist and the coaching hot-seat chatter started before camp. Minnesota believes its window is wide open. Golden State is running it back with Butler, Curry and Draymond’s generation — if the medical report cooperates, which right now it doesn’t.

The Clippers are the West’s mystery box. Trading Kawhi Leonard to Toronto for Brandon Ingram, Gradey Dick and picks was a franchise-direction decision; Ingram’s partially torn Achilles means the direction won’t be clear until November at the earliest. The Intuit Dome era needs a face. Right now it has a waiting room.

The big questions

Can a superteam work on the first try? Recent history says instant superteams need a year of awkwardness before the breakthrough — if the breakthrough comes. Philadelphia doesn’t have a year; it has a 42-year-old LeBron and a win-now mandate.

Is the Giannis fit seamless? Early returns say yes, loudly. But Spoelstra’s system has absorbed stars before, and Giannis’s gravity warps defenses in ways that make everyone better. Miami’s ceiling might be the highest in the league.

Does Luka have an MVP season in him? A second scoring title at 33.5 points per game with no LeBron to share with. If the Lakers win 50+, the MVP conversation starts and ends in Los Angeles.

Who survives the West? Ten teams have a plausible path to 48 wins. The play-in will be a bloodbath, and some 50-win team is going home in April.

Games that matter in October

The schedule-makers did their job. Oct. 20: 76ers at Knicks — LeBron’s first real game as a Sixer comes against the champs who swept Philly last spring — and Spurs vs. Thunder. Oct. 21: Warriors at Lakers — Curry vs. Luka, the old guard vs. the new — and Clippers vs. Kings. Oct. 22: Nuggets vs. Thunder.

By Halloween we’ll have answers to the first round of questions. By Thanksgiving we’ll know which October takes were foolish. And by June, someone will be holding a trophy — quite possibly a team that spent this week insisting the games don’t count.

They always count. Just not the way you think.

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