The NBA might be in its depth era, but star power still wins the day.
In a sport in which only five players take the floor for each team at a time, a concentration of stars has been a clear way to build a championship-level team.
But even when a team doesn't have a trio of ready-made stars, looking at the top three players on each roster is a good way to measure both the short- and long-term health of an organization and where a franchise is headed over the next few months and next few years.
With that rubric in mind, we not only have laid out the cores of all 30 NBA teams, but also ranked them in comparison to one another. And we've done so by taking into account both the group's present and future value — along with the likelihood that these players will be with their respective teams for the medium to long term.
Jump to a tier:
A league of their own |Knocking on the door
Best of the East | Ascendant young teams
Gap Years | Old stars with big questions
Changing the course | Stuck in the middle
Starting a rebuild | Rebuilding
Oklahoma City Thunder: Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Chet Holmgren, Jalen Williams
Who else could be atop this list? Not only did the Thunder win 68 games and their first championship last season, but they also did so with one of the youngest title-winning rosters in NBA history. Then, to cap things off, general manager Sam Presti went out this summer and proceeded to lock all three of his young cornerstones into long-term contract extensions — officially cementing the Thunder as the perennial favorites to lift the Larry O'Brien Trophy for the foreseeable future.
Last year: Gilgeous-Alexander, Holmgren, Williams
Denver Nuggets: Aaron Gordon, Nikola Jokic, Jamal Murray
Denver is a pair of rough Western
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