Jaylen Brown and Payton Pritchard have taken on more workload for the Boston Celtics with Jayson Tatum injured this season. (Danielle Parhizkaran/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)
The best team in the NBA remains the Oklahoma City Thunder, who have the league’s top net rating by a mile and are heavy title favorites whether you look at the statistical forecasts or the prediction market odds:
The feel-good rooting interest of the year, meanwhile, probably belongs to the Detroit Pistons — who have zoomed up to the league’s best record after previously wandering through the wilderness for so long — and the San Antonio Spurs are the OKC foil we need (in addition to the nightly spectacle that comes from simply having Victor Wembanyama play on your team). Amidst those, there are plenty of other teams worth dissecting as well — but the most interesting of all might end up being the Boston Celtics by the time the playoffs roll around.
This Celtics season was supposed to be defined by the man who wasn’t there: Jayson Tatum, who tore his right Achilles tendon during the second round of last year’s playoffs, and who originally was believed to be ruled out for all of 2025-26 as a result. (Achilles injuries like these tend to take a full year to recover, unless you are a total physical and mental outlier like Kobe Bryant, who came back in just 8 months.)
As was true with the abnormal number of other teams whose stars were presumably out for the year in 2025-26, this season could have plausibly gone any number of different ways for Boston, from just sneaking into the playoffs to taking a full gap-year like the Indiana Pacers — who are tracking for one of the league’s worst records with Tyrese Haliburton sidelined due to the same injury as Tatum suffered.
What wasn’t on many observers’ radars was that the Celtics would be mostly just as good without Tatum as they were with him a year ago. (And remember, Boston was among the inner circle of 2025 title contenders until they choked away the opening games of their East semifinal series against the Knicks, then Tatum was injured.) The team was No. 2 on offense and No. 3 in Net Rating overall last season… and sure enough, they’re No. 2 on offense and No. 3 in Net Rating this season as well: