We Don’t Know Ball’s Actually Unhinged 2025-26 NBA Season Predictions (Part 2)
Every year, people try to guess what will happen in the NBA. Every year, people are wrong. We are those people.
We believe that most articles of “bold” NBA season predictions are not bold enough. Every season, a few things happen that transcend belief, and we want to try to get in early on forecasting those things. (The Charlotte Hornets taking a PlayStation 5 away from a child, for example.) Our goal is to predict things that grow from only a tiny seed of plausibility, but are not mean-spirited or harmful. We aim for whimsy and weirdness. Also, not all these predictions need to be logically consistent with each other.
In this installation, we’ll consider All-Star Weekend and the western conference.
All-Star Weekend
There is widespread agreement that the correct players were chosen as all stars and reserves and nobody writes an article on snubs.
Due to the success of the 1v1 tournament in Unrivaled, the NBA does something similar for All-Star Weekend. Marcus Smart wins.
Western Conference
Teams are ordered from worst 2024-25 regular season record to best regular season record.
Utah Jazz
The Jazz have the worst record in the league but pick outside the top 4 yet again.
Lauri Markkanen requests a trade and enters a Jimmy Butler-esque standoff with Danny Ainge.
Ace Bailey makes his rookie debut for the Jazz and decides after 10 games that professional basketball in Utah isn’t for him. He pivots to becoming a player agent.
New Orleans Pelicans
The Pelicans rebrand themselves as “The New Orleans Jazz” and the league decides it isn’t worth the effort to fight it.
Kevon Looney finally becomes a stretch big.
Jeremiah Fears gets posterized so badly in a game that he changes his jersey number from 0 (“Fears 0”) to 1.
San Antonio Spurs
Victor Wembanyama has a career-worst season but the Spurs still reach the Western Conference Finals.
Victor Wembanyama cheats at the skills challenge again and is banned for life from the NBA.
Pop Mart does a collaboration with the San Antonio Spurs and releases a limited-edition Victor Wembanyama Labubu that is modeled on Wemby’s proportions, including a to-scale 90cm wingspan.
Portland Trail Blazers
The Blazers win the stacked Group C of the NBA Cup, composed of the Nuggets, Warriors, Rockets, Spurs, and Trail Blazers.
Damian Lillard’s magical healing powers also make him the fastest person to ever return from an Achilles injury and he starts playing before New Year’s.
Thanks to the Chinese media fan vote and Adam Silver’s personal blessing, Hansen Yang becomes a rookie all-star despite averaging only 5 points per game.
Phoenix Suns
Dillon Brooks is suspended for punching his own teammate in the nuts
G: One of these years this will happen
M: It’s looking promising
Dan Gilbert lowers food prices in Cleveland to $0.25 less than the prices in Phoenix’s arena, leading to a game of chicken that culminates in Mat Ishbia paying people to eat nachos.
In light of the Phoenix Mercury losing the 2025 WNBA championship, Mat Ishbia decides to truly take things into his own hands, and fires the general manager of the Phoenix Suns in order to name himself GM.
Dallas Mavericks
Cooper Flagg gets caught drinking a celebratory Michelob Zero after practice and is traded to the Celtics.
Jason Kidd switches from wearing comically tight glasses to wearing comically loose glasses. His glasses fall off mid-game while he’s protesting a foul call, in an exciting new take on his “spill a drink on the floor to get a free stoppage” play.
Sacramento Kings
It is revealed that Vivek Ranadive was also romantically involved with one of the Kings players.
Exhausted by years of foiled plans, Vivek Ranadive trades the Sacramento Kings for the LA Kings in a team-for-team swap.
Memphis Grizzlies
After reading a Wikipedia article on the history of Memphis, Ja Morant gets really into Egyptology and becomes the first NBA player to get a hieroglyph tattoo (and it has a typo).
xAI becomes the jersey sponsor of the Memphis Grizzlies, which inadvertently drives awareness of the environmental problems caused by the xAI data center in Memphis. The backlash against the data center leads xAI to pull out of Memphis and move to Vancouver.
Golden State Warriors
Grant: The feedback from last year was that we had kid gloves on for the Warriors predictions, so I’m overcorrecting.
The Warriors get old all at once and end the season with a winning percentage under 10% versus teams with a winning record.
Jimmy Butler falls in love with the city of Oakland and forms a pact with Draymond to only play home games at Oracle Arena, forcing the league to reschedule games last minute.
After the season ends, Steph Curry and LeBron James flip a coin on live television to determine who will go to play with whose team. The coin lands on heads and Steph signs with the Lakers for the vet minimum.
Inspired by Gui Santos, the moderator of the defunct Timberwolves Brasil Twitter account comes back to run Warriors_Brasil. If you don’t know about Timberwolves Brasil, don’t look it up. Thanks, and we’re sorry!
Minnesota Timberwolves
A-Rod tells players to try harder at practice (MJ style). In response, Ant releases a callout video on TikTok and is suspended for 10 games due to conduct detrimental to the team. The losses in this span cost the Timberwolves home-court advantage in the playoffs.
Bald Rudy Gobert is more aerodynamic and becomes an offensive juggernaut.
LA Clippers
It is revealed that Kawhi did, in fact, film videos for his alleged no-show job with Aspiration; once released they are so awkward that everyone agrees it makes sense they were never aired and the Clippers are cleared of all charges.
Over the course of the season, the Clippers sign all 4 active NBA players born on March 18th. They currently have 2 of 4, Ivica Zubac and Kris Dunn.
Jeff Van Gundy quits his job as Clippers assistant coach in order to start a novelty acrostic t-shirt business.
Denver Nuggets
Opposing teams start playing videos of horse racing during Jokic free throws and he is so distracted he shoots 0.00 for the remainder of the season.
Head coach David Adelman gets his hair permed.
Los Angeles Lakers
The Lakers once again try and fail to trade Dalton Knecht.
Mark Cuban buys the Lakers to force them to trade Luka back to the Mavs.
Houston Rockets
KD accidentally stands up straight, revealing he is 7’3”. The Rockets force him to play center and move Sengun to point guard to fill in for the injured Fred VanVleet.
Reed Sheppard grows a curly mustache.
Oklahoma City Thunder
The long-rumored return of the Seattle Supersonics is announced, and an imprecise contract means that when the Thunder return Supersonics history to the new franchise they include the 2025 NBA championship as well.
The Thunder trade for Indiana’s mascot, Boomer the (Probably A) Cat, thereby making their mascot the OK (C) Boomer.
This concludes our annual season predictions. We hope to get one of these at least a little bit correct.