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NBA Front Office Rankings (Part 1): Knicks soar over Celtics after winning title
As longtime readers might remember, I rank the NBA's front offices twice a year: Once around the trade deadline and then once again in the offseason. This time, we're tweaking the formula slightly by splitting it into two parts. We'll begin today with the top 15 front offices in the NBA. The bottom 15 are coming later in the week.
Since we're focusing on the best front offices today, let's try to define what exactly makes a great front office in 2026. There are a number of obvious qualifications, of course. Make smart trades. Draft good players. Sign team-friendly contracts. Hire the right coaches. That's all surface-level stuff. Dig deeper and these are the traits that separate the two halves of these rankings:
The basic purpose of this exercise is to determine which front offices you would want to run your favorite team if you could make that choice. Our final note, as always, and one that I will especially emphasize now that we're splitting this list into two parts, is that there are more well-run teams than poorly run teams. There are going to be smart teams that don't make the top 15. In many cases, their placement is due to a limited sample size or a couple of recent misses and will be explained in more depth once we get there. The reality, though, is that most of the NBA is run very well and the gap between most of the teams outside of the top or bottom handful is relatively small. So, with all of that said, let's start ranking.
There's little I can say about Sam Presti that hasn't already been said. He's a Hall of Fame executive who does virtually everything at an elite level. He's drafted three MVPs and traded for another. He's stockpiled draft picks as effectively as any general manager in history and deployed them in virtually every possible manner, from opportunistically swiping talented players away from other teams ( Jared McCain ) to converting low-upside picks into high-upside swaps (as they did with the Mavericks at the 2024 deadline) to simply drafting and developing good players to replace older, more expensive ones.
The Thunder successfully signed a high-impact, big-money free agent ( Isaiah Hartenstein ) at a point in history when basically nobody ever does. Virtually all of their contracts are team-friendly. Many include team options and non-guarantees, concessions that players tend to be willing to make given Oklahoma City's player-friendly reputation. Even their mistakes work out in the long run. They should've drafted Franz Wagner over Josh Giddey ... but Josh Giddey got them Alex Caruso .
The Thunder are so good at team-building that they even managed to turn this summer's apron-induced cost-cutting into a reasonably productive endeavor. Notice that two of the players they traded away, Lu Dort and Aaron Wiggins , went to the Atlanta Hawks . Well, Oklahoma City's chief rivals, the San Antonio Spurs , control Atlanta's 2027 first-round pick, so the Thunder want the Hawks to be good. They used the financial flexibility those trades created to sign Spencer Jones to an offer sheet that pushed the Denver Nuggets into the second apron. Presti misses no opportunity, however obscure, to better his team's position.
For the first time in the brief history of these rankings, the Boston Celtics do not occupy the No. 2 position. Making the leap are the defending NBA champion New York Knicks . The only thing keeping the Knicks out of the top three in prior rankings was the fear that they bet on the wrong stars. Spending five first-round picks on Mikal Bridges , on paper, was an overpay. Karl-Anthony Towns, at times, looked like a bloated contract that reportedly held minimal trade value. They went all-in. That meant that the team they built needed to be good enough. Obviously, it was.
Now, Leon Rose is responsible for one of the most incredible feats of team-building in NBA history. The Knicks just created an NBA champion without drafting a single starter. The only other champion to do so was the 2019-20 Los Angeles Lakers , who signed LeBron James in free agency, who, in turn, recruited Anthony Davis to force a trade to join him. The Knicks were built around a former second-round pick and his college friends. Jalen Brunson , at the very least, now stands as one of the five greatest free-agent signings in NBA history. Towns and OG Anunoby qualify as preposterous trade heists.
Even the Bridges trade stands out now as a sort of calculated irresponsibility. They didn't trade five first-round picks for a wing who's never made an All-Star Team. They traded five first-round picks for the specific player and contract they decided they needed to win a championship. Then they won that championship. It's simultaneously the sort of risk a lot of teams are going to be forced to take if they plan to catch up to the Thunder and the San Antonio Spurs, given the head starts those teams have, and one that almost none of them will ever be able to justify. It gets you the trophy or it gets you fired. Rose is fearless. He fired his head coach after reaching Game 6 of the Eastern Conference Finals, and it worked.
The big stuff gets the headlines, but the Knicks also thrive on the margins. Their contracts are a thing of beauty, and that extends far beyond Brunson's now-legendary discount. They have been pioneers in the recent proliferation of team options and descending-annual-value contracts. Virtually everyone on their bench makes below market value and has meaningful non-guarantees in their deals. They're always stuffed to the brim with second-round picks, which is how they so freely add players like Jose Alvarado at the deadline. They drafted Immanuel Quickley at No. 25 and Deuce McBride at No. 36.
You could find some minor quibbles. Owner James Dolan was reportedly heavily involved in the decision to fire Tom Thibodeau , and in general, he seems to participate more in basketball decisions than you'd like. Contrary to Dolan's beliefs, going into the second apron does not need to be...
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