It feels like just yesterday that much of the NBA-discussing world was wondering whether the Oklahoma City Thunder were not only about to smash the league’s all-time record for wins in a single season, but whether the defending NBA champions’ two-way dominance had become so all-consuming and so inescapable that it would lead even teams with title aspirations of their own to just punt on the pursuit.

It feels like just yesterday, but it wasn’t. It was in the ]

It’s a dramatic shift in tone from the “Are they going to win 75 games???” talk that some of us engaged in, but the man’s got some points. (And, to be fair: It’s not like he was the one putting the 2025-26 Thunder next to the 2015-16 Warriors.)

Since the start of the 2023-24 season, nobody has more wins (156) or a higher winning percentage (.772) than Oklahoma City. When a team wins more than three-fourths of the time, there aren’t exactly a whole lot of opportunities to get used to it losing consecutive games — which the Thunder have done twice in the last three weeks after doing it twice all of last season — let alone experiencing an extended stretch of malaise. When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression; when you’re accustomed to a 60- or 70-win pace, .500 ball feels like a crisis.

NBA Cup hangover?

The “physically and mentally tired” thing might have some legs. On this week’s episode of The Big Number, Tom Haberstroh and I looked into whether teams, like the Thunder, that make the semifinals of the NBA Cup experience a “hangover” in the weeks following their trips to Las Vegas …

… and while the sample size is still small, the number of games those Vegas teams have played lately isn’t. Wednesday’s win over the Jazz marked Oklahoma City’s 12th game in 21 days since the end of the tournament — a stretch that has included four back-to-backs. Nine NBA teams have played a dozen games in that three-week span, including all four semifinalists (the Knicks, Spurs, Thunder and Magic), with a combined record of 53-55 — a .491 winning percentage). By contrast, the 10 teams that have played either nine or 10 games in that same timeframe have gone 55-44 — a .556 winning percentage.

Your mileage may vary on just how much you think a couple of extra games’ worth of miles over a couple of weeks add up. It might show up, though, in the legs on your jumper, where a Thunder team that was splashing 38.1% of its 3-point shots through its 24-1 start, fifth-best in the NBA, has dropped down to 31.8% since its NBA Cup semifinal loss, fifth-worst in the league in that span.

It’s been a contagious cold snap for a Thunder offense that ranked fourth in offensive efficiency through 25 games and has dropped to 18th since, with rotation mainstays Cason Wallace, Luguentz Dort, Aaron Wiggins and Isaiah Joe all shooting below 40% from the field over the past three weeks, and SGA, Wallace, Wiggins and Alex Caruso all under 30% from 3-point land.

Injury issues

The absence of starting center Isaiah Hartenstein, who’s missed the last six games with a right calf strain, hurts, too. With him on the floor, the Thunder grab offensive rebounds at a top-10 rate. With him on the sideline, they perform like the worst offensive rebounding team in the league — a particular bummer when there are more misses to corral than there used to be. (OKC dropping from a top-five defensive rebounding team through its 24-1 start to 16th in clearing the defensive boards during this lull hasn’t helped, either.)

Some of those misses have been coming off the right hand of Williams, who began his ascent as Gilgeous-Alexander’s running buddy two seasons ago and cemented himself as a cornerstone in his own right last season, earning All-Star, All-NBA and All-Defensive honors and authoring an iconic 40-point performance in the NBA Finals to help propel the Thunder to the championship. After missing the first 19 games of the season rehabilitating following offseason surgery on his right wrist, though, Williams has struggled to recover his shooting touch.

Williams’ accuracy is down everywhere but the free-throw line this season — most notably from midrange and beyond the arc — contributing to a true shooting percentage of .536, which would be the worst mark of his four-year NBA career. It’s also one of the worst among high-volume offensive players in the league thus far this season: Of the 53 players this season who’ve played at least 500 minutes and have a usage rate of 25% or higher, Williams’ TS% ranks 48th — ahead of only Brandon Miller, Jordan Poole, Russell Westbrook, Jeremiah Fears and Ja Morant.

It seems reasonable to give Williams a little bit of grace amid his shooting slump, considering it hasn’t even been six weeks since Williams came back from surgery to repair an injury that literally forced him to re-learn how to shoot the basketball, and that he’s trying to get back to full speed without the benefit of training camp or preseason. A player using that many possessions that inefficiently does have an impact on your offense, though: The Thunder are scoring like a league-average unit in J-Dub’s minutes, and at a league-worst rate in the minutes he’s played without Gilgeous-Alexander.

‘It’s a competitive privilege’

Another place that the additional post-Cup workload could show up? Execution in close-and-late situations.

Heading into the semifinal against San Antonio, the Thunder were 9-1 in “clutch” games — defined by the NBA as contests in which the score was within five points in the final five minutes of the fourth quarter or overtime — with a league-best 136.7 offensive rating and just three turnovers in 90 crunch-time minutes. Since? They’re 2-3 in the clutch with a 119 offensive rating, shooting just 20-for-55 (36.4%) from the field and 5-for-25 (20%) from 3-point range.

One of those losses — a 108-105 defeat at the hands of the better-than-anyone-outside-Phoenix-imagined-they-could-be Suns — came on an absolute honey of a game-winner by Devin Booker; sometimes, great offense beats even the best defense on the planet. That’s the thing, though. For two months, the only pathways to beating the Thunder seemed to be “get them to run out of gas on the second night of a back-to-back on the road” or “have a gigantic anomaly and three star guards, and play perfectly.” Now, it’s become clear that there’s more than one way to get them. Now, you know they bleed.

[Get more Thunder news: Oklahoma City team feed]

“It’s a competitive privilege to be a team that other teams are up to play for,” Thunder head coach Mark Daigneault said Monday, according to Joe Mussatto of The Oklahoman. “And it forces you to rise to that. And if you can, you really can get better and stronger as a result of that. And if you don’t, you learn the lesson. We got to learn the lessons in these ones.”

One of the lessons Williams has taken from this uncommon glitch in Oklahoma City’s unnervingly efficient opponent-mashing machine? Life in the NBA isn’t always so smooth.

“Every team this year has lost a couple of games that they wish they could have back,” he said Wednesday. “We understand that it’s just like: How many of those can you limit during the season? And how much better can you get because of it?”

The prospect of the Thunder getting better — by getting Hartenstein (and backup big Jaylin Williams, who has missed the last 12 games with right heel bursitis) back in the fold, by thawing out those frosty jumpers, by doing a better job of finishing possessions — ought to be a scary one, considering they’re still, even in this somewhat diminished form, good enough to beat anyone on any night. (Well, maybe not anyone.)

What three weeks of hiccups have made clear, though, is that they’re not dominant enough to beat everyone on every night, irrespective of who’s in or out of the lineup. Especially when the price of wearing the crown is taking every team’s best shot, without a breather in sight or any quarter given.

“You can’t be at a playoff level every single night in the NBA,” Caruso recently told Joel Lorenzi of The Athletic. “You’ll burn out. There’s no way for you to play like that for 82 games.”

Combine that with the vicissitudes of 3-point variance and the injury gods, and sometimes — even multiple times — even Goliath can get got.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

If Tarik Skubal is playing for another team on Opening Day of 2027, the Detroit Tigers will at least be able to say they made him a record-setting offer. It just won’t be a good record.

Thursday saw MLB teams and players submit their filings for salary arbitration, a clerical move that sets up arbitration fights for further into the offseason. A player asks for one salary, his team asks for a different, lower salary, and then an arbitrator looks at the player’s accomplishments and decides which number to use for the season.

It’s not often the most thrilling day, but the numbers filed by Skubal and the Tigers were interesting for multiple reasons. Skubal asked for $32 million, while the Tigers offered $19 million, according to ESPN’s Jeff Passan.

That $13 million gap is reportedly the widest in arbitration history by a large margin. And if Skubal wins, his $32 million salary would be the largest in arbitration history, besting Juan Soto’s $31 million with the New York Yankees in 2024.

There’s no telling who will win. It will be up to the arbitrator to decide if Skubal is worth more or less than $25.5 million, the midpoint between the two sides. These decisions are based primarily on precedent, using past players with similar stats, and normally value more old-school numbers than what you’d find on a Baseball Savant page. Teams and players often avoid these battles because of the awkwardness of arguing why a guy deserves less money in front of said guy.

If we look at pitchers only, here are some recent big names and what they got in their final years of arbitration, which Skubal is entering. You be the judge on whether he should get more than they did:

• Framber Valdez (2025): $18 million

• Dylan Cease (2025): $13.75 million

• Corbin Burnes (2024): $15.6 million

• Max Fried (2024): $15 million

• Julio Urías (2023): $14.25 million

Notably, all of those numbers were reached via agreement, not arb hearing. 

[Get more Tigers news: Detroit team feed]

Whichever side wins the Tigers’ hearing, Skubal will be receiving the largest arbitration salary for a pitcher in MLB history.

That, of course, makes sense, because no recent MLB pitcher has had Skubal’s résumé while still in arbitration. Skubal has been the easy pick for the best pitcher in baseball over the past two years, with two Cy Young Awards and a Triple Crown in 2024. Besides Skubal, six pitchers have won multiple Cy Youngs in the past 15 years — Clayton Kershaw, Justin Verlander, Max Scherzer, Corey Kluber, Jacob deGrom and Blake Snell — and none of them entered arbitration after the second trophy.

That’s because teams usually do whatever they can to keep that kind of player, but that effort hasn’t been fruitful for the Tigers so far. Skubal is slated to enter free agency after 2026, and he and the Tigers have been reported to be so far apart in negotiations for an extension that a trade could be on the table. 

The fact that their arbitration filings exhibit a similar chasm between the two sides underscores how unlikely a deal appears to be.

The sport of baseball has changed a lot under MLB commissioner Rob Manfred, with the institution of the pitch clock, the infield shift ban, the ghost runner and, starting next year, the automatic ball-strike challenge system. But what he floated on Thursday might be the biggest change yet.

Speaking on WFAN’s “The Carton Show,” Manfred addressed the possibility of MLB expanding to 32 teams after nearly three decades with 30 teams. The commissioner sounded more than open to the idea, saying there are several cities that want an MLB team. 

“When people want your product, you ought to try to find a way to sell it to them,” Manfred said. “It’s kind of basic.”

That’s not too new. Manfred has been flirting with the idea of expansion for years and said just a few months ago that he intends to select two cities for expansion before his planned retirement in 2029. It got interesting, however, when Manfred made pretty clear that he intends to realign the league once the two new teams are aboard.

That seems to mean going from the American League and National League to something like an East and West league, much like the NBA and NHL currently use.

Among Manfred’s reasons for the change is making travel easier for the players:

“It does a ton for us from a format perspective. You would realign, you would do it along geographic lines, which could alleviate a ton of the travel burden that’s on players.

“Remember, we ask our players [to play] 162 times in 186 days. So most of the [time] between 162 and 186 [is] travel, right? So you can eliminate a lot of that travel, make it less burdensome, which would be a great thing in terms of player health and safety.”

MLB has been composed of the American League and National League for 125 years. They used to be very distinct leagues, with separate governing systems, rulebooks and umpire crews, but that line dissolved in 2000 under former commissioner Bud Selig to more closely resemble the rest of the sports industry.

Manfred’s other pitch is that some playoff series would align better time-wise for fan bases (i.e. East Coast fans not having to stay up late to watch an ALDS game on the West Coast):

“If you play geographically, we get in a postseason. You know, we have those four-window days that I love, right? You get four baseball games in a day. It’s awesome. But when you think about the fans in the individual markets, you always end up with, because of the way we’re set up, you know, you get Boston versus Anaheim in one of the early rounds. So you’re either going to be too late for the fans in Boston or too early.

“So if you realign geographically, you would look more like other sports, where you play up East into the World Series and West into the World Series. And that 10 o’clock game on the West Coast that sometimes is a problem for us becomes a prime-time game on the West Coast for the two teams that are playing. So there’s a lot of advantages to it.”

Manfred shared a vision of eight divisions of four teams and keeping teams in the same city in separate divisions.

How would that look? To throw out a quick mock-up, let’s just say the two expansion cities are Nashville and Portland. If we try to create eight geographically distinct divisions with no teams in the same city while trying to preserve some premier rivalries, we could get something like this:

• West: Seattle Mariners, Portland, San Francisco Giants, Los Angeles Dodgers

• Southwest: Los Angeles Angels, San Diego Padres, Las Vegas Athletics, Arizona Diamondbacks

• South: Texas Rangers, Houston Astros, Colorado Rockies, Kansas City Royals

• Midwest1: Minnesota Twins, Milwaukee Brewers, Chicago Cubs, St. Louis Cardinals

• Midwest 2: Chicago White Sox, Cleveland Guardians, Detroit Tigers, Cincinnati Reds

• Northeast: New York Yankees, Boston Red Sox, Toronto Blue Jays, Pittsburgh Pirates

• Mid-Atlantic: Washington Nationals, Baltimore Orioles, New York Mets, Philadelphia Phillies

• Southeast: Atlanta Braves, Nashville, Tampa Bay Rays, Miami Marlins

Please note: That is absolutely not a serious attempt to create permanent, harmonious divisions for MLB. There are some obvious problems. It’s just meant to show how different things could become if Manfred is serious. And condolences to the Pirates if those divisions actually do come to pass.

That might not be the only major change to the structure of MLB that Manfred is considering, as he was also asked about the NBA Cup in-season tournament. He didn’t deny that his office has discussed a sort of MLB Cup, but he seemed hesitant, given some obvious drawbacks:

“We’ve talked about split seasons, we’ve talked about in-season tournaments. We do understand that 162 [games] is a long pull. I think the difficulty to accomplish those sort of in-season events, you almost inevitably start talking about fewer regular-season games.

“It is a much more complicated thing in our sport than it is in other sports because of all of our season-long records. You’re playing around with something that people care a lot about.”

Manfred also confirmed that he still intends to retire at the end of his contract in January 2029. His successor could find themselves running a very different league.

We’re at the point where we can officially call this a slow MLB free agency. Pitchers and catchers are due to report to spring training in a little more than a month, yet six of Yahoo Sports’ top 10 free agents have yet to sign.

There have been slower offseasons and greater pitfalls for top free agents, but it now seems safe to say that certain players just aren’t having their asking prices met. And among the players who have signed, we’ve seen the most qualifying offers accepted in MLB history and some surprisingly small deals, such as the $34 million that Japanese star Munetaka Murakami got from the Chicago White Sox.

Here’s how the markets for those six top unsigned free agents seem to be shaping up and why teams might not be lining up to give them nine-figure deals.

Kyle Tucker

Red flags: Injury history, a ho-hum 2025

For the past few years, Tucker receiving MLB’s next eye-popping contract has been treated as an inevitability. However, judging from current reporting, no team save for the Toronto Blue Jays has emerged ready to give him that huge contract, and even the Jays — baseball’s biggest spenders so far this offseason — seem to be trying to keep the price down.

A month and a half ago, Toronto was reported by ESPN’s Jeff Passan to be considered the favorite for Tucker’s services and to have hosted him at its Florida complex in December. However, the fact that no deal has been reported would imply the two sides still have ground to cover. If the Jays don’t want to give Tucker the long-term deal he seeks, the Los Angeles Dodgers and New York Mets are reportedly looming as options.

However, the Dodgers and Mets are reportedly more interested in a short-term deal that would pay Tucker an extremely high average annual value and allow him to reenter the market while he still has star value. That has been done before (e.g. every major Scott Boras client in 2024) and would be a boon for either team’s lineup.

After losing the 2025 World Series in excruciating fashion, Toronto has committed a combined $337 million to the quartet of Dylan Cease, Kazuma Okamoto, Tyler Rogers and Cody Ponce. They do not appear to be finished and could make another major move with Tucker or …

Bo Bichette

Red flags: Injury history, defensive limitations, a miserable 2024

Had it not been for Miguel Rojas’ unlikely Game 7 home run, Bichette almost certainly would’ve entered free agency as an all-time hero for the Blue Jays, thanks to his go-ahead homer off Shohei Ohtani earlier in the game. He still presents an enticing package, but consider us skeptical that any team sees him as a long-term shortstop.

Second base is Bichette’s likely destination, especially after he played there in the World Series, and he has signaled to teams that he’s willing to move there, according to MLB.com’s Mark Feinsand. The Jays are obviously interested in bringing him back, particularly in the event they miss on Tucker, and the New York Post’s Jon Heyman reported last week that the Dodgers, New York Yankees and Chicago Cubs have all checked in on Bichette.

On Thursday, The Athletic reported that the Philadelphia Phillies had entered the fray and scheduled a meeting with him. Adding Bichette would likely result in the Phillies moving on from J.T. Realmuto, a free agent, and Alec Bohm, a trade candidate.

Of course, if Heyman’s claim that Bichette is “thought” to be seeking a contract of around $300 million is true, that might be a tough sell for any team.

Alex Bregman

Red flags: Age, one All-Star season since the COVID-19 pandemic

This is a familiar position for the Boston Red Sox’s third baseman. He entered free agency last offseason and encountered a similarly frosty market. He ended up signing a three-year, $120 million deal with the Red Sox that included two opt-outs, allowing him to reenter the market as soon as he posted a good season.

Did he do that in 2025? Well, he was definitely doing that until May 23, when he sustained a quad strain. Before that day, he was hitting .299/.355/.583. Then he came back in July and hit .250/.338/.386 for the rest of the season. That’s not exactly the final impression you want to make when you’re turning 32 at the start of the 2026 season. But Bregman still opted out.

The Red Sox are interested in a reunion, according to ESPN’s Buster Olney, and could offer something in the range of the six years, $171.5 million the Detroit Tigers offered Bregman last offseason. MLB.com’s Mark Feinsand suggests the Tigers are still interested, too, and mentions the Arizona Diamondbacks are also a major player. The Blue Jays were in there, too, until the Okamoto deal.

Bregman waited until February to sign the deal he just opted out of, and we seem on track for a similar wait this winter.

Cody Bellinger

Red flags: Perhaps the most inconsistent star in baseball

It’s really not an MLB offseason if we know what’s happening with Cody Bellinger. The Dodgers non-tendered him after 2022. The Chicago Cubs swooped in and signed him on a one-year deal for 2023, then brought him back in free agency. A down 2024 season led to a trade to the New York Yankees, with whom he enjoyed a resurgent 2025. And now Bellinger is a free agent again, still looking for the nine-figure deal that has eluded him.

The Yankees have made pretty clear they want him back, with multiple contract offers reportedly on the table. Among the other reported teams to check in on Bellinger are the Cubs, Phillies (pre-Kyle Schwarber deal), San Francisco Giants, Mets, Dodgers and Los Angeles Angels.

As with Bregman, there doesn’t seem to be much movement as of now. Bellinger presents an enormously risky profile, but he can play all three outfield positions and is a true middle-of-the-order presence when healthy. Most teams aren’t eager for that sort of mystery box, as his previous forays into free agency have shown.

Framber Valdez

Red flags: Age, a rough end to 2025, a bizarre catcher incident

Cease landing a $210 million deal at the start of free agency was seen as a good sign for both Valdez and the next guy on this list, but it hasn’t amounted to much yet. Valdez seemed on track for a huge deal midway through 2025, but a 6.05 ERA in his final 10 starts and a fateful pitch to catcher Cesar Salazar underlined the concerns around the 32-year-old.

The Mets, a rich team desperate for rotation help, have loomed as interested, according to The Athletic, as have the Baltimore Orioles. The Giants also met with Valdez in November, per MLB Network’s Jon Morosi.

Ranger Suárez

Red flags: A 90 mph fastball

Suárez is coming off a career year and has a robust postseason track record, but his sinker going from an average of 92.3 mph in 2023 to 90.1 mph in 2025 could be limiting his market. Granted, that diminished velocity hasn’t stopped Suárez from getting outs, but it complicates the idea of signing him into his 30s.

The Orioles are in on him, according to the Baltimore Banner, as are the Astros and Cubs. A reunion with the Phillies could be in the cards, too, but it doesn’t look like we’re seeing a bidding war yet.

In the NBA, name recognition remains an active element in how a player is viewed and evaluated, from peers, fans and pundits.

Players with notable draft stock, such as former top selections, or players who used to be All-Stars will enjoy the fruits of that past by being placed — for the most part — ahead of players without those same accolades.

Jalen Johnson of the Atlanta Hawks remains one of those players who gets overlooked because of peers who have more accolades or had more hype coming into the league. But that could be changing now for the 20th selection of the 2021 NBA Draft out of Duke with the Hawks moving on from Trae Young.

Breaking out and comparing favorably to bigger names

The 6-foot-9 power forward, who appears likely to make his first All-Star team, is about as good as they come, yet he rarely features in the national discourse around the league.

Johnson is averaging 23.5 points, 10.3 rebounds, 8.3 assists and 1.3 steals, and shooting 52% from the floor while playing quality defense. Yet he is rarely mentioned in the same breath as Orlando’s higher-profile Paolo Banchero, despite the fact that it’s become exceedingly difficult to find a real argument for ranking Banchero above Johnson.

This isn’t meant as a jab on Banchero, who is a formidable player shooting 45.9% from the floor and 26.5% from 3-point range, but rather to illustrate the level Johnson has reached and why we need to talk about him.

Kelsey Grant via Getty Images

With Young out of action earlier this season, Johnson was thrown into the primary creation role in Atlanta with head coach Quin Snyder showing full buy-in. The Hawks went a respectable 13-9 during that stretch without Young. But when the star guard returned in mid-December, they lost their next five games.

Johnson is converting over 70% of his shots within 5 feet of the basket, and he’s upped his 3-point conversion rate to 35.5% on the season, which used to be his biggest weakness. To some extent, it still is, but he’s at least making progress in that area and is fast approaching a territory where he can be viewed as reliable from that distance.

Taking the numbers aside for a minute and his visual play speaks volumes. The 24-year-old is far more determined in practically every action, even when he slows the game down for himself.

The ball-handling is more crisp, and his passes come more naturally now. He changes speeds to manipulate the defense far more effectively, and most importantly: He’s recognizing when he can utilize his height and strength more.

Johnson’s more calculated approach to basketball, combined with an organic sense of internal player development, has created one of the league’s best two-way forwards — and flat out one of the top players in the Eastern Conference.

What does the future hold for Johnson in Atlanta?

Can Johnson continue to carry the Hawks in this role as the face of the franchise? That remains to be seen. 

What can be concluded already is that Johnson can step up and fill a fairly large creation gap left by Young. Johnson is the focal point of the offense and has embraced the responsibility of setting up others and getting them shots within the right circumstances.

Given his age, skill set and production, it’s outright odd how the larger discourse isn’t focused on the inevitability of Johnson further improving.

Unlike players within a similar age group — and even those with more recognizable names — Johnson has routinely improved while others have either stagnated or just not matched his rate of development.

Now might be time to realize we’re all looking at a player who could make some real noise in this league, especially if the Hawks can build a sustainable product around him, one that should feature plenty of outside shooting to optimize Johnson’s shot creation.

The carte blanche approach with Young didn’t field the necessary results in Atlanta, and now the organization has stumbled upon a player who can do many of the same things as Young while offering legit size and being gifted defensively.

It remains odd how Johnson flies this much under the radar. His raw stat line alone should raise eyebrows, but his actual impact and fingerprints on a game should raise a question: How high up in the pool of NBA players should he rank?

Odds are good that most answers will come in way too low.

Trae Young is an incredible basketball player. 

Imagine being as good at anything as Trae Young is at this sport. Let’s get that out of the way up top. I don’t want to say anything negative about him in that sense. He is a wonderfully entertaining talent — among the 30 or 40 best to do it in the entire world. And sometimes he can be even better than that.

But can you win an NBA championship with Young as your point guard?

That is the question every team asked themselves this week, if they had not already, since Young’s agents reportedly were working “over the past week” with the Atlanta Hawks to find a new landing spot for him. 

If the answer to that question was a flat no, and it was for many, there was no reason to trade for the four-time All-Star. The point of the game is to win the Larry O’Brien Trophy, and if you think you cannot win it with him, then why even entertain it? This is a conclusion most of the league must have reached.

Otherwise, he would not have been traded to the Washington Wizards in exchange for 34-year-old CJ McCollum’s expiring contract and Corey Kispert. With all due respect to Kispert, whose shooting could help the Hawks, he is hardly on Young’s level. A four-time All-Star was dealt for relatively little in return.

And the league did not bat an eye. Nobody wanted to give up much for Young. That should tell us a lot.

It also tells us a lot that the Wizards were reportedly Young’s preferred destination. Why would anyone want to join a team that hasn’t won 50 games since 1979? Because they are wiling to pay him, most likely.

Which could be a mistake, unless they get him to sign a team-friendly extension. The Wizards can absorb Young’s $49 million option for next season. In fact, they need it to reach the salary floor. But continuing to pay Young anything close to a max salary is a fool’s errand — one Washington knows all too well, given its experiences with John Wall and Bradley Beal, whose contracts set a second-round ceiling on the Wiz.

Like Wall, or Beal, there is the matter of Young’s fit. He has been, almost exclusively, a ball-dominant point guard, though in the past two seasons his usage rate has dipped below 30%, where it stood for five straight seasons, when he ranked among the league’s leaders. He wants to use a lot of possessions, either to launch an attempt from 30 feet, to get to his floater, or to fire a pass to the perimeter for an assist.

It works well. Young gets his numbers, averaging 26.5 points and 10.2 assists over a six-year span, and the Hawks were capable of fielding an offense that peaked as the league’s second-rated outfit in 2021-22, when they won 43 games. That is about where they ended up every year, give or take a few wins, and they peaked as an Eastern Conference finalist in 2021, losing to the eventual champion Milwaukee Bucks.

That was as good as it got. It was supposed to get better this season, when Atlanta gave Young every weapon possible — a two-way wing core of Jalen Johnson, Dyson Daniels, Nickeil Alexander-Walker and Zaccharie Risacher, plus centers Onyeka Okongwu and Kristaps Porziņģis — in the wide-open East.

It did not work. So, the Hawks gave up on Young, largely because they were always worse defensively with him, and now their offense is good enough — with NAW playing so well — to carry that defense into a similar 43-win territory without him. Young failed to elevate them any further than that.

TRAE YOUNG’S ON/OFF NUMBERS
	OFFENSIVE RATING		DEFENSIVE RATING
YEAR	ON	OFF	ON	OFF
2018-19	108.5	101.9	114.8	105.8
2019-20	111.2	95.7	116.1	107.9
2020-21	118.2	104.4	113.0	107.8
2021-22	117.2	107.2	114.9	107.8
2022-23	115.9	111.4	114.6	112.6
2023-24	116.6	113.2	119.1	115.3
2024-25	115.2	105.2	114.6	108.9
2025-26	119.4	112.5	126.2	112.9

Johnson is Atlanta’s future. His ceiling knows no bounds. He has been tremendous all season offensively, averaging 24-10-8, and he is capable of top-tier defense, too. He is the type of player who, when paired with another two-way star, could take the Hawks to the top of the East, something they have never done in the franchise’s history. Atlanta could very well conjure titles with him at Giannis Antetokounmpo’s side.

But that is a different trade scenario. Here we are discussing Young, whose defense is as deficient as his offense is brilliant, if not more so. This is the thing with him. He gets relentlessly attacked on that end in the playoffs, and it is a problem for his team. He would need a team full of two-way talents — a team like the Minnesota Timberwolves — to answer that question about whether he can play point for a title team.

Which brings us to back the Wizards, who scored Young on the cheap. To think they could win a title with Young is to think, in the next few years, as Young ages into his 30s, that some combination of Alex Sarr, Tre Johnson, Kyshawn George, Bilal Coulibaly and Bub Carrington transform into a squad as good as the existing Hawks, and that core enjoys playing with Young more than his teammates in Atlanta seemed to.

Young’s history is his history. He has the worst defensive rating of anyone in the league who plays as much as he does. He can simultaneously be among the league’s very best on offense and its least-effective on defense. Atlanta lived that experience for the better part of eight seasons and was over it.

So, why would the Wizards want Young? Why might a team that may well be among those who answered no to the question of whether they can win a championship with him still want him? To get better, of course. Young can do that. He could organize them into a playoff team, as he did in Atlanta, where his Hawks mostly topped out as first-round fodder, save for one fortune-filled trip to the conference finals.

That looks pretty good from where the Wizards are sitting, once again at the bottom of the standings.

Is it wise? That is up for debate. Getting better is also a strategy. Except, in Young, they invite in both improvement to a certain point and a ceiling at that point — a ceiling that is sub-championship level, most likely, if not for the absolute perfect roster around him (and the Wiz are far from fielding that).

Every team had to ask: Can we give up what we need to give up to get Young, fit his salary onto our cap sheet and still have enough around him to mask his deficiencies as a player? Washington talked itself into that scenario. Getting Young for relatively little, the Wizards can hope he accelerates the development of their core, and pray they make the playoffs before it comes time to pay Johnson, Sarr and the others.

That is a needle to thread. They better hope Kispert does not become the next Deni Avdija, who has blossomed in Portland since leaving Washington. And they better not let their team become The Trae Young Show, where their prospects’ development stagnates as he drives them back into the middle.

So, should the Wiz have done it? Only the Trae Young of general managers could make that call.

John Henry Daley, one of the the top havoc-wreaking players in the transfer portal, is changing schools but not head coaches. 

After starring at Utah, Daley is following Kyle Whittingham to Michigan, according to On3’s Pete Nakos. Whittingham stepped down after 21 seasons of leading the Utes and is now replacing Sherrone Mooreas the Wolverines’ head coach. He’ll get an immediate boost with Daley’s arrival.

Daley has two seasons of eligibility remaining. The 6-foot-4, 255-pound edge rusher stacked 11.5 sacks during the 2025 campaign, tied for the sixth most in the country this season.

He announced on Dec. 30 that he was entering the portal. 

“I’d like to thank my teammates, coaches and Ute nation for the incredible support these past two seasons,” Daley, an Alpine, Utah, native, said in a statement he posted to social media at the time.

“The experiences I’ve had here will last a lifetime. Who I consider to be family has grown significantly, and I will always cherish those relationships.”

Daley broke out as a redshirt sophomore for an 11-2 Utah team while earning All-America honors. His 17.5 TFLs are tied for the fifth most of any FBS player this season. He put up those numbers in just 11 games, too.

He suffered a season-ending lower-body injury during a 51-47 win over Kansas State on Nov. 22. Daley recorded a pair of sacks and 3.5 TFLs in that game.

When declaring for the portal, Daley said in his statement that he will be “fully healthy” by the spring.

Daley was a semifinalist for the Chuck Bednarik Award this season, and that was a first-time starter. He’ll have big expectations waiting for him in Ann Arbor, where he’ll once again play under Whittingham.

Demond Williams is not leaving Washington after all.

The Huskies QB announced Thursday night that he would be returning to Washington for his junior year after “thoughtful reflection with his family.” Williams had started to explore leaving Washington earlier in the week despite signing a new NIL deal with the school after the start of the new year. LSU and new coach Lane Kiffin was heavily rumored to be courting Williams.

“After thoughtful reflection with my family, I am excited to announce that I will continue my football journey at the University of Washington,” Williams wrote. “I am deeply grateful to my coaches, teammates and everyone in the program for fostering an environment where I can thrive both as an athlete and as an individual.

“I am fully committed and focused on contributing to what we are building.

“Additionally, I apologize that the timing of these events coincided with the celebration of life for Mia Hamant, a beloved member of our university community. I never intended to call attention away from such an important moment.

“I am excited to reunite with my teammates and to lead the University of Washington to success in the 2026 season and beyond.”

Haman, a goalkeeper on the Washington soccer team, died in November. She had been diagnosed with stage four kidney cancer earlier in 2025. Her celebration of life was held on Tuesday.