The NBA preseason is upon us, which means the real thing is right around the corner. Which players, teams, and story lines will drive the title race—and news cycle—over the next six months? This week, The Ringer is doing its best to provide an answer in Five Columns That Will Define the ’23-24 NBA Season. On Monday, it was the players. Tuesday, it was the teams. Today is Rivalry Wednesday.
For the first time in a long while, the state of the NBA rivalry is … good? We have lingering animosity waiting to be unleashed on the court, we have consecutive blockbuster trades that feel spiritually in conversation with each other, and we have two eerily similar young phenoms ready to chart the future of the league. There are story lines to unpack and scores to be settled. It’s a great time for mess. Of course, we all know that the biggest rivalry the NBA has going for it is Kawhi Leonard versus the player participation policy, but beyond that, these are the five rivalries worth monitoring in the season to come.
Victor Wembanyama Vs. Chet Holmgren
If it were a squared circle inside Paycom Center instead of hardwood, perhaps the first NBA duel between Victor Wembanyama and Chet Holmgren, a preseason game between the Spurs and Thunder in Oklahoma City on Monday, would have elicited the kind of “this is awesome!” crowd chants that used to be reserved for five-star pro wrestling matches. That first glimpse of the two of them—against each other, no less—felt like the start of something seismic. If it was any indication, this could be the best Rookie of the Year race in years.
Five Columns That Will Define the 2023-24 NBA Season
• Five Players
• Five Teams
• Five Rivalries
• Five Trade Candidates
• Five Questions
For as renowned as Holmgren’s rim protection has been across all levels of play, it was the totality of his offensive suite that stood out in his preseason debut: He is a confident 7-foot-1 ball handler with slashing instincts and a devil-may-care attitude toward contact; a multivalent pick-and-roll attacker; a player who can warp defenses with his off-ball movement at the 5; an epic trailer with a sweet 3-point stroke.
And for as McGrady-esque as Wembanyama might appear on offense, his defensive versatility was arguably the highlight of the entire game on Monday night. On a possession midway through the first quarter (which eventually led to a breakaway Wemby dunk), the 7-foot-4 Wembanyama stuck with Jalen Williams’s stuttering provocations in the corner, expertly contesting a badly missed stepback 3. Then, after Thunder rookie Cason Wallace grabbed the offensive rebound and pulled the ball out to reset, Wembanyama crowded Josh Giddey’s airspace beyond the arc. Wallace tried to take matters into his own hands by driving the ball, not realizing that in that same instance, Wemby would—or even could—flip his hips and dig at the ball, lunging after it with one foot planted at the top of the key and the other on the free throw line. Spurs point guard Tre Jones was ostensibly the help defender at the nail on the play, but Wemby’s preposterous length and flexibility allowed him to do Jones’s job—from damn near the 3-point line:
Wemby and Chet both scored on nimble dribble drives that led to and-1 opportunities, demonstrating the latent strength and body control belied by their gangly frames; they flexed on each other; they matched pull-up 3s on consecutive possessions. “I thought they went at each other a couple of times, and it was interesting. It shows their character, their competitiveness. And they did it within reason,” Gregg Popovich said after the game. “Neither one was shooting a horrible shot to do the other one in, or anything. It was basic basketball that the basketball gods would agree with.”
To hear Popovich, the oldest coach in the league, praise the two towering prodigies for playing basic basketball suggests just how far the league has come in terms of recognizing and embracing uncommon skills across positional lines. Together, Wemby and Chet presented a new horizon just on the other side of the NBA’s so-called unicorn moment—which always felt more like a cultural shoehorning of 2010s finance-bro vernacular than a natural line of demarcation in the league. Skilled, versatile big men have long stalked the hardwood; Wembanyama and Holmgren are simply the latest in the lineage, blessed with ecosystems that will allow them to explore the very edges of their talents from the very start of their careers. What they discover along their paths as new prototypes intrinsically linked to each other could very well reshape the game as we know it.
“I plan on playing a long time, and I’m sure he does too,” Holmgren said after the game. “So there’ll be no choice but to go back and forth.”
Milwaukee Bucks Vs. Boston Celtics Vs. Miami Heat
Milwaukee did what it needed to do to assemble what, on paper, looks like a top-five pick-and-roll duo of all time in Damian Lillard and Giannis Antetokounmpo. Boston had a logical response in trading for Jrue Holiday, the star the Bucks had to relinquish and the man who made Lillard’s life a living hell five years ago in the playoffs. An arms race, they cried! And Miami, in response to everything, trotted out Jimmy Butler as a walking mood board at media day, pantomiming the devastating end to a brief summer of a would-be courtship with Lillard.
So, if they’re a throuple, the power dynamics at play here are a bit lopsided. Based purely on talent, the Bucks and Celtics have created a tier to themselves, both all in on a top-heavy fragility in their rotations. And yet the Heat—who would be quick to remind you that they are 4-2 in playoff series against the other two teams since 2020—loom, reminder of the chaos that overrides any basic arithmetic notions teams that might have of success through simply adding talent.
The Heat serve as the Eastern Conference’s Schrödinger’s cat, a team that’s both dead in our minds and alive in our heart of hearts and that has consistently thrown a wrench into the league’s assumed road map. Yes, the Bucks have a theoretically unstoppable tandem; yes, the Celtics have as strong a top six as a team under a salary cap can assemble; but the Heat have one of the greatest postseason strategists the NBA coaching world has seen. The Bucks and Celtics have shown their hands—and they’re both doozies. The Heat enter the season once again as underdogs with nonetheless lofty ambitions. They will be in position for whatever unforeseen gold rush arises before the trade deadline; in many ways, we have no idea where they actually stand in the East. As someone spooked by Heat Culture (and disgusted by their new City Edition jerseys), I would not be shocked to see an equilateral triangle once the dust settles.
Los Angeles Lakers Vs. Denver Nuggets
This is arguably the most important rivalry in the NBA today, if only because it sets a new landmark precedent of public coaching beef as a vital and necessary addition to the NBA gossip landscape. For more than a decade, I’d clung, Van Gundy–style, to this glorious moment between two coaching legends:
But, thankfully, no more.
Anyway, to recap: The Nuggets swept the Lakers in the Western Conference finals last season in a series that Denver coach Mike Malone felt was unevenly covered by the media. After Game 1, Malone claimed, the focus was on the Lakers’ adjustments; then, after the sweep and ensuring the first NBA Finals series in Denver, attention momentarily shifted to LeBron James, who publicly considered retirement after the loss. So, in an interview on The Pat McAfee Show after winning his first NBA championship, Malone jokingly said he was considering retiring, too. A day later, at the Nuggets championship parade, Nuggets broadcaster Vic Lombardi did for Malone what Chris Rock did for Penny Hardaway. He created an outsized alter ego: Lakers’ daddy.
At no point has Malone acknowledged or accepted the title personally (nor did he look too thrilled as Lombardi anointed him), but that didn’t stop LeBron from crafting an all-time LeBronism—“Enjoy your light but just know I’m the SUN” is right there in the subtweet pantheon with “Stop trying to find a way to FIT-OUT and just FIT-IN.” It didn’t stop Lakers coach Darvin Ham from throwing barbs in Malone’s direction on a podcast with NBA reporting vets Marc Stein and Chris Haynes in July either. And as recently as this month, Anthony Davis was still bringing up how Lakers’ daddy was being used as motivation entering the new season.
To which Malone responded, “Oh, they’re talking about us? That was, what, four months ago? I can’t speak for anybody in L.A., but if they’re still worried about us, that’s on them.”
It’s all very silly, and I want to believe no one is taking this as seriously as it’s being aggregated on the internet. In reality, it is a glimpse into the dynamics of communication—or lack thereof—in the NBA, where quotes are prompted and disseminated by a middleman and just kind of hang there, waiting to be cherry-picked. Communication—true interpersonal communication—in the NBA is something that happens either in games or in private. Everything else is semiotics that can and will be used against you on the court. The Lakers will use this as blackboard material until it no longer serves them.
The Lakers were a winner in the offseason; the Nuggets are as dangerous as ever. The last two times these teams faced each other in the postseason, the victor would become champion. Best two out of three?
CP3 Vs. Golden State Warriors
As a Mike D’Antoni evangelist who spent his formative years watching the Steve Nash–era Suns repeatedly lose in increasingly absurd fashion to the Spurs in the postseason, I felt a sad, strange connection to Chris Paul’s perpetual losing battle against the Warriors—one of the great one-sided dramas of the NBA’s past decade. From Steph’s baseline ankle breaker in 2015 to the torture of an injured Paul having to watch 27 consecutive missed 3-pointers in 2018.
All these years later, seeing Paul set up Steph Curry for an easy 3 off a ghost screen actually felt fitting. The compact archetype of point guard purity and the wispy sharpshooter who changed the game’s parameters forever; just two greats doing great things together.
In literal terms, this rivalry is dead—Paul can no longer lose at the hands of the Warriors; he can only lose as a member of the Warriors. (Unless he’s shamelessly shipped off before the deadline, which would be a real coup de grace.) And yet there is an element of the rivalry that persists. The most compelling aspect of the old Clippers-Warriors and Rockets-Warriors rivalries was the opposing notions of point guard play. CP3 always had the ball on a string, as his controlling Napoleonic streak compelled; Curry could do that, too, but within the Warriors system, control was seen in Curry’s footsteps all around the floor, tracing a web of motion that kept the Warriors’ unique offense aligned. There was no right answer on how to generate a top-five offense—both players have been at the helm of plenty.
That contrast in play, and the stylistic implications therein, is the biggest question heading into the Warriors’ season. One of the most masterful and heavily repped pick-and-roll initiators in league history is entering the starting lineup on a pass-heavy team that, rather notoriously, seems to view the pick-and-roll as a last resort. If this is the year that Steve Kerr fully embraces the two-man game, it could be Paul’s most consequential win over the Warriors in some time.
Devin Booker Vs. As Many People As Possible
Bless Devin Booker, who has built a cottage industry out of being a supreme hater. Honestly, he has every right to be, given how much grief he got upon signing his max extension five years ago. (Whoops!) He’s feuded with the Raptors mascot. He’s gotten the fairly mild-mannered Paul George to crack, multiple times. Luka’s not a fan; ergo, the Mavericks signed professional shit stirrer Grant Williams, who is on record as being excited to “join in on some competitive vibes” when it comes to the budding Suns-Mavericks rivalry.
Book knows what he’s doing. He has long been one of the great Kobe zealots in the league, and after years of steady improvement on both ends of the floor, he’s reached a point where, despite being flanked by Kevin Durant and Bradley Beal, he is still the most important player in the Suns organization. Kobe, of course, was feared. Booker, instead, has settled for pissing off as many people as possible. These are the actions of a man who knows what the people want, need, and deserve—and is willing to put himself on the line to see it through. We thank him for his service.
