Five trends to watch in the NBA this year: The Pacers’ big impact, backcourt pressure and more positivity on broadcasts?

There isn’t any right way to watch the NBA, but we do gravitate towards the who more than the what or why.

And why wouldn’t we? This league has so many grand talents: Nikola Jokić, Luka Dončić, Joel Embiid, LeBron James. That’s natural to anybody’s fandom; we’re people who care about these people who play for our teams. We’ve arbitrarily chosen to live and die with them, to support them, to learn more. I just spent my first year at the ALLCITY Network doing just that for the DLLS Mavericks Podcast.

But the truth is the what and the why increasingly interest me, too. What you’re seeing this season, and why it’s happening will be the core of many stories I’ll write across the ALLCITY Network the website this year. Sometimes, it’ll be something you might have never realized existed, something behind the scenes that I’ll spot and decide its worth exploring.

Sometimes, it’s just my best demystification of the thing we’re all talking about. Today, I have five trends for the 2025-2026 NBA season, both whats and whys, that I’m anticipated this season. It may apply directly to your team, certainly will apply to some opponents, should add slightly to the games that are now coming, sure as the seasons, just weeks away from now.

1. Everyone wants the Pacers’ pace

The Indiana Pacers will not be forgotten in defeat. Frankly, their NBA Finals run, devastating ending be damned, has remained the league’s main point of chatter at summer league and even into this week’s start of training camp.

Indiana averaged 437 touches in its postseason run, tied with the 2022 Denver Nuggets for the most in seven seasons. Over the past four years, it’s been either the Pacers or the Golden State Warriors atop the league in that stat for the regular season. But now that Indiana’s success got them to last season’s NBA Finals, Rick Carlisle’s tempo-ball has drawn more attention. The league’s overall pace (98.8 possessions per team per game) was higher just two seasons ago; it’ll probably rise this season, but it could stagnate due to teams wielding more dual-center lineups, which subsequently will lead to more offensive rebounds.

When your team’s head coach talks about pace, however, he’s often not referring to the number of possessions but rather the number of touches and actions in any given possession. Indiana set 561 screens with 20 seconds or more remaining on the shot clock last year, the sixth most in the past 13 seasons. The sooner possessions start, the sooner players cross half court, and the sooner that first action begins, the higher likelihood a team’s half court offense succeeds. It’s not revolutionary stuff, but it’ll be preached and demanded with an even higher emphasis after the entire league watched Indiana abuse this principle all the way to the season’s final game.

Look, you might be thinking: Every coach says this stuff in training camp. It’s true they do. But Indiana, it seems, has renewed attention into what speed can do on both ends. Which, to that point …

2. Teams will respond with more full-court pressure

Not only did Indiana run the most actions with 20-plus seconds on the shot clock, but it also allowed the third fewest. The Pacers stole seconds from their opponents, prioritizing that on both ends, using constant backcourt pressure to push back how quickly opponents began their halfcourt possessions even as they emphasized their own. They led the league with 4,617 instances of such pressure, and it worked: Indiana allowed three fewer points per 100 possessions when Andrew Nembhard (second in the league) or another harassing guard began their defense efforts within the first 47 feet.

One Western Conference executive noted to me how many teams emulated those tactics at this year’s Las Vegas Summer League. Admittedly, the league’s industry conference, doubling as a youth symposium, is the likeliest place for that to happen. It’s the perfect combination of younger legs, shorter minutes, and looser handles. But this executive’s belief was that more teams were specifically testing out backcourt pressure in response to Indiana’s success with it. Granted, not every team has Nembhard or even Ben Sheppard. (Sheppard led the league in the percentage of his time being clocked as moving fast, at about 17 percent, according to Second Spectrum.) But for younger teams, there’s no harm to some backcourt disruption to make sure opponents have fewer seconds to create halfcourt success.

Relatedly, to that point, we might see fewer players surpass 90-plus touches per game this season. In the past six seasons, there were 4.2 players who reached that heliocentric marker compared to just 2.5 in the six seasons before that. To ease the burden of backcourt pressure, more teams may dole out their initial ball advancement to more players. Even Trae Young, who has often been the league’s most central gravitational pull, has his coach asking him for more hit-ahead passes and defensive contributions, which might require him to have slightly less of an every possession orbit.

3. Two-center lineups are here to stay

In a forgettable 2021 first-round series, Erik Spoelstra briefly rejected modernity: For about eight minutes, he played his starting center, Bam Adebayo, alongside his backup, Dewayne Dedmon. It was a throw-stuff-at-the-wall ploy in a doomed series: The Milwaukee Bucks swept Spoelstra’s Miami Heat en route to that season’s championship. But those eight minutes — two bigs playing alongside each other, an oldhead’s dream — outnumbered every other team combined that entire postseason. In total, there were just 14 minutes from lineups featuring two proper centers. For that moment, it seemed small ball might have won for good.

Last postseason, teams combined for 905 minutes given to lineups with two centers. Oklahoma City’s pairing of Chet Holmgren and Isaiah Hartenstein led the way, of course, but it was notable that the Houston Rockets (Alperen Şengün, Steven Adams), New York Knicks (Karl-Anthony Towns, Mitchell Robinson), and Cleveland Cavaliers (Evan Mobley, Jarrett Allen) all organically found their own twin tower looks.

	REG MIN	REG MPG	POST MIN	POST MPG
13-14	9458	7.7	1080	12.1
14-15	10401	8.5	846	10.4
15-16	8434	6.9	410	4.8
16-17	8924	7.3	387	4.9
17-18	3454	2.8	257	3.1
18-19	1239	1.0	151	1.8
19-20	1403	1.3	191	2.3
20-21	1366	1.3	16	0.2
21-22	4054	3.3	347	3.7
22-23	4416	3.6	397	4.4
23-24	4660	3.8	730	8.3
24-25	5190	4.2	905	10.8

It speaks more to the big man adapting to the modern era than the other way around. Of those players above, plenty of them shoot 3s and handle the ball in ways once reserved for players half a foot shorter than them. More importantly, many of these centers reject the slow-footed, plodding labels that their elder archetypes carried with them. This season, there will be two-big lineups being teased and tested in most games you watch. Even Miami has a Dedmon-esque player reborn in Kel’el Ware to trot out alongside Adebayo.

Most teams won’t rely exclusively on these lineups. In Atlanta, for example, Hawks coach Quin Synder has belief that Kristaps Porziņģis and Onyeka Okongwu can play together, which is a far cry from the Dallas Mavericks, on the spectrum’s other end, who have wholly committed to three non-shooting big men. In fact, Dallas has the most unique experiment; whereas most of these expected duos have at least one prolific 3-point shooter or driver in their ranks, Dallas is leaning more heavily into old school BigBall™ than any other team in the league.

TEAM	DUOS	DRIVES/G	3PA/G	D&3
MEM	Jackson, Edey	11.0	6.1	17.1
OKC	Holmgren, Hartenstein, Williams	7.4	7.0	14.4
NYK	Towns, Robinson	8.1	4.7	12.8
MIL	Turner, Portis	3.0	9.1	12.1
MIN	Reid, Gobert	5.0	5.8	10.8
CLE	Mobley, Allen	7.3	3.2	10.5
ATL	Porzingis, Okongwu	2.5	8.0	10.5
MIA	Adebayo, Ware	5.0	4.5	9.5
HOU	Şengün, Capela, Adams	8.2	1.2	9.4
DAL	Davis, Lively, Gafford	6.1	2.4	8.5

There for a moment, though, it really did seem like the smalls had forced downsizing across the entire league. But in honor of Thin Lizzy, do spread the word: The bigs are back in town.

4. The broadcasts will be more positive

It’s one of the league’s longest running debates: Are the Inside the NBA boys, even if beloved for their cutups, hurting the league’s product with too much casual negativity? Is the constant debate between old vs. new, often fostered by these official broadcast partners, downplaying how complex and talented basketball’s modern era has become?

With NBC and Amazon Prime taking over for TNT, you’re sure to see that school of thought, the one that blamed some of basketball’s marketing on its broadcast partners, prevail. As Dirk Nowitzki said on a recent DLLS podcast, “The coverage on some channels (has been) a little negative for the NBA. We need to switch gears and have some fun but also show how hard it is to play in this league, to analyze it a little more.”

Likewise, Thunder general manager Sam Presti opted for a similar sentiment at his team’s media day earlier this week.

“We can’t have a whole generation of players growing up thinking that the game is played behind the three-point line, which it’s not,” Presti said. “Those partners can really do something to help the game itself and grow a whole new generation of fan that can appreciate and understand what goes into high-level basketball. I see that as the biggest opportunity.”

Even Michael Jordan and the Roundball Rock theme song has joined the coverage for the league’s return to NBC. We know they’re referring to Jordan as a special contributor, that he won’t appear on NBC’s live studio coverage but rather provide taped segments. We know, outside of the Last Dance documentary in 2020, Jordan has stayed far away from hoops discussions. We just don’t know why he’s now decided to come back. But NBC’s coverage is trending in a certain way. Here’s to hoping his appearances are more akin to Kobe Bryant’s Detail, a show where Bryant broke down the league’s intricacies and highlighted players he loved watching.

Although, if Jordan’s back just to chomp cigars and motherf— old rivals, I’m cool with that, too.

5. Rookie contracts matter … if you play

The second apron’s continued reckoning will remain one of this season’s trends. Rookie-scale contracts, similarly, are more valuable than ever in a league where every dollar matters to avoid the punitive apron punishments. As the NIL system takes over college basketball, more players will stay longer in college, theoretically offering teams more of a selection of ready-now rotation candidates who can contribute on cost-controlled salaries from their first or second season.

If, that is, they actually play.

Kobe Bufkin, shipped from the Atlanta Hawks to the Brooklyn Nets after playing just 27 games in his first two seasons, is a warning. Bufkin’s proof of concept in this league hasn’t been proven either direction; his contributions have been limited far more by injury than any proven lack of talent. But because he’s proven nothing, Atlanta couldn’t justify his $4.5 million salary hit next season nor get anything in return from Brooklyn’s willingness to rehome him beyond some cash considerations. There are other examples: Olivier-Maxence Prosper was stretch-waived by the Dallas Mavericks after just two seasons; the Los Angeles Lakers bailed on Jalen Hood-Schifino to make room for the Luka Dončić trade after a year and a half.

Those players had been given chances to prove themselves, though, and were victims more of roster crunches. Their talent level, or lack thereof, isn’t quite as mysterious as Bufkin’s, who had good counting stats on troubling efficiency this past summer league. But while Bufkin could still be someone, rookies who don’t succeed early in their rookie contracts are no longer as safe as they once were. Because while there’s nothing more valuable than a cheaper-than-average rotation player, teams that set sights on winning basketball don’t have dollars to throw away to as-of-yet-unrealized projects.

Tim Cato is ALLCITY’s national NBA writer currently based in Dallas.  He can be reached at tcato@alldlls.com or on X at @tim_cato.