Danny Green has long been one of the best role players in the NBA, but he'll have to be something more than that for the Lakers this season. Read more »

Russell Westbrook is so domineering, so omnivorous as a player that he plays an outsized role in determining his team's fate even if he is not their best player. Read more »

What Kyrie Irving is striving for remains as opaque as ever. The irony of Irving's move to the Nets is that he now finds himself in a similar situation to the one he was so eager to leave two summers ago. Read more »

A year ago, Zion Williamson was projected to go No. 7. Now he's going No. 1 and expected to be a surefire Hall of Famer. In this way, Zion is more of a myth than a man at this point, more potential than actuality. Read more »

By stopping two potential three-peats by two of the greatest would-be dynasties of the last decade, Kawhi Leonard has established himself as a giant killer, the NBA's version of those legendary dragon slayers of yore. Read more »

The variance in Pascal Siakam's play is hard to explain or make sense of, but he needs to find some semblance of stability, enabling the rest of the team to feel secure and to ensure that good games from other players do not go to waste. Read more »

This trio of secondary stars are all crucial to their respective team's success. Yet they also operate on a level without the burden of legacy building. Read more »

The Raptors need Kawhi Leonard more than he needs them, which makes his impenetrable nature all the more compelling. Read more »

Joel Embiid is both a throwback and a renunciation of present trends in basketball strategy. He also could be running a race against his own body. Read more »

Nikola Vucevic does everything well, just a shade less well, and a few shades less engagingly than his peers. Read more »

When we talk about the NBA being a players' league where the players appear to have more power than ever before, we need to be more conscientious of firstly, just how limited that power is relative to ownership and secondly, how few players we're talking about. Read more »

DeMarcus Cousins now single-handedly provides a reason for fans otherwise tired of Golden State's dominance to cheer for the Warriors, adding a patina of fun and joy to their seemingly inevitable Finals triumph. Read more »

There's something almost admirable about DeMar DeRozan's distinctiveness, his apparent desire to refine his own style rather than attempt to fit into the prescribed idea of who he, or any modern guard, should be. Read more »

Without intending to, Draymond Green and Jimmy Butler both show us how limited our patience today is for players acting like jerks, unlike in the Jordan/Kobe eras, how we now believe such behavior may be entertaining without being edifying. Read more »