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.
Sign team-friendly contracts. 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.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
