New Year, New NBA

It all starts with the sports gaming industry, which has been running hot since the return of College Football 25. But will it be the biggest storyline in 2025 for sports gaming?

Travis Hunter won the Heisman and then deleted his Instagram after some drama. We may have reached peak athlete accessibility, and see more private time in 2025.

It feels like there’s a new women’s sports league launching every month as interest continues to rise. We’re not sure which leagues will break through, but women’s sports won’t be playing second fiddle in 2025.

Don’t look now, but 2025 will be the year for sneakerheads to grab some grails. The banner comes hot and heavy this month, with a chance to create nostalgic moments in bigger settings.

The sports business landscape is shaping up to have another tumultuous year. In this 2025 outlook, expect the tides to shift around sports gambling and officiating.

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The perceived decline of the NBA was the talk of podcasts, newsletters, and social media at the end of ‘24. An electric Christmas silenced (momentarily) the takes, and we were reminded of the stories that matter around the NBA.

There’s no denying its cultural power. And as we enter ‘25, and the back half of the NBA season, the excitement from storytellers who love the game is real. OffBall reached out to one of those storytellers, Katie Heindl, the founder of "Basketball Feelings" to shine a light on the NBA's massive opportunity for a reset in the new year....

Here’s what Katie had to say…

One of the reasons I enjoy writing about basketball (and why I started Basketball Feelings) is because of the parallels that run between the game and life. The thrill of a chasedown block reverberates with anyone who’s fantasized about a very emphatic comeback.

On a deeper level, the language of trades — reducing people to their salary values, talking about bodies as assets and busts — shows the dangers of entertainment’s third wall and brings to the fore our perceptions of bodily autonomy, of who gets to have it, and why.

Basketball’s intersections with life occasionally swing into the existential, perhaps best exemplified now by the inevitable aging of the NBA’s ruling star class. Steph Curry just borrowed a Zoomerism and called his struggling team “very mid,” some of Kevin Durant’s best work with the Suns this season has come off the floor, and LeBron James just turned 40.

There’s been a rise in panic this season on just who stands to inherit the league once its best-known stars decide to hang it up. Panic that’s been further stoked by alarmist discourse on the NBA’s ratings decline. The good news? There's no point in panicking when this fabled “next generation of stars” has been playing under our noses for years already.

There’s Victor Wembanyama, the lanky French phenom who, at 7’5, you really can’t miss. Close to Wemby, on the sophomore to handful of years in the league scale, is the bold, unbackdownable Paolo Banchero, who was on a career-best track before an injury sidelined him in October. 

Tyrese Maxey, even amidst the downright bummer of a season the Sixers are having, is like a beam of light on legs. 

You’ve probably caught a headline with one of the many fines the explosive and, lately, expletive-loving Anthony Edwards is racking up (don’t worry, they all go to charity), but his brazen brand of basketball is a breath of fresh air in a league lately hung up on the trappings of legacy. A new calendar year offers the NBA storytelling class — media, marketers, and the league itself — a chance to take a closer examination of what’s good and working. To give up lazy tropes and instead see what’s exciting in the game right now.

And then there are the MVP caliber stars, the wait, didn’t-we-already-consider-these-guys-stars?, stars: Jayson Tatum, Luka Doncic, Ja Morant, Bam Adebayo, Jalen Brunson, and the unflappable Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, who’s in MVP contention for the first (and still overdue) time this season. Maybe by June, Gilgeous-Alexander will win an accolade for his on-court work to match his sartorial achievements off the floor. 

If you’re reading this and a little annoyed that I’ve missed a few of your faves, good, because I know I’ve actually left out loads of guys. That’s the point. The way names come to notoriety is through frequency of use. Old-fashioned word of mouth. The narrative that the NBA is running out of stars to root for is as tired (probably!) as LeBron James’ legs come January. The future, this young and restless, capable and thrilling crop of athletes, is ready.

We just have to start not shutting up about them.

To keep the predictions going, we tapped into our network to see what they thought was in store for sports and culture in 2025. 

Phil Lewis (Deputy Editor, Huffington Post): Sports news leaders would be wise to take advantage of the surging interest in the WNBA and invest in journalists who can tell its stories while so many eyes are on the league.

Travonne Edwards (NBA Analyst): The culture of sports for 2025 will be a single superstar saving a product by actually caring about their job. NBA is having a ratings problem and the solve is Victor Wembanyama—we’ve seen a boom in the WNBA with Caitlin Clark, and Shohei in MLB—looking forward to more superstars to buy into narratives again.

Katie Heindl (Writer, Basketball Feelings): There’s going to be a swing back to slow-baked, nuanced storytelling—long profiles, meandering studies of game mechanics, personal and team histories. So much for so long has been shifting to small bites, clips, everything easily aggregated. People want to spend time with the athletes they root for and follow, they want to pull the threads of team tapestries.

Toni Cowan Brown (Tech, culture, and political commentator): Netflix will secure exclusive live broadcasting rights to a select number of F1 races. Netflix has now proven post-Christmas game day that it can pull off live events, but more importantly that it can attract a whole new audience and understands the value of integrating entertainment and sports. And… 

The Vegas GP will become home to the CES (largest consumer tech conference) of motorsports. It will launch a global tech conference to showcase innovations developed by the sport, covering sustainability, data analytics, the future of fan engagement, and infrastructure setups... positioning itself as a tech thought leader beyond racing.

Joe Pompliano (Huddle Up on Substack): UFC’s Media Deal Is The One To Watch. It will be one of the only premium sports properties to hit the market over the next few years. ESPN has an exclusive negotiating window with the company in Q1, and they will want to re-sign because the UFC essentially built their entire streaming business on ESPN+. But with UFC now under the TKO umbrella with WWE, do they also try to sign a deal with Netflix? Or do they go with the NFL/NBA model, divvying up the sport’s media rights to maximize revenue by selling several smaller packages to a mix of cable and streaming companies? 

Rembert Browne (Writer): Tiger Woods will almost win the Masters. He’s going to give us one more incredible weekend, then focus on his son’s career. I’m 92% sure this will happen.