The Relegation Zone Draft With Rob Mahoney!

The NBA’s 2025 offseason has been a slow burn, but the league’s landscape is shifting in ways that will define the next half-decade. On the Zach Lowe Show, staff writer Rob Mahoney joined to run through a “Relegation Zone Draft,” ranking the nine teams most likely to be in the league’s basement this season. The conversation quickly became a deep dive into roster construction, asset management, and the strange new math of a league where tanking has been de-incentivized and every team is trying to thread a needle between competing and rebuilding.

The LeBron Vigil and the New NBA Math

The episode opened with the hosts waiting—still—for LeBron James to make a decision on his next team. Mahoney noted that no one around the league seems to know anything, and that Pat Riley’s recent public comments about LeBron were notable as a form of “projection into the marketplace” rather than genuine information gathering. Lowe’s bottom line on LeBron’s fit anywhere: “He’s just that good and so smart and so versatile because of his size that he’s just gonna help whatever team he goes to.” The real tension, Mahoney pointed out, is that if LeBron goes to Miami, Giannis Antetokounmpo and Bam Adebayo would have to share creative responsibility with a player as dominant as LeBron—a dynamic that might not be what Giannis signed up for.