Hoops Tonight - NBA Contender Rankings w/ Kevin O'Connor: Thunder & Nuggets BEST, sneaky Celtics, Lakers in top 10
The Herd with Colin Cowherd
iHeartPodcasts and The Volume
4.1 • 10.3K Ratings
🗓️ 13 February 2026
⏱️ 60 minutes
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Summary
Jason is joined by Yahoo! NBA analyst Kevin O'Connor to break down contender rankings for the 2026 NBA title. They discuss the Oklahoma City Thunder and Denver Nuggets still being at the top, why James Harden and the Cleveland Cavaliers are rising, why they'll never count out Anthony Edwards and the Minnesota Timberwolves, how high up the Boston Celtics should be now and if Jayson Tatum returns, whether Luka Doncic and the Los Angeles Lakers can crack the top 10, why Kevin Durant and the Houston Rockets have fallen since the last rankings, Jalen Brunson's New York Knicks, Victor Wembanyama's San Antonio Spurs, and more.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is an I-Heart podcast. |
| 0:02.6 | Guaranteed human. |
| 0:05.3 | The Volume. |
| 0:20.1 | All right, welcome to Hoops tonight here at The Volume. Happy Thursday, everybody. Hope all of you guys are having an incredible week. I'm very, very excited for today's show. You guys all know Kevin O'Connor, a friend of mine, I've been on his show several times. I think he's been on our show once before this. But we've never done this specific format before. As you guys know, about once a month, I like to take a look at |
| 0:39.2 | our contender tiers, just a big picture look at how the championship landscape has shifted |
| 0:45.0 | around the NBA. Now, to be clear, we're not married to any of these ideas. We reserve the |
| 0:50.9 | right to change our mind at any point between now and the start of the playoffs. |
| 0:55.0 | But this is just a snapshot of how Kevin and I feel about the landscape of championship contenders at this point. |
| 1:01.3 | First of all, Kevin, how are you, man? |
| 1:03.4 | How are you feeling today? |
| 1:04.7 | I'm doing excellent. |
| 1:06.0 | I'm excited for the All-Star break flying out to L.A. |
| 1:08.9 | And yeah, hopefully it's a productive and fun time and |
| 1:12.1 | reset the NBA season and come back and see this tank race and this contending race on both |
| 1:18.3 | ends of the spectrum. I'm looking forward to discussing the top end of the NBA today because |
| 1:23.1 | a lot of the conversation this week seems to be about the bottom. The shameless tanking too. |
| 1:45.6 | Yes. It's crazy. Just the openly like, yeah, we're doing it. What are you going to do about it? You know? But yeah, I'm very excited for the home stretch of the season. Also in LA is fun too. I've got actually a lot of buddies who are going. I, uh, this is like I have historically taken this as my first, my last little break before the, the playoff grind. But it being in LA this year, there's a lot of people going out there. |
| 1:50.1 | It should be a fun one. All right. So we're going to keep very simple today. I'm just going to |
| 1:54.1 | literally work down my list. Kevin is just going to mention whether he agrees or disagrees. And if |
| 1:58.8 | he disagrees, he'll say where he has them. |
| 2:01.4 | We have divided our contenders into tiers. Tier one, pretty self-explanatory. These are teams |
| 2:06.6 | that should feel great about their chances to win the title. These are teams that should be sitting |
... |
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