LeBron James, Stephen Curry and Kevin Durant.

For the better part of two decades, the league has counted on those three players to move the needle for eyeballs. Even now, in the sunset of their careers, they dragged Team USA to a men’s basketball gold medal last year and are the linchpin of the league’s biggest TV dates.

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For instance, the league’s opening day, by custom, features the defending champion and three other teams. This year, joining the Oklahoma City Thunder are the three teams that employ James, Curry and Durant (the Los Angeles Lakers, Golden State Warriors and Houston Rockets, in case you’ve been living under a rock). That’s not an accident.

Those three again are the centerpieces on Christmas, when Durant, Curry and James occupy the prime-time viewing hours, even as more likely NBA finalists (the Thunder and Cleveland Cavaliers — more on that in a minute) work the early-afternoon undercard.

It’s that last record-scratch of a sentence that underscores the somewhat odd state of the NBA union. We’re in the midst of a changing of the guard and have been for the past few years. Yet, even in their sunset years, the three players above still retain the strongest gravitational pull — so much so that the league’s TV partners have motored right through the prime years of Nikola Jokić, Giannis Antetokounmpo and Joel Embiid to keep showing the LeBron-Steph-KD triumvirate.

That formula worked better when the star trio was still playing into late May and June. In 13 of the 14 NBA seasons from 2010 to 2023, at least one of Curry, James and Durant played in the conference finals, with the lone exception being the already forgotten 2021 postseason. Seven of those seasons featured two of them in the conference finals, and the 2017 and 2018 editions had all three in the Cavs-Warriors NBA Finals.

But in the last two conference finals … crickets. Not one of James, Curry or Durant made it, the first time that happened in consecutive years since 2005 and 2006, when Curry and Durant were still in high school. So let’s kick off my 2025-26 bold predictions with this one: For a third straight season, none of the three — James, Curry or Durant — will make the conference finals.

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I have more fearless predictions below, but before we go deeper, let’s review what I forecast a year ago. First, the good stuff: I picked the Atlanta Hawks to be in the Play-In Tournament once again (cha-ching!) and Victor Wembanyama and Jalen Williams to be first-time All-Stars (cha-ching!).