The 2024-25 NBA preseason has begun and the start of the regular season is barely a week away. That means it's preview season. We can and should look at different teams and players through different lenses, but a common thread weaving the narrative of the league's highest-profile players is pressure, and some are under a lot more pressure than others to perform.
That is certainly true of the five names below, beginning with Karl-Anthony Towns, who was traded to New York, where he will feel the heat of a spotlight he has never known.
Towns is one of two All-Stars in a new home who makes our list below as we rank the five NBA players under the most pressure heading into the 2024-25 season.
1. Karl-Anthony Towns, Knicks
The most obvious name on this list, Towns hasn't exactly been a portrait of poise and stability throughout his career. He caught hell even when he disappeared in big moments in Minnesota. If he lays a couple of playoff eggs in New York? Forget about it. He's going to get skewered.
There's no doubt the Towns trade made sense for the Knicks. From a purely basketball standpoint, he fits perfectly. But when the Knicks aren't playing two bigs, or certainly if Mitchell Robinson ends up traded, he will have to be the interior anchor of a postseason defense. It's about more than making shots. Towns will have to be tough. Every night. And still serve as a No. 2 scorer and make 3s at a high clip.
This is a team that now expects to compete for a championship. Even with the Wolves last season, there was a fairy-tale aspect to what they accomplished. New York might as well be another world. Towns has never faced this kind of pressure.
2. Trae Young, Hawks
If Young's actual value was commensurate with his talent, there's a chance, perhaps a good one, that he wouldn't even be on the Hawks right now. But the truth is, nobody is banging down Atlanta's door to get their hands on him. He makes max money, dominates an offense and cripples a defense.
The offensive part is justified in a vacuum. Young is one of the most talented playmakers we've seen in a long time. His passing is preternatural. He's nearly impossible to keep out of the paint, where he has to feel for toggling between his floater and pinpoint lob passes.
But is he great enough to have this tight a grip on an offense? Is he Luka Doncic? Is he prime James Harden? Obviously not a lot of teams feel he is because if you have a chance to trade for that kind of player, you do it. There was a chance to trade for Young this summer. Nobody really even sniffed.
Young's actual 3-point shooting falls short and has consistently fallen short, of his reputation as a long-range sniper. He has the range part, and that alone impacts spacing and the overall attention he garners from defenses, but he's not consistently on target. His shot selection got better last season. He is moving toward the midrange more, where his efficiency ratchets up.
In the end, the Hawks have stunk since their surprise run to the 2021 Eastern Conference finals when we catapulted Young into franchise-carrying status. In fact, the only place he's really carried the Hawks, with talented rosters I might add, is to some sub-.500 records, the Play-In Tournament and a couple first-round bounces.
The small, ball-dominant point guard who can't defend is a dying archetype. You have to be extra special to occupy that role on a legit team. Even Steph Curry has to move off the ball to maximize himself, and we all know Young doesn't like doing that, either. He wants to play his way, which hasn't proven to be a winning way. If he and the Hawks spend another year in irrelevance, Young is going to wear the brunt of the blame.
3. Paul George, 76ers
Don't confuse the fact that George wasn't brought to Philadelphia to be the No. 1 option, or even the No. 2 option, with the idea that he's not under immense pressure to perform. He's the guy who's supposed to get the Sixers, who haven't been past the second round in more than two decades, over the hump. Patience is not a luxury he'll have with the fans on a $212 million contract at 34 years old.
George will be judged mostly by his playoff performances, but not entirely. Philadelphia is going to do everything it can to keep Joel Embiid healthy, meaning more will fall on George's plate throughout the regular season. And even as a "No. 3" guy, he's not going to be some corner shooter tasked with the occasional big shot or game. He's an All-Star, and he has to play at that level, at a minimum, for this contract, which is probably already going to age poorly, to make sense.
4. Damian Lillard, Bucks
If we give Lillard a mulligan on Year 1 in Milwaukee, Year 2 offers no such cushion. The Bucks are old and considered by many to be below the true-contender line, but that's in part because we didn't see the dominant Lillard we expected to see alongside Giannis Antetokounmpo.
You can bet Doc Rivers is going to be putting Lillard in consistent pick-and-rolls rather than asking him to adjust to an off-ball role. Perhaps that's gets him back in his groove, and the Bucks follow suit. Giannis is arguably the second-best player in the world behind Nikola Jokic. Khris Middleton is a big question mark.
But Lillard is bigger because he takes the ceiling higher if he can return to top form, with his shooting in particular. To be fair, he turned 34 in July. Maybe his best days are behind him. That's not going to be an acceptable qualification if he and the Bucks underperform again.
5. Jamal Murray, Nuggets
This sounds strange to say about a guy who has already won a championship -- the first in franchise history no less. You would think the pressure would be off. But talk is swirling about Murray's playoff struggles and the subsequent Olympic egg he laid with Team Canada.
Let's not exaggerate this. Murray literally had the best regular season of his career last year, averaging career highs in points, assists and 3-point shooting, and then he became the first player in history to hit multiple game-winning shots inside the final five seconds of the same playoff series.
But overall, yes, he was not close to the Jamal Murray we've come to expect in the postseason, where he typically becomes one of the best players on earth. He made just 40% of his shots, including and 31.5% from 3. And again, the Olympics left a weird taste. I'm not sure anyone still really knows what to make of that.
Either way, there's a lot of talk that Denver has fallen off with the loss of Kentavious Caldwell-Pope, and Christian Braun is expected to lead his replacement by committee. Jokic is still the best player in the NBA, but Murray is the one with the pressure. If his playoff and Olympic falloffs were an indication of things to come, Denver will be in trouble.
