Key Points
Bullet point summary by AI
- The 2025-26 NBA season saw unexpected talent surges as veterans sat out, shifting the league's competitive balance.
- Players like Anthony Black and Neemias Queta saw their roles and statistics dramatically, stepping into starting positions and shattering previous career highs.
- These breakout performances are set to reshape team strategies and free agency dynamics in the upcoming offseason.
The 2025-26 season was a great year for breakout campaigns in the NBA.
With LeBron James and Stephen Curry racking up DNP-Olds left and right, a new wave of NBA talent took hold this year. A few of them were obviously in the making (Deni Avdija, Jalen Johnson), while others were out of nowhere (Jalen Duren, Nickeil Alexander-Walker).
Avdija, Johnson and Duren all earned their first All-Star nods this season, and Alexander-Walker is the odds-on favorite to win the league's Most Improved Player award. All four have had career years and will now have a chance to build on them in the postseason.
Those four aren't the only players who had breakout seasons this year, though. And some of them won't be participating in the playoffs this year.
Before we officially turn the page to the postseason, let's look back and celebrate some of the biggest breakouts aside from Avdija, Johnson, Duren and Alexander-Walker this season.
Anthony Black, Orlando Magic
When Jalen Suggs went down with a hip contusion in mid-December and then an ACL contusion a few weeks later, the Magic's season easily could have gone off the rails.
Anthony Black made sure it didn't.
Black, who spent the first month-and-a-half of the season largely coming off the bench, slid into the starting lineup in place of Suggs and never looked back. In the two months leading up to the All-Star break, he averaged 18.5 points, 4.8 assists, 4.1 rebounds, 2.1 threes, 1.4 steals and 0.8 blocks in only 33.8 minutes per game while shooting 46.4 percent overall and 36.3 percent from deep.
An abdominal strain cost Black most of the month of March, and he's played limited minutes since his return in early April. Still, he finished the season averaging more points (15.0) than he did over his first two seasons combined (14.0). After starting 43 games across his first two years with the Magic, he started 40 this year alone.
Black's breakout raises some uncomfortable questions for the Magic, as he'll become eligible to sign an extension this offseason. They already have four massive contracts on their books between Suggs, Paolo Banchero, Franz Wagner and Desmond Bane, which means they may need to move off one of Suggs, Bane and Black within the next year.
If they choose to move Black, their loss will be another team's gain.
Keyonte George, Utah Jazz
Despite what president of basketball operations Austin Ainge said last June, the Utah Jazz entered the season with zero intention of actually competing this year. They owed their 2026 first-round pick to the Oklahoma City Thunder if it fell outside the top eight, so they did everything in their power to ensure that pick didn't convey.
Keyonte George nearly sabotaged that for them, though.
After averaging 13.0 points per game as a rookie and 16.8 last season, George jumped up to a career-high 23.6 points per game this year. He did so on vastly improved efficiency, too. After shooting 39.1 percent overall in each of his first two seasons and no better than 34.3 percent from three-point range, he shot a career-best 45.6 percent overall and 37.1 percent from deep this year.
It's easy to forget now considering how brazenly the Jazz tanked down the stretch, but they were 10-15 in mid-December. Had they remained even semi-competitive, George would have been a real contender for his first All-Star nod this season.
George suffered a hamstring strain in mid-March that shut him down for the year, so he finished with only 54 games played, which disqualified him from the Most Improved Player race. He would have deserved at least a perfunctory nod in that voting had he played in at least 65 games, though. The combination of his uptick in scoring and efficiency gives the Jazz legitimate hope moving forward.
Ryan Rollins, Milwaukee Bucks
When the Milwaukee Bucks signed Ryan Rollins to a three-year, $12 million contract this past offseason, it was a total afterthought outside of Milwaukee. While Rollins did shoot 40.8 percent from downtown last season, he averaged only 6.2 points in 14.6 minutes per game.
Nothing about that suggested what was coming this year.
Prior to this past season, Rollins had scored 20 points in only two games across his first three years in the NBA. He had never topped more than 23, and his three highest-scoring outings all came late last season in the heart of Mickey Mouse March.
In his fourth game this season, Rollins scored a career-high 25 points in a 121-111 win over the New York Knicks. Two days later, he had a career-high 32 points and eight assists in a 120-110 win over the Golden State Warriors.
In total, he topped the 20-point threshold 29 times this season. He finished the year averaging 17.3 points, 5.6 assists, 4.6 rebounds, 2.5 threes and 1.5 steals in only 32.1 minutes per game, all of which smashed his previous career highs.
Suddenly, Rollins' $4 million salary for 2026-27 looks like one of the biggest steals in the league. Unfortunately for the Bucks, the odds of him picking up his $4 million player option in 2027-28 are now roughly nil.
Collin Gillespie, Phoenix Suns
The Suns originally signed Collin Gillespie to a two-way contract ahead of the 2024-25 season. Amidst their failed Big Three experiment, he averaged 5.9 points, 2.4 rebounds and 2.4 assists in 14.0 minutes per game across 33 appearances that season.
After Kevin Durant and Bradley Beal departed this past offseason, the Suns re-signed Gillespie on a one-year, $2.4 million veteran-minimum contract. That turned out to be a screaming bargain.
Gillespie started 58 of the 80 games he played in this year and set new career highs across the board with 12.7 points, 4.6 assists, 4.1 rebounds, 2.9 threes and 1.2 steals in only 28.5 minutes per game. He shot a career-worst 41.8 percent from the field, but that's largely because more than two-thirds of his shot attempts came from deep. He knocked those down at a far more impressive 40.1 percent clip.
Jalen Green's hamstring injury vaulted Gillespie into a far more prominent role than expected heading into the season, but he took that opportunity and ran with it. The 26-year-old is now poised to potentially cash in as an unrestricted free agent this summer.
Will the Villanova Knicks come calling to reunite Gillespie with his former teammates? Based on what he did this year, they might not be able to afford him.
Neemias Queta, Boston Celtics
This was supposed to be a gap year for the Boston Celtics. Neemias Queta had other ideas.
The Celtics traded away Kristaps Porziņģis for financial reasons and lost Al Horford to the Golden State Warriors in free agency, which left a massive void in their frontcourt to fill. Rather than chase an established option, they decided to roll with Queta and Luka Garza as their primary bigs. Even after they acquired Nikola Vučević at the trade deadline, Queta still maintained his grasp on the starting job.
That was well-deserved, too.
On the season, Queta averaged 10.2 points, 8.4 rebounds and 1.3 blocks in only 25.3 minutes per game. Prior to this year, he had never averaged more than 5.5 points, 4.4 rebounds or 13.9 minutes per game in any of his first four seasons. Queta also ranked in the 97th percentile in Dunks and Threes' estimated defensive plus/minus.
Despite being without Jayson Tatum for a majority of the season, the Celtics still managed to win 56 games and finish as the No. 2 seed in the East. Jaylen Brown, Derrick White and Payton Pritchard were the main reasons for that offensively, but Queta helped anchor the Celtics' fourth-ranked defense.
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