Every team has a personality. It can change with a trade or a big-time signing; it can transform with a coaching hire, or even just through a few tough, losing months. It plays out through what schemes a team runs, how its players work together (or don’t), and—maybe most clearly—what happens when shit really hits the fan. The arrival of a new NBA season means there are 30 teams to get to know all over again, each with their own evolving identities. And they’re introducing themselves to us right now, as we speak, through the way they play.

Welcome to the NBA Alignment Chart—your guide to the playing style of every team for the 2022-23 NBA season. It’s a new take on a classic premise; if we can learn something about the universe by finding the alignment of Tool lyrics, KitchenAid stand mixers, and assorted Brad Pitts, why would we stop at NBA teams? There’s a value in taxonomy. Assigning a team into a certain category helps us understand what it has in common with every other team in the same bucket. Comparing those buckets can tell us a lot about the landscape of the league—from what’s valued and why to what the best and worst teams tend to gravitate toward.

A classic alignment chart plots its entries on a spectrum from lawful to chaotic, and from good to evil. The first axis we’ll keep.

A lawful team is: organized; predictable; system-driven.

A chaotic team is: versatile; free-flowing; erratic.

Yet when we’re talking about drop coverage and turnaround jumpers, good and evil seems like a bit of a stretch. So instead, we’ll judge teams on terms that any sports fan will intuitively understand: good and bad.

A good team is: talented; balanced; overpowering.

A bad team is: flawed; inexperienced; miscast.

A little reductive, sure, but generalizing is pretty much the point. What you lose in the specifics of what makes a team good or bad, successful or not, you make up by understanding what links the Cavs and Pelicans, Timberwolves and Heat, Hornets and Lakers. This is what the NBA looks like going into the 2022-23 season:

Below you’ll find explanations for how every team was categorized—from lawful good to chaotic bad, and everything in between—along with one larger question heading into the season that could alter the team’s alignment. Teams are listed in order based on last season’s records. Let’s dig in:

Phoenix Suns

There’s a lot hanging over the Suns right now, ranging from the eventual sale of the team as a result of a massive scandal to the apparent frustrations of one of Phoenix’s best players. And yet it still feels like the on-court product will be surprisingly stable. The Suns play like a Chris Paul team through and through, with minimal turnovers and an exacting attention to detail. That isn’t likely to change so long as he’s in uniform. Phoenix will still run the same basic curl actions for Devin Booker, setting up a dangerous scorer to attack the defense on the move. That should be as effective as ever. Some slight modifications will need to be made to what was one of the most-played starting units in the league last season, but even that lineup seems fungible; simply replace Jae Crowder (who has loudly requested a trade) with Cam Johnson and keep it moving. That’s just what these guys do.

How invested is Deandre Ayton?

There’s no indication that Ayton has been anything less than professional since reporting for camp, or that his performance in the preseason has been at all out of character. Yet it can’t exactly be ignored that Ayton, after he was ominously benched during the 2022 playoffs, signed a $133 million offer sheet to play go play in Indiana. The only reason he’s a Sun is because they had the power to match it. If that’s a sore spot for Ayton, it could hang over the entire season—stoking discontent, testing relationships, and eventually burbling up in his play. Yet ultimately, no one but Ayton can decide how much he really cares to be a part of this particular team, even if he doesn’t have all that much recourse to leave. With enough collective buy-in, this is still a contender. That’s just looking like a bit more of a catch than the Suns might have bargained for.

Dallas Mavericks

For as devil-may-care as a Luka Doncic team might seem, let’s take stock of what the Mavs really are: an ultra-slow, low-turnover outfit that starts most of its Offense from the same, basic, high pick-and-roll premise, bolstered by one of the league’s most reliable, fundamental, down-the-middle defenses. There’s nothing more lawful than a team that wins by nailing the little things, and that’s exactly how Jason Kidd coached Dallas to 52 wins and a trip to the Western Conference finals. The Mavericks don’t play the passing lanes, they don’t shift styles, and they don’t put too much pressure on the offensive glass. It’s all a game of percentages, down to Luka playing the numbers in isolation to manipulate the entire floor. The only things keeping the Mavs from being the most orderly team in the league are what Doncic does with the Ball and what he does with the new bigs he’ll be setting up this season. No team with Christian Wood and JaVale McGee can be totally predictable; whether that turns out to be constructive or disruptive for the Mavs could wind up being the story of their season.

Where do the Mavs find their secondary offense?

For a team that already had limited creative options beyond Doncic, the departure of Jalen Brunson—who ranked third among Mavs in playoff minutes and second in playoff points—leaves a pretty explicit void. No other supporting player on the roster can get all the way to the rim the way Brunson did or manufacture simple, effective looks out of the team’s base offense the way he managed to. Part of Brunson’s value was how little he required Dallas to change to fit him; there’s no real stand-in for Luka, but Brunson found his own ways to be effective through the team’s preexisting sets and spacing. In his absence, the only real choice is to adapt—to find ways to play through Wood, Spencer Dinwiddie, and Tim Hardaway Jr. (who rejoins the team after recovering from a broken foot) on their own terms, in whatever ways feel sustainable.

Philadelphia 76ers

We know exactly where James Harden and Joel Embiid want the ball. That doesn’t make them any easier to stop, though it does narrow the band of what opposing teams can expect: a steady diet of high pick-and-roll, more traditional post-ups than you’ll find almost anywhere else, and a trickle-down approach that sets up scorers like Tyrese Maxey and Tobias Harris to attack from the weak side. Even this summer’s main additions were distinctly lawful players: shooters who sit in the corners like P.J. Tucker and Danuel House Jr., and a pure, straight-down-the-middle roll man in Montrezl Harrell. (De’Anthony Melton is … something else entirely.) Some of Philadelphia’s biggest missteps have come from trying to be a bit too clever—like pairing Embiid with Al Horford when almost anything but another center would do. This version of the team has learned to embrace simplicity. Trust in the fact that you have one of the best basketball players in the world. Lean into his strengths, get out of his way, and let the talent define the system.

Can James Harden still be a dominant player?

Doc Rivers has made it clear that he wants Harden running the show in Philly as both a scorer and playmaker, pushing for his own opportunities in a way that actively lifts the offense. No one else on the Sixers can create the way Harden does—or at least the way he did before he came to Philadelphia with an injured hamstring and fizzled out in a second-round playoff series against the Heat. Now it’s time to see what Harden, who recently turned 33 years old, really has left to offer. Taking some time off this summer has reportedly done wonders for his hamstring. Going through the full training-camp cycle gives Harden more opportunity to learn his teammates and what they really need from him. All that’s left is for him to prove he’s still got it—that he still has shades of his former MVP self, if not the full-blast, high-volume vintage that became an elite offense unto himself.

Atlanta Hawks

To this point, Trae Young has shown only the capacity to be an utterly ball-dominant player. That in itself makes the Hawks fairly predictable, even if opponents have a hard time keeping up with every fake and feint Young throws their way. Put a clever point guard in more pick-and-rolls than pretty much any other player in the sport, spread the floor as much as possible, and profit with one of the league’s most efficient regular-season offenses. It’s really that simple. Or it was until Atlanta traded for Dejounte Murray, and Nate McMillan floated the idea that Young might log more time off the ball this season. That would be a healthy development, if it sticks. But believe it when—and only when—we see Young give up the ball on a regular basis. It’s hard for high-functioning creators of this caliber to let go, even when their team trades for another All-Star in the backcourt.

Can Atlanta get back to playing passable defense?

Maybe the most inexplicable part of the Hawks’ sharp regression last season was the way their defense—a crucial part of their run to the East finals in 2021—turned into a strung-out mess. The positioning of the defense was consistently off. The idea of making multiple efforts was apparently out of the question. Atlanta just wasn’t connected at all in its coverage, which translated to the 26th-ranked defense. If that’s just who the Hawks are now, even a smothering defender like Murray won’t make a profound difference. However you diagnose the exact cause of what happened last season (Clint Capela’s nagging injuries, questionable chemistry, etc.), Atlanta’s core, returning players will have to invest enough defensively to save themselves.

Milwaukee Bucks

Slowly but surely, the Bucks gave up their dogmatic commitment to a certain way of playing—drop defense, straightforward spread offense—for the sake of exploring what works. Adjustment was a crucial part of their championship story in 2021; Giannis Antetokounmpo might never have lifted the Larry O’Brien Trophy if not for his team making calculated tweaks in its coverage along the way, moving defenders around and ramping up pressure to keep opponents off balance. Today’s Bucks will drop, or switch, or challenge at the level of the screen. They’re hugging up to the 3-point line more than they ever have before. And for as stale as their offense might seem, Giannis and Co. split the difference between systematized basketball and a ton of freeform transition play. The ball can go through Antetokounmpo, Jrue Holiday, or Khris Middleton (once he returns from a wrist injury) in all kinds of spaces and combinations. It’s not always pretty, but it’s diverse enough to keep opponents honest.

Are the Bucks still an elite defense?

Last season was a low point on defense for Milwaukee in the Mike Budenholzer era—a roughly average finish on that side of the ball for a team that once ranked as the out-and-out best in the league. Only having the shot-swatting Brook Lopez for 13 regular-season games might have had something to do with it. A starting spot and a vote of confidence couldn’t make Bobby Portis the rim protector the Bucks needed, and most of Milwaukee’s small-ball lineups looked overtaxed as it tried to stay connected. It’s good to have flexibility. It’s even better to have a schematic backbone, courtesy of one of the best interior defenders working. Lopez just needs to show he can be that again for the Bucks over an 82-game term, delivering in a way that eats minutes, reduces liabilities, and gets Milwaukee back to meeting its own lofty standard.

Cleveland Cavaliers

Of all the teams that swung blockbuster trades this summer, the Cavs may be the most ambitious. Yet it’s easy to believe in a trade like the landmark addition of Donovan Mitchell when you view it as the start of something for an ascendant core. The other reason to make the deal is that Mitchell so clearly provides what last season’s Cavs were missing: the kind of shot creation that gives a team its sense of natural order. Without it, Cleveland was stifled by having to run so much of its offense through Darius Garland, bogging down possessions into the worst kind of chaos. There should be fewer rambling possessions of various Cavs tossing the ball around the perimeter, working through actions that don’t have the space or momentum to succeed. And there should be more in which Mitchell, by the sheer force of his pick-and-roll game, busts loose the kinds of possibilities that were never available to the giant, injury-depleted team we saw a season ago. Having an All-Star you can throw the ball to can sometimes make a team predictable. But would predictability really be so bad for a defense-first team that was never quite sure where its points might come from?

Are the Cavs balanced enough to win big?

At one end of the lineup: two dynamic guards running the offense, both standing 6-foot-1. On the other end: two true bigs in Evan Mobley and Jarrett Allen, creating layers of rim protection that no other team in the league can match. Those are two powerful counterweights that should make for an effective team on balance. Yet it remains to be seen whether Cleveland can fully reconcile the two disparate styles baked into its roster, particularly without the kind of high-end wing talent that tends to bring lineups together. The new starting unit—no matter whether Isaac Okoro, Caris LeVert, Dean Wade, or a mystery guest starts at small forward—will be an exercise in polarity. Some nights, the guards will set up the bigs, the bigs will cover for the guards, and the entire team will find its perfect balance. Other nights will be clumsier, or more deliberate, or perhaps altogether disjointed. This team is talented enough to press the East’s major contenders as-is, and in future seasons might challenge them outright. But first comes the work of understanding exactly what the members of this loaded core have to offer one another between the lines, and what they take away.

New Orleans Pelicans

There are teams with neutral dispositions because they’re caught between extremes, in states of transition, or simply lacking the kind of superstar that would give them a stylistic lean. And then there’s the Pelicans, who after a successful run to the playoffs were more or less reset to the middle by Zion Williamson crashing into their operation like a meteor. You don’t just slide a force of nature back into your plans; Zion could thrive in almost any kind of basketball environment, but the players around him do inevitably have to adjust to his impact. Brandon Ingram and CJ McCollum might have to take on slightly altered roles. Jonas Valanciunas, Larry Nance Jr., and Jaxson Hayes will wind up playing at varied times and in different combinations. There’s a lot left for Willie Green to nail down in his second season as head coach, and not enough of a pattern of play to say definitively what the Pelicans will look like on the floor. All we can say for sure is that Zion is back, and he’s looking pretty freaking dangerous.

Can the Pelicans establish any kind of defensive identity?

Maybe this is asking too much of an up-and-coming team that can blow out opponents with scoring alone, but it would be nice if New Orleans could manage even an average team defense—something it hasn’t done since Anthony Davis was in uniform. People’s champion Herb Jones aside, the roster isn’t exactly built for it; getting to that level would take real commitment and focus on the part of the Pelicans’ core players, and a level of connection beyond what they’ve shown. New Orleans came in just about average from the time of the McCollum trade through the end of the season. The next step is to extend that over an 82-game slate, or at least build the habits to prove they eventually could.

Memphis Grizzlies

Ja Morant is what you get when an ascendant star feeds on nothing but pure chaos energy, channeling it through every quick-twitch fiber until his entire game becomes shock and awe. You can’t even blame him for sitting back to admire his own mixtape; that’s a collection of dunks and layups and blocks that no other player in the league could possibly produce or even attempt. It’s the audacity of Morant that whips the Grizzlies into a frenzy. Sometimes they get ahead of themselves by dribbling headlong into traffic or lunging for a steal for the sake of the lob that may come after it. Yet everything Memphis does best is fueled by that same manic energy, and a roster deep enough to mix and match as Taylor Jenkins explores the fullest extent of its options. To be honest, the tactics matter only so much when a team plays this fast and this hard. The Grizzlies don’t win by making the perfect adjustment at the perfect time. They beat you by dominating all the game’s gray areas, turning the math on every 50-50 ball in their favor.

Are the Grizzlies still deep?

If we include Jaren Jackson Jr. (who underwent foot surgery over the summer), Memphis will start the year without three of its top seven players in total minutes played last season. The good news is that Jackson is due back, though perhaps not for a few more months. Kyle Anderson and De’Anthony Melton are just gone—lost in the churn of free agency as the Grizzlies begin to consolidate their roster. There were too many quality players in Memphis for everyone to stay and for everyone to get paid. Yet that kind of shift in the depth chart inevitably means that some of the less-seasoned Grizzlies will be thrown into the mix, potentially even as starters. Things are about to get pretty real for the likes of Santi Aldama and Killian Tillie.

Miami Heat

There was only one place to put a fluid, ever-adaptive team organized by one of the sport’s great orchestrators. Miami never sits still. Within games, the Heat are a swirl of movement around the elbows and beyond, where every move is designed to make an opponent think, and overthink, and then get stuck in their own head as Jimmy Butler knifes through the lane for an easy layup. Between games, Miami is constantly changing shape. There’s always something to tinker with when a team operates this democratically, and when so many players could be moved into different spaces around the floor or through different assignments as needed. There are times when the Heat’s offense is so free-form that it seems unstable. At some point they won’t be able to pack so much exploratory action into a 24-second shot clock, or at some point they’ll get burned for working toward a better look that never quite materialized. Then you realize that the Heat rode all that ambiguity to within a shot of making the NBA Finals, again, for what would have been the second time in three seasons. What’s a little more chaos when it’s your entire way of life?

How much will the Heat miss P.J. Tucker?

What Tucker did for Miami last season was unprecedented. Over the course of the Heat’s playoff run, the 37-year-old logged time defending stars ranging from Trae Young and James Harden to Jayson Tatum and Joel Embiid. Losing him—to a conference rival, no less—leaves a void. Erik Spoelstra could attempt to stretch Caleb Martin into that role, but Martin isn’t nearly as ferocious as Tucker and doesn’t have anywhere close to his defensive range. Miami could let Butler take on some of those assignments, though at an inevitable cost to his offense. We’re accustomed to a world where the Heat produce the exact kinds of role players they need out of thin air. But can you replicate what had never been done before?

Golden State Warriors

The Warriors aren’t just agents of chaos—they’re its architects. You can usually trace any seemingly random error an opposing team makes all the way back to Steph Curry or, more precisely, to the way a single one of his moves or hesitations caused the entire defense to lose its collective mind. Curry knows he has that power. The Warriors, by extension, know exactly how to draft an entire philosophy of movement off of it. There are shooters flying around screens at virtually all times and then into handoffs that become drives, which then free up other shooters. Basic patterns became instinct, and instinct became bucket after bucket, title after title. Teams have studied Golden State’s basic designs for years and don’t really seem any closer to cracking the code. It’s one thing to know, conceptually, what the Warriors are trying to accomplish and what sets they like to run. Surviving every unpredictable development, however, is something else entirely.

Are the next-wave Warriors ready for this?

This is the season where Golden State’s reinvestment in player development collides with its clear rotation needs. After an exodus of intuitive role players, 20-year-old Moses Moody might not have the luxury of standing off to the side, idly creating space. Jonathan Kuminga might have to be more than a wild card. Both will have to move and read the game like Warriors, sliding into a freewheeling rhythm that has been rolling for years. James Wiseman, the former no. 2 pick who missed all of last season, might actually have to play—and finish at the rim enough to diversify Golden State’s entire strategic operation. There’s a lot of cover in running with Curry, Draymond Green, and Klay Thompson, but the young, unseasoned Warriors will have to figure out where they fit in a complex ecosystem under the massive weight of a title defense. Not everyone can play the way Golden State does; you either find the flow or you don’t. You thrive in the chaos, or you drown in it.

Boston Celtics

Coaching turmoil aside, the Celtics tend to only put a somewhat chaotic product on the floor—one limited by their personnel on offense, but with enough size and switchability on defense to keep opponents guessing. Moving Robert Williams III (who could miss the first few months of the season after undergoing knee surgery) into a roving, weakside role gave one of the league’s toughest defenses a vital, confounding element. Even if an opposing team managed to break Boston’s initial stranglehold on the pick-and-roll, it would have to contend with Williams swooping in from an unspecified position, jamming up what seemed like a sure thing. Without Williams, the Celtics play even smaller and less predictably, sometimes to their detriment. There isn’t much mystery as to where the ball will go: to Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown, usually in that order. How the ball gets there is another story entirely, and often a more erratic process than Boston would like. A healthy Malcolm Brogdon—picked up via trade for scraps—could help calm things down.

Will Joe Mazzulla operate like an interim or a fully ratified head coach?

Maybe it’s naive to think that the Celtics could be the same team that made a run to the Finals, stylistically speaking, when the coach responsible for that team’s style of play is now suspended for the entire season. Beyond that: It’s not clear if Ime Udoka will ever have the opportunity to coach this Boston team again. That makes Mazzulla an unprecedented kind of interim—filling a post that isn’t technically vacant, yet empowered to call the shots for one of the best teams in the league. It will be telling to see what Mazzulla changes and what he opts to keep in place. Are there supporting players Mazzulla might trust more than Udoka did? Are there elements of the playbook that weren’t to his liking? It could take a few months, but the longer Mazzulla is in the head job, the more likely he’ll be to make a definitive stamp on a contender.

Denver Nuggets

From the moment Nikola Jokic touches the ball, no other player on the floor can be quite certain of where a possession might go. Teammates on the move have to keep their eyes up, or else they risk taking a pass straight to the head. Defenders in Jokic’s general vicinity have to be equally conscious of their man coming in for a handoff or darting back door—diametrically opposed possibilities that make it difficult for a defense to commit to stopping any action at all. Whoever is guarding Jokic has to be ready for the fact that what seems like a pass could instantly become a shot, and what looks like a shot may well be the staging for a pass. Nothing can be ruled out at virtually any time. It’s dizzying. It’s incredible. It’s consciousness-expanding. Jokic has go-to moves and natural rhythms to his game just like anyone else, yet the way he reads the action makes the Nuggets a perpetually moving target—and unlike any team in the league.

Can the newly healthy Nuggets pick up where they left off?

The last time we saw Jokic, Jamal Murray, Michael Porter Jr., and Aaron Gordon play together in an NBA game, they made dominance look easy. That was a year and a half ago; an ACL tear took Murray out of commission and derailed that lineup before it could even establish itself. Recurring issues with Porter’s back forced more problems and more compromises, until the Nuggets could only surround Jokic and Gordon with a bare-bones rotation. This season is a grand reunion of a core that barely played together in the first place—a chance to finally see how Gordon slots into the role Denver initially imagined he would fill.

Minnesota Timberwolves

In the 2022 playoffs, the Wolves proved to be a team equally adept in building leads and blowing them; at seizing momentum and fumbling it away; and at managing to reach the truly spectacular until they (almost as spectacularly) managed to trip over their own feet. One of the most electric teams in the West playoffs wound up turning the ball over more often than any other team on that side of the bracket. Yet at every moment in its first-round series, Minnesota felt like a team on the bleeding edge of something—close enough, in the franchise’s own estimation, to push a chunk of its starting lineup and a huge amount of its draft capital into a trade for three-time Defensive Player of the Year Rudy Gobert. In theory, a move like that should stabilize what was one of the most aggressive defenses in the league last season, settling Minnesota’s constant scrambling into the steady beats of drop coverage. In practice, Gobert will slot in alongside another center in Karl-Anthony Towns, making every night a puzzle of matchups and spacing that the Wolves will have to solve in real time. Even by trading for one of the most straightforward stars in the league, Minnesota can’t help but make things interesting.

What can’t Anthony Edwards do?

The biggest reason the Wolves feel comfortable accelerating into their next phase as an organization is that Edwards—a 21-year-old natural who could score in his sleep—wouldn’t have slowed down anyway. The fact that he’s already accomplished this much this quickly (most notably averaging 25.2 points per game on 60 percent true shooting in that playoff series against the Grizzlies) changed the way Minnesota looked at itself and its prospects. This is a franchise tethered to every explosive drive from its youngest star, and similarly chained to every mistake as he finds his way. This season, Ant’s third in the league, should offer a clearer sense of where he might be going. We know he can create, but how reliably will he create for others? Chris Finch gives his best players—and Edwards in particular—a lot of latitude to explore within the offense. Will the precocious young guard find his way to reliable reads in the biggest moments, or will his grasp of those situations always feel a bit too loose, a bit too free? It’s already clear that Edwards can elevate a team. What’s still to be decided is whether he can anchor one, too.

Brooklyn Nets

Brooklyn remains a total mess from an organizational perspective, in a way that could—or maybe will, inevitably—lead to absolute anarchy between the lines. Any team with Kevin Durant can fall back on the security of his pull-up jumper. But how secure can any of this really be when that safety net has made clear it would rather be anywhere else? The looming impact of Durant’s unfulfilled trade request makes the Nets one of the most chaotic teams on the board and one of the most undeniable in terms of aggregate talent. Kyrie Irving could make first team All-NBA or retire to take an internship at InfoWars. Ben Simmons could turn out to be a perfect fit next to KD and Kyrie, or a slightly lesser version of the already complicated player he was before his back injury. It doesn’t exactly help matters that throughout the entire Durant-Irving era, Brooklyn has never managed to set anything resembling a baseline style of play. And even that might not matter that much. The Nets are a team that should be and could be contending, in spite of everything—if only they could stop imploding for long enough to play through a single season as planned.

Are we just going to pretend all of this is normal?

Durant—after requesting a trade in the offseason and then later clarifying that, actually, he would stay under the condition that his team’s coach and general manager be fired—would like all of us to move on. “I know it’s an interesting story,” he told reporters last week. “I know that it took up most of the offseason, and drama sells, I get that, but I didn’t miss any games, I didn’t miss any practices, I’m still here. So hopefully we can move past that.” With all due apologies, Kevin, I’m not sure we can. You can’t just quietly pack away an attempt to detonate the entire leadership s