Opening night is usually the first evidence of how much an NBA roster has been turned over. This season, only Orlando and Denver brought back the exact same five starters from their previous opener, a narrow bit of continuity in a league where even championship teams keep moving pieces.
Two teams held their opening-five shape
The Magic again opened with Paolo Banchero, Desmond Bane, Wendell Carter Jr., Jalen Suggs and Franz Wagner. Denver returned Nikola Jokic, Cameron Johnson, Aaron Gordon, Jamal Murray and Christian Braun to its Game 1 group.
Every other club had at least one change from last season’s opening-night lineup. Across the league, 28 of 30 teams altered their starting five, and several replaced four starters.
There were 71 players who started opening night for the same franchise in both seasons. Another 21 opened last season with one team and this season with a different one. Oklahoma City, the 2025 NBA champion, and New York, last season’s champion, were among the teams that retained four Game 1 starters.
Minnesota coach Chris Finch sees the churn as standard operating procedure. “No team stays the same,” Finch said.
Starting spots are only one rotation checkpoint
Boston coach Joe Mazzulla pushed back on the annual fixation over who gets announced first. A starting unit only occupies the floor for a small slice of a 48-minute night, and the more revealing decisions often arrive later in the rotation.
“People care about it too much,” Mazzulla said. “It lasts five minutes and there’s still 43 minutes left in the game.”
Mazzulla said he assigns equal importance to the groups that close quarters, begin quarters and finish games. “They all carry the same weight to me,” he said.
Still, the opening-night card remains a useful snapshot of organizational stability. Stephen Curry made his 18th straight opening-night start for Golden State in his 18th NBA season. Curry, Jokic and Phoenix guard Devin Booker are the only players to have started each of the past 10 opening nights for the same club.
Curry said the pull of the job remains intact even as the workload around basketball has grown.
“I still love it,” Curry said. “I still enjoy it. I love the work. There’s a lot more work off the court than it used to be, but that’s fine.”
Some franchises rarely run it back
- The Clippers have changed their opening-night starters in each of the past several seasons and have not repeated a Game 1 lineup in back-to-back years since the mid-1970s, when the franchise was based in Buffalo.
- Toronto has never repeated an opening-night five in the records dating to 1974.
- Sacramento also has not repeated an opener’s starting group since tracking began, dating back to the franchise’s Kansas City years.
- Most NBA teams have gone more than 10 years without using the same Game 1 starting five in consecutive seasons.
Miami has its own unusual streak. Erik Spoelstra has submitted 19 opening-night lineup cards as Heat coach, and each one has carried a different starting five.
“That is weird,” Spoelstra said after hearing the number.
The Heat, in their 39-year history, have repeated an opening-night lineup only twice. Both instances came in 1999: once in the lockout-shortened 1998-99 campaign and again when the 1999-2000 season began nine months later.
Minnesota, now in its 38th season, has used 37 different opening-night lineups. This year brought another new combination.
The roster-building reality
Finch framed the turnover as the natural consequence of teams constantly trying to improve, whether that means a smaller adjustment in the rotation or another major deal.
“We’ve had seismic trade after seismic trade,” Finch said. “It’s all about being better and whatever you need to do to try to be better. You don’t always get it right, but you’ve just got to keep pursuing that.”
That pursuit is why the first five are rarely preserved year to year. Orlando and Denver entered this season as exceptions; the rest of the league arrived at the next tip-off with at least one new face in the opening group.
