10. Houston Rockets
The James Harden/Russell Westbrook on-court dynamic will be fascinating to watch this season, but the end of that Westbrook contract is going to be brutal (even more so considering the way he plays the game of basketball). I’m not in the business of breaking news, but I’d like to be the first to report that Westbrook is going to accept his $47 million player option for the 2022-23 season.
Even if Westbrook isn’t useful at the end of his contract though, they’ll still have James Harden and Daryl Morey, who is one of the most innovative executives in the league. As long as they have those two guys in place, it’s hard to imagine the Houston Rockets not being a contender for the foreseeable future.
9. Utah Jazz
Assuming the Utah Jazz can keep their core of Donovan Mitchell and Rudy Gobert, they’ll without a doubt be a playoff contender for the next several years. Mitchell needs to be more efficient, but he’s more than capable of doing that as he becomes more and more polished on the offensive end.
The Jazz have gone all-in for the next year or two by signing Mike Conley and Bojan Bogdanovic, but with the arbitrary purpose of this article is set three years in the future, I think their best years as a team will already be behind them by the time 2021 comes around.