This article was originally published on www.si.com/nba/rockets/onsi as ESPN's Power Rankings Drops Rockets to NBA's 11th-Best Team. The 2025-26 NBA season is one week complete. The Houston Rockets have played three games thus far and have been a competitive group, which was expected.

ESPN’s NBA Rank panel, made up of more than 150 reporters, editors, producers, and analysts, was asked to rank players based on their predicted contributions — quality and quantity — for the 2025-26 season only.

ESPN and ABC will primarily cover games on Sundays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays during the 2025-26 regular season. "Inside the NBA" will serve as ESPN's main pregame, halftime and postgame show for its biggest events, but "NBA Countdown" will still air before select games.

The NBA Tip-Off 2025 had nearly 37 million viewers in the United States tuning in across NBC/Peacock, ESPN and Amazon Prime. This marks a staggering 100% increase year-to-year and the most viewers for an opening week in 15 years.

Dorian Finney-Smith has not been cleared for basketball activities and will likely miss time to start the season,” ESPN’s Brian Windhorst writes.

The studio program to serve as pregame, halftime and postgame show for highth-profile NBA events on ESPN and ABC.

ESPN has finalized some of the details for its first season airing "Inside the NBA," including its regular-season schedule and format.

The program will continue to be produced by TNT Sports from its Atlanta studios and will feature the longtime cast of host Ernie Johnson and analysts Charles Barkley, Shaquille O’Neal and Kenny Smith.

As news broke Thursday that federal agents had arrested an NBA coach and player as part of a sprawling investigation into gambling, Mike Greenberg, host of ESPN’s morning show “Get Up,” prepared viewers for the network’s wall-to-wall coverage of a scandal.

The Boston Celtics are right back at it on Saturday, Nov. 1, playing the second half of a back-to-back against the Houston Rockets.