The NBA offseason has brought many changes to rosters, coaching staffs, and the list of championship contenders. As we draw closer to opening night, it’s time to move our focus from the potential impact of each offseason event and onto the broader issues that figure to define this season. The BDL 25 takes stock of, uh, 25 key storylines to get you up to speed on where the most fascinating teams, players, and people stand on the brink of 2016-17.

This much I believe to be true: the Philadelphia 76ers will be better this season than they were last year. I believe this because, well, they almost have to be.

Only one team in NBA history has ever managed fewer wins than last year’s 10-72 76ers. (They, too, hailed from the City of Brotherly Love.) Only two have boasted a lower winning percentage than the 2015-16 Sixers (.122): Philly’s 1972-73 squad (.110) and the 2011-12 Charlotte Bobcats, who played only 66 games due to a season-shortening lockout and lost 59 of them, a robust .106 finish that stands as the worst ever. Both of those clubs bounced back from world-historically awful to merely dismal the following season, with the ’73-’74 Sixers going 25-57 and the ’12-’13 Bobcats going 21-61. Brett Brown’s team being that bad again wouldn’t just be tragic. It’d be unprecedented.

Last year’s Sixers ranked 25th out of 30 NBA teams in points allowed per possession and dead last in points scored per possession. Moreover, they ranked dead last in overall attendance percentage, a measurement of how well a team packs the gym, whether their own or the one they’re visiting, on a given night; with all due respect to top-minutes-getters Hollis Thompson, Jerami Grant and Isaiah Canaan, hardly anybody wanted to watch the 76ers last season.

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This much I believe to be true: that will change this year, and not just because the 76ers should be better. It’s how they get better — who contributes to it, and how much, and in what ways — that’ll make them worth watching, and that’ll help clarify for us whether everybody’s favorite long-view-loving, Process-promoting shredder was onto something with his player evaluations and can-kicking approach to roster-building.

For three years, the 76ers have been all but devoid of tangible on-court reasons to believe. Sure, there were delirious flashes: Michael Carter-Williams beginning his NBA career by beating The Big Three, Tony Wroten posting a triple-double in his first career start, K.J. McDaniels’ spring-loaded swats and slams, the periodic displays of athleticism from a roster full of early-20-somethings with long arms and hops for days, etc. They were fleeting, though, as teams lacking the basic elements of NBA consistency — point guards who could throw entry passes and spoon-feed hungry young bigs, professional shooters whom defenders have to respect as credible scoring threats more than 15 feet out, and players with enough experience playing NBA defense to recognize where and when they need to rotate — mostly just drained fans’ lifeforce, offering hardly anything to rally around besides the prospect of Nerlens Noel becoming a top-flight defender.

So far, so good on that front: Noel has ranked fifth and ninth among power forwards in ESPN’s Defensive Real Plus-Minus statistic during the last two seasons (a slightly odd designation, since he played a lot of center, but nevertheless!), ranked just outside the top 20 among rotation big men in opponents’ field goal percentage at the rim when he was defending last year, is already one of just 28 players in Basketball-Reference.com’s database to post at least 100 blocks and 100 steals in multiple seasons, and is only 22 years old.

In the course of a rebuilding process that threw continuity to the wind in favor of near-constant roster churn aimed at unearthing dirt-cheap diamonds, one in which drawing concrete conclusions about players has been damn near impossible, we’ve learned at least that much: Nerlens Noel, unfinished product though he might be, is good at defense. Now, the 76ers just need to figure out everything else. At long last, they’ve got some of the materials with which to start doing so.

View photos LSU’s Ben Simmons raises his hand as he walks off the stage after being selected as the top pick by the Philadelphia 76ers during the NBA basketball draft, Thursday, June 23, 2016, in New York. (AP Photo/Frank Franklin II) More