The NBA’s Western Conference is a glorious mess.

Heading into the season, all but two teams can reasonably cross their fingers for a spot in the Play-In Tournament or better. Multiple franchises will be disappointed come April.

At least three of the hopefuls won’t play a second of postseason basketball. Various teams that will push for the top six won’t get there. Groups that consider themselves the quality of conference finalists will get bounced in the first round.

As competitive as the West was a season ago, this season could turn into a fight for the ages.

Do LeBron James or Stephen Curry have a Team USA encore in them? Do the Memphis Grizzlies, behind a healthy and available Ja Morant, re-enter the mix? Does Victor Wembanyama take over as a top-five player?

With the start of training camp less than a week away, Sam Amick and Fred Katz connected to break down five Western Conference storylines they are looking forward to following this season. (And if you missed our East storylines to follow, check those out here.)

Do LeBron James and/or Stephen Curry have a Team USA encore?

Amick: If James and Curry never truly compete for a championship again, then their magical run as Team USA buddies in France over the summer will go down as a swan song for the ages. And considering the greatness that was on display during their gold-medal journey, with the 39-year-old James carrying the Americans for so much of the Olympics and the 36-year-old Curry spectacularly saving them in those final two games against Serbia and France, the pressure is now on the Los Angeles Lakers and Golden State Warriors, respectively, to find a way to avoid wasting the final years for these all-time greats.

If only it were that easy.

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The Warriors are bullish on their offseason moves, as they responded to the departure of the legendary Klay Thompson to Dallas by adding a group of vets (Kyle Anderson, De’Anthony Melton and Buddy Hield) who should fit in well while adding versatility and depth. But they whiffed on the kinds of moves that would have truly aided Curry’s cause, pursuing the likes of Paul George and Lauri Markkanen to no avail. Unless they can land a player of that caliber before the February trade deadline, or Jonathan Kuminga (who is in extension talks) takes another leap that puts him closer to that tier, this march toward mediocrity will likely continue.

Meanwhile, the Lakers are in a similar pickle. For all the optimism that came with their strong finish last regular season, when they won 16 of their final 23 games after starting 31-28, the five-game loss to the Denver Nuggets in the first round was as clear a sign as any that this group isn’t title-contention level. Nonetheless, with adding JJ Redick as head coach qualifying as the biggest move of their offseason and an internal debate continuing about whether Austin Reaves should be part of the future or part of a trade for an upgrade, this roster remains mostly untouched.

Will Victor Wembanyama make “the leap”?

Katz: Maybe we should be asking, does Wembanyama even need to leap? Merely standing on his heels gives him enough lift to scrape the Jumbotron.

He morphed into the scariest defender in the NBA over the second half of last season. No one else sticks a hand up half a mile away from a shooter and still manages to deter a jumper. Somehow, those players aren’t being panicky after they spot Wembanyama in the distance; they’re just being smart.

But what happens when the world’s greatest defender, as Wembanyama should be in his second NBA season, also drops 25 or 27 points a game? What about if he increases a slightly below-average 3-point percentage to one that approaches the high 30s? What about if his passing game continues to improve, as it did over his time as a rookie, when he became progressively comfortable with the speed of the NBA game?

The league is overridden with talent, but there is a world in which we watch Wembanyama on Day 1 and understand immediately: OK, this guy is in contention for All-NBA First Team right now. A gigantic jump at his age isn’t unprecedented. James, for example, made All-NBA Second Team in his second year, turning 20 in December of that season. Wembanyama turns 21 in January.

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Could Wembanyama carry the Spurs, who improved this summer, to the postseason? The West is a monster of its own, but San Antonio played a portion of 2023-24 with Jeremy Sochan, more of a ball-moving forward, at point guard. Now, it has Chris Paul, whose teams are always better when he plays. It deployed Wembanyama at power forward for the first quarter of 2023-24 before deciding the rookie was best at center. The Spurs have depth, spacing and a generational coach at the top.

We already know Wembanyama is a generational player. Maybe, just maybe, we witness generational sophomore strides too.

Which team will emerge from the second tier?

Amick: Preseason projections are always a fool’s errand, but they’re also an annual part of this job. As such, let’s start by saying that, health permitting, I fully expect the Oklahoma City Thunder, Dallas Mavericks, Denver Nuggets and Minnesota Timberwolves to finish in the top four in the West — in no particular order. Regardless of whether that turns out to be the case, that’s a fair prognostication given those teams’ recent pasts and apparent trajectories. Good luck making sense of the second tier from there.

Kevin Durant fades away to try to get off a shot over Sacramento’s De’Aaron Fox. (Mark J. Rebilas / USA Today)

The Phoenix Suns, for starters, are worth watching as a team that could upend the previous prediction about the top four. We just saw Kevin Durant and Devin Booker playing beautiful basketball together with the national team, and the recent history in Dallas and Minnesota tells us that star player pairings often need time to truly work (Bradley Beal’s health is the elephant in the room here). Can Morant lead a Memphis Grizzlies renaissance after all the off-court tumult of last season-plus? (More on that later.)

Does DeMar DeRozan’s arrival in Sacramento make the Kings a legitimate threat?

The Clippers, even without Paul George after he headed for Philly, are still dangerous if Kawhi Leonard and James Harden are on the floor. The Zion Williamson-led New Orleans Pelicans have talent in spades after adding Dejounte Murray. We talked about the issues with the Warriors and Lakers already, but they’re both capable teams that should be in this mix.

All of this parity is sure to excite the folks inside the league office, as it gives even the most casual of fans a reason to tune in from October to April (and beyond). All of that doesn’t factor in Wembanyama’s Spurs and the Houston Rockets, legitimate wild cards here.

What do the Pelicans look like?

Katz: No one in the basketball world expected the Pelicans to hold onto Jonas Valančiūnas once he hit free agency this summer. New Orleans made it clear to the rest of the league that it was willing to listen to offers for its starting center leading into last winter’s trade deadline. By the time the most important part of the season came around, Valančiūnas would occasionally sit on the bench for entire second halves.

The Pelicans lost faith in their center. So what might they make of the big men on their current roster?

Valančiūnas walked to Washington as a free agent, but his departure wasn’t the only hit to New Orleans’ frontcourt. The Pels sent a versatile defender, Larry Nance Jr., to the Atlanta Hawks in the trade in which they acquired Murray.

I wrote earlier this week about question marks for the New York Knicks at center. At least they can cross their fingers and hope Mitchell Robinson returns healthy and productive. If New Orleans wants anywhere near a force down low, or even just someone tall, it has to piece together draft picks to trade for one or pray with even more vigor that Daniel Theis, a career backup, or Yves Missi, a rookie, exceeds expectations.

Does New Orleans pack its wings with its impressive length and let Williamson play the five on offense with Herb Jones guarding opposing centers? As a result, does it implement a high-risk, high-reward style focused on forcing turnovers?

Of course, those are not the only questions for a team that won 49 games last season and, at times, looked like a force in the more competitive conference.

The Pelicans spent the summer dangling Brandon Ingram, an All-Star-caliber free-agent-to-be. He hasn’t inspired enthusiastic suitors. Players of Ingram’s ilk are growing increasingly difficult to trade because of quirks with the new collective bargaining agreement, which makes it difficult to justify giving raises to 20-point scorers who aren’t seen as No. 1 or 2 options on title squads. How does Ingram react to a summer of drama that led to a stalemate?

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How does what’s left of this group play together? Murray is now in town after he could not find a way to make it work with Trae Young in Atlanta, where Murray’s once-vaunted defense dissipated. He improved as a spot-up option but also showed he’s best with the ball in his hands. The problem is, so is Ingram. And so is CJ McCollum. Maybe Williamson too.

Trey Murphy is a budding 24-year-old, but how do the Pelicans find opportunities (and a contract extension) for him?

New Orleans is at its best when Williamson controls the offense. There are few more exciting moments in basketball than the final few minutes of a close Pels game, when head coach Willie Green turns to Williamson, expecting him to initiate the offense, get to the rim however he pleases and create for others on his way there. Williamson isn’t just a bully capable of choosing his favorite spots and battling there uninhibited. He’s also become one of the league’s best passing power forwards.

The Pelicans were already talented, and they flipped a bundle of role players for Murray, a prime-aged former All-Star on a reasonable contract. Yet, they have somehow become more confusing. The question is less about quality and more about cohesion and aesthetics.

What style do the Pelicans play? And how does this all look when it’s put into practice?

Can Ja Morant have a redemption tour?

Amick: You already know Morant is going to be a man on a mission.

The 25-year-old is coming off a year-plus of self-induced chaos. The NBA suspended him 25 games for posing with a firearm on social media on May 13, 2023. It was the second time in fewer than two months that he’d hurt the Grizzlies’ prospects with off-court immaturity, as he displayed a firearm during a live stream on the previous March 4 from inside a Denver-area strip club and earned an eight-game suspension. The list of troubling incidents hardly ended there.

From a basketball standpoint, the travesty of it all is that one of the game’s best young players wasted a chunk of his precious prime. Adding injury to insult, his mid-December return was cut short after just nine games when he needed season-ending shoulder surgery. But Morant is back now, and that means the Grizzlies might have something to say yet again about how the West is won.

Yet, while Morant, Desmond Bane and Jaren Jackson Jr. remain from the team that won 56 games and pushed the eventual champion Warriors in the second round in 2022, everything around that core has changed for the worse. There’s no more Dillon Brooks, Melton, Steven Adams, Tyus Jones or Kyle Anderson. Those Grizzlies were deep, with a defense that ranked third in 2021-22 and fourth in 2022-23. They looked like they were on the doorstep of a dominant run.

Can this group recapture that up-and-coming spirit? It remains to be seen. The Grizzlies have key question marks both young (rookie big man Zach Edey) and old (Marcus Smart), as well as an early setback with promising young big man GG Jackson. The 19-year-old who averaged 14.6 points during their 27-win campaign (in 48 games) is out for at least three months after having surgery to repair the fifth metatarsal on his right foot.

But as Morant’s agent, Mike Miller, put it to our Shams Charania in late July, “Ja Morant is coming for all the work this year — all of it. How soon they forget.”

Mike Miller, Ja Morant’s agent: “Ja Morant is coming for all the work this year. All of it. How soon they forget. That’s all I’ll say: He’s about to come for it.” https://t.co/B0Y4PsAi4f

— Shams Charania (@ShamsCharania) July 31, 2024

That alone might be enough to make Memphis a force in the West again.

(Top photos of LeBron James, Stephen Curry and Ja Morant: Ezra Shaw, Justin Ford / Getty Images)