I have been obsessed with sports for more than 40 years and writing about them professionally for more than 20, and I think I watched more sports in 2025 than I have in any other year of my life. That’s because — as you probably don’t need reminding — it has been a pretty tumultuous year here in the U.S. and I needed as much respite as I could find. Lucky for me and a lot of other fans, sports provided plenty of compelling and sometimes spectacular distractions. Here’s my ranking of the year’s ten biggest sports stories.

10.

The NBA is specifically structured — through its salary-cap arcana and Commissioner Adam Silver’s eternal commitment to financial and competitive parity — to stop any team from dominating the league for too long. Silver is the ultimate spread-the-wealth commissioner, to the point that the NBA actively makes it difficult to hold on to players for too long. This makes what the Oklahoma City Thunder has done all the more impressive. After winning its first NBA title in June — a seven-game epic against the upstart Indiana Pacers — the Thunder, behind MVP Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and a seemingly endless parade of brilliant young players, leaped out to a 26-3 start to the new season. That’s the best in NBA history and puts the team on track to break the all-time-wins record, too. These players are tied together for the next half-decade, and the Thunder is so well-constructed it may even have multiple picks in next year’s draft. The Steph and LeBron era is in its sundown period; these guys are what’s next.

9.

Speaking of the end of dynasties, the Chiefs followed up the start of their Taylor Swift era with a sunsetting of their own. At the beginning of 2025, the Chiefs got stomped in the Super Bowl by the Eagles (and their lunatic fans), and by the end, they had missed the playoffs for the first time all decade, it was widely presumed Swift’s pending hubby would soon retire, Patrick Mahomes had blown out his knee, and the team announced a move from Kansas City to Kansas. The Chiefs had a nice run, but this thing is over. At least we got Swift’s “Wood” out of it.

8.

The past 20 years of men’s tennis have been dominated by Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, and Novak Djokovic to the point that it was an open question whether anyone could conceivably take their place. (For a long time, it looked as if it would just be Djokovic forever.) But in 2025, we got the next great tennis rivalry: Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner are the two best players in the world, and they faced off six times in 2025, including in the finals of three majors. The best was the French Open, a five-set woolly mammoth with........

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