The 2026 Castrol Rising Stars field was built to showcase the league’s next wave, but the draft itself produced a clear headline: Carmelo Anthony walked away with the most complete, most scalable roster, and, in my view, the best team by a wide margin.
Tuesday’s draft split 21 NBA rookies and sophomores into three seven-man teams coached by Anthony, Tracy McGrady and Vince Carter, with a fourth G League team coached by Austin Rivers. The four squads will meet in the familiar Rising Stars mini-tournament on Friday, Feb. 13 at the Intuit Dome in Inglewood, with the semifinals played to 40 points and the final to 25.
Team Melo starts with the top-end advantage: Dallas rookie Cooper Flagg went No. 1 overall in the draft, giving Anthony the tournament’s most bankable two-way centerpiece from the opening pick. But what makes Melo’s roster feel unfair isn’t just Flagg, it’s how cleanly the rest of the pieces fit around him. Stephon Castle, last year’s Rising Stars MVP and the reigning Rookie of the Year, brings real lead-guard gravity and playmaking juice (7.0 assists per game per the event’s official roster page), and he arrives with built-in rhythm next to Spurs teammate Dylan Harper.
Then there’s the structure. Donovan Clingan gives Team Melo the kind of interior control that matters in a race-to-40 format: rebounds that end possessions, screens that create quick separation, and a defensive deterrent that turns sloppy drives into one-and-done trips. Reed Sheppard and Jeremiah Fears supply the perimeter pressure, ballhandling, shot-making, and pace, that can punish the looser, “my turn” possessions these showcases tend to drift into. Even the seventh man, Collin Murray-Boyles, fits the logic: a connector forward who can keep the ball moving and do the dirty work when the stars start hunting highlights.
The other rosters have talent, they always do, but they read a little more like collections. Team T-Mac has serious scoring (Kon Knueppel and Alex Sarr headline it), yet it’s lighter on true table-setting and interior control than Melo’s group. Team Vince is deep and versatile, but it lacks the same obvious “who’s the best player on the floor in a one-possession sprint?” answer that Team Melo has with Flagg, and it doesn’t match the Flagg-plus-Castle pairing as a two-engine advantage.
That’s why Anthony’s team looks like the favorite before a ball is tipped: it has the tournament’s most convincing top-end, the cleanest on-court roles, and the best blend of playmaking, size and defensive backbone for a format where you don’t have time to “figure it out.” If Rising Stars is usually chaos, Team Melo is the rare draft that feels like a plan.
