Six seasons, six different champions. The fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth ranked teams reached the conference finals within a two-season span. And seemingly more unpredictable than ever: A team with one of the NBA’s two best regular-season records hasn’t won the title since the Toronto Raptors beat the Golden State Warriors in 2019 (although the Boston Celtics can end that streak this year. )
Are we in a new era of parity? And if so, how long will it continue?
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First, the prima facie case that something is possibly different from the above: We haven’t had alternate champions like this since 1970 to 1987, when we crowned a different champion for 18 consecutive seasons before the Los Angeles Lakers repeated in 1988.
That streak ended nearly four decades ago, and even that era comes with something of an asterisk: Nine of those 18 titles were won by the Lakers or the Celtics, who spent most of the 1980s with shared custody of the Larry Trophy O’Brien. Even in the 1970s, the New York Knicks and Celtics were years apart in championships. None of that has happened in the era since 2018.
The real stretch of comparison, then, might be the period from 1975 to 1980, where there was a true “first-time” champion five times in six years, intervening only in the dying embers of the Celtics dynasty in 1976. Similarly , in the last six years the Raptors and the Denver Nuggets won their first titles, the Milwaukee Bucks won their first in 50 years and the Lakers their first since 2010. This year will give us another kind of “rookie”: the first for this group of Celtics or Dallas Mavericks. As in the 1975-80 era, only the dying embers of an ancient dynasty have intervened, the Warriors of 2022.
Plus, there’s the matter of the relative unpredictability we’ve seen in the playoffs. One thing that stands out to me about this era is how postseason results have become somewhat decoupled from the regular season standings, which we can see by the abundance of lower-ranked teams advancing.
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If you break it down by round, you’ll see something else happening: a pretty normal first round followed by chaos in the second round. Lower-seeded teams have won 13 of the last 20 conference semifinals (65 percent). They have only won 14 total series in all other rounds, out of a possible 54 series (25.9 percent), in the last five years.
What this strongly suggests to me is that the notion of parity is still somewhat limited in the NBA, but could be expressed as something like “contender class parity.” Fringe and flawed playoff teams still get eliminated in the first round just in time; The lowest qualifiers are between 8 and 40 in the first round since 2019. Thanks for stopping by. However, as the data above shows, the few who survive will fare much better…. like the 2023 Heat or the 2024 Mavericks.
Basically, when we narrow things down to the top eight teams, the margins between them become very close. That allows the forces of MOML (Make or Miss League) or four hoop bounces or other strange phenomena to take over.
A golden rule that still holds: every champion of the last 44 years has been in the top three with at least 52 wins (prorated to 82 games) and a plus-3 net rating; That will stand if Boston prevails in the NBA Finals, but not if Dallas wins. (The three West teams that met this criteria, Oklahoma City, Denver and Minnesota, have been eliminated; the Mavs beat two of them.)
This data strongly suggests that a certain level of regular season play is still required to be in the championship discussion, but there is a different, higher level of what we might call “unbeatable elite” that teams have had a difficult time achieving.
Compare that to, say, 2018, where the Warriors and Houston Rockets were so much better than everyone else that it was obvious they were playing for the title in the Western Conference Finals. Those two teams were 20-4 in the postseason if you eliminate their seven-game fight against each other.
After the Warriors, I’m not sure any team has matched the level of those two clubs. We’ve only had four teams play at a 60-win pace (prorated) in six seasons, and the previous three failed to reach the finals. (Boston ended that streak this year.)
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In particular, compared to the Kevin Durant-era Warriors, no one has been able to line up three A-Listers on contracts at the same time, except for the Brooklyn Nets, who for various astonishing reasons do not have any of the six championships to which they are I referred to earlier.
Instead, we’ve had a lot of really good but not entirely impervious teams competing at the same time (including the post-Durant Warriors in 2022), and we may be primed for that to continue (you may read on).
In particular, the new collective agreement seems designed to make the current environment continue for a while longer. The rules in the second platform are designed to rein in big spenders and force elite teams to make tough decisions at all levels of the roster once their stars graduate from rookie contracts to supermax extensions. We’ll see how teams play in the coming years, but the rules seem to incentivize even the biggest spenders to limit themselves to a two-year run above second apron before backing off and avoiding the harshest penalties.
So are we seeing more years of alternate champions and new faces holding the Larry O’Brien trophy? Are we prepared for a five-year period with something like Pacers-Wizards-Hornets-Pelicans-Magic as our NBA champions? (Not the Pistons, though. I’m keeping things real here.)
Wait a second. Because just as we have experienced a huge increase in parity, there is another force we must reckon with.
Jayson Tatum and Jrue Holiday laugh during overtime of the Celtics’ victory over the Timberwolves. (Winslow Townson/USA Today)
The Big Green Counterargument
I’m not sure the mass audience has noticed this, since the commentators seem to want to dunk the team every time they allow something worse than a 4-0 run, but… isn’t the argument about parity a little ridiculous until or Unless the Celtics lose?
Boston won 64 games, tied for the most since the Rockets won 67 in 2018, and did so with the fifth-best scoring margin of all time, a plus-11.3 spread that covered the field. Only two other clubs (Oklahoma City at plus-7.4 and Minnesota at plus-6.5) had margins that were even half that.
While the Celtics haven’t exactly faced killer competition in the playoffs, they have dispatched those opponents in a hurry, going 12-2 so far in the playoffs with a plus-10.9 margin while sitting in first place. place in playoff offense and third in defense. .
They are also the only team in the postseason that has been able to withstand a serious injury and move on. While the absences of key players have led to the demise of teams like the Clippers, Knicks, Bucks, Cavs and, most recently, the Pacers, the Celtics have barely missed a beat despite being without star powerhouse Kristaps Porziņģis in recent years. two rounds of playoffs.
He’ll likely return for the finals, where Boston already appears to have an advantage. Dallas lost its last game against the Celtics (with all of its current trade pieces on board) by 28 points in March.
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Are we then entering a new era of parity? Or are we really emerging from an era of parity?
How different would we be at this age if Jayson Tatum hadn’t injured his ankle on the first play of Game 7 against the Miami Heat a year ago and the Celtics had won the title?
If that’s too much for you, also consider some of the circumstances that prevented recent champions from repeating.
Kawhi Leonard left a perfectly good team in Toronto that actually had a better winning percentage without him a year later. Milwaukee’s title defense in 2022 was derailed by an injury to Khris Middleton. Finally, there is a nearly inexhaustible supply of all the desires and possibilities of the Brooklyn group with Durant, James Harden and Kyrie Irving.
The events had to develop in a very specific way to give us a scenario in which no champion was repeated. Lady Luck also becomes very important. In a 30-team league, fortune will always play a role in May and June unless a team builds a Durant-Stephen Curry-Draymond Green-Klay Thompson steamroller level.
Boston is possibly at that level, but no one is fully confident in that idea yet, and we won’t know for at least two more weeks. Other teams could perhaps get there soon, especially Oklahoma City and San Antonio.
Building that level of team in any era is extremely difficult, but we are also entering a new reality. It is now difficult to build such a team and equally difficult to maintain it for any appreciable period of time. Age, injuries, contracts and the apron conspire to make reaching the 55-win level difficult but possible during a multi-season prohibited “career.” But reaching the level of 60 and being almost unbeatable? That simply hasn’t happened since Durant left the Bay.
Again, Boston can argue it’s an exception to that rule if it wins the title this year. The Celtics seem exceptionally well-prepared for a multi-year run at a high level; Extensions for Tatum and Derrick White would have Boston’s top five players signed through 2026, the exact type of two-year run above second baseman I talked about earlier.
On the other hand, Boston has a crucial weakness that most other dynasties didn’t: the Celtics don’t have the best player in the league. No matter how good Tatum is, they won’t have the best player on the court in the finals.
On the other hand, wouldn’t that be the perfect demarcation of our new era of parity? That the most dominant team of this stretch is the one that had a player (barely) on the All-NBA first team and instead beat you by signing smart contracts and with six deep players with real quality?
With or without the Celtics’ reign, however, this year’s Mavs are the latest example of another strong trend that will likely be a lasting lesson of this era: If you’re good enough to make the second round, anything can happen. . In an NBA where seemingly 20 teams “go for it” each year, the game within the game has become getting to those final eight.
Required reading
(Illustration by Dan Goldfarb / The Athletic; Top photos by Giannis Antetokounmpo, Nikola Jokić and Stephen Curry: Gary Dineen, Rocky Widner, Garrett Ellwood / NBAE via /Keynote USA/Getty Images)
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