With the NBA’s conference finals kicking off tonight, basketball fans are now guaranteed something unprecedented in the league’s history: this year’s eventual champion will be the seventh different winner in a row. Through a combination of rule changes, booming league depth, and maybe a little bit of blind luck, the NBA has achieved the sort of parity that it has long touted but never really achieved.
Dating back to 2019: Toronto Raptors, Los Angeles Lakers, Milwaukee Bucks, Golden State Warriors, Denver Nuggets, Boston Celtics. Viewed a certain way, that collection of champions is exactly what the NBA probably wants — its two most storied franchises, the tail end of a dynasty, a couple of somewhat smaller markets, all getting a piece. And this year, the title will land in either a decidedly small market including Oklahoma City, Minnesota, or Indiana, or, of course, the biggest market of all, if the Knicks continue a charmed run.
The last time six different teams in a row won the championship is all the way back from 1975 through 1980. Since then, we’ve had various forms of dominance — the Lakers-Celtics rivalry through the ’80s, Pistons-Bulls-Rockets accounting for every title in a ten-year run including two repeats and two three-peats, five more Lakers titles in the Shaq and Kobe era mixed with five for the Spurs, the four Warriors wins, and so on. But now that sort of dominance seems hard to fathom — none of our previous six champions even made the Finals the year after they won, and the possibility of top-tier players pulling a Steph Curry and simply staying in one place for an entire career grows dimmer by the year.
There is so much buzz about what the new collective bargaining agreement does to teams trying to keep star players that it is just sort of assumed last year’s champion Celtics will need to do something drastic as they await their best player’s year-long recovery from an achilles injury. Other teams are also facing down enormous tax bills that their poor billionaire owners are likely to blanche at paying. Oklahoma City seems best positioned to make a long run, given their collection of younger, still-on-rookie-deals stars and a frankly unconscionable number of draft picks stored up from various trades, but even they will soon face the “they can’t pay all these guys” chorus.
Whether you like this or not is a matter of taste. Surely fans of the Pacers, Timberwolves, and other teams that have literally never won an NBA title have seethed on the sidelines as the Celtics and Lakers won 35 of them, as the money bleeding out the seams of the Chase Center sent the Warriors back to the Finals, as a city lucky enough to land Michael Jordan or Tim Duncan watched the trophies roll in. Opening the door to smaller markets and to just the sheer stochastic variety that is more likely to descend upon the NBA with the rules the way they are lets more people in more places in on the action — but it also means players like Luka Dončić or, maybe this offseason, Jaylen Brown get traded, nuclei get blown up faster, and the potential for seeing your team make a sustained run is severely diminished.
After two more rounds, a fan base that has either never seen a championship or has not seen one for literally half a century will get to hold a parade. The way things are going, it will probably be a different one doing the celebrating a year from now.
GET SPLINTER RIGHT IN YOUR INBOX
The Truth Hurts
