The NBA’s superteam era is over, at least for now. The second apron did its job last offseason. None of the eight remaining teams (now seven, I realize) can be credibly called “super.”
That might be putting it mildly.
- The Nuggets—who won the title two years ago—have one reliably good player. He’s the best player in the world, but as plenty have pointed out, he’s yet to play a season with a fellow All-Star. He’s been in the league for a decade.
- The Thunder keep struggling to put the Nuggets away. Partly because the Thunder have a glaring weakness at the position which most embodies basketball as a sport.
- The Warriors—who won the title three years ago—briefly looked like they were championship caliber, but that had mostly faded by the time the playoffs started, and their best player’s injury has made them possibly the worst team left.
- The Timberwolves didn’t win 50 games this regular season.
- The Celtics—the reigning champions—were already about to trail the Knicks three games to one when their best player got hurt.
- The Knicks were written off as recently as Monday night.
- The Pacers are still being written off.
- The Cavs won 64 games but were completely outmatched by Indiana in the postseason.
Forget super.
Is anybody even good?
I’m being a little facetious. All these teams are good or at least capable of being good. But I’m not sure when the last time was that the NBA champion was as flawed as this year’s champion will be.
Mostly, this is just weird. The NBA hasn’t seen a dominant team since 2017, but every champion from the 2018 Warriors to last year’s Celtics was still really good. If Giannis Antetokounmpo does go to Oklahoma City next year, the 2026 Thunder should be excellent if not dominant. The NBA’s probably just in a little bit of a lull, one created by organizational incompetence in Denver and Los Angeles—where the Nuggets and Lakers should both be much better—and a bizarre one-dimensionality in Boston.
But at the same time…when was the last great Finals? 2024 and 2023 were mismatches. 2022 should have been great, but none of the games were close. 2021 was good, but it’s not a classic. 2020 was the bubble. Was it 2019, when the Raptors upset the Warriors? Was it 2016, when the Cavs and Warriors went all seven?
Right now, an echo of 2021 (Bucks over Suns) seems like the best thing fans can hope for: The Pacers and Timberwolves aren’t good enough to be the best teams in the NBA, but you’d rather have two good–not–great teams than another Nuggets/Heat or Celtics/Mavericks. The Pacers and T-Wolves would entertain. You can do far worse.
More likely, we end up with something a lot like last year, where the Knicks play the role of Luka Dončić (exciting that they’re there) and the Thunder overwhelm them. Pacers/Wolves would be spun as a bad result for the NBA because of market size, and sure, maybe ratings would be worse. But what Adam Silver and the owners really need to worry about is Knicks/Thunder. In the NBA, the professional sports league with the least serious regular season, the playoffs peaking earlier and earlier is dangerous. At some point, the league just becomes a series of Shams reports about who wants to team up with who.
Of course, maybe the NBA is rigged, or capable of being rigged. Maybe the league office really is pulling the lottery strings, or maybe they have something up their sleeve which will get Giannis to Los Angeles as part of a bizarrely constructed new style of superteam, one last confirmation of LeBron’s legacy. I don’t really subscribe to the rigged theory (any of the Sixers, Nets, Spurs, Rockets, Mavericks, and Bulls winning the lottery would have been good winners for a rigged lottery, meaning there was a one-in-three chance someone could believably call it rigged), but I’m not confident enough to say it isn’t true. Maybe there’s a plan in place, even if it’s just a “break glass in case of emergency.”
Assuming it isn’t rigged: Will this fix itself? Will the owners fix it if it doesn’t? The superteam era sucked. It epitomized the worst parts of modern basketball culture. But at the same time, at least it guaranteed there’d be some interest. What becomes of an NBA whose regular season doesn’t matter and whose playoffs stop being interesting in May?
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