Joe’s Notes: The Post-Superteam NBA

The NBA’s conference finals are set, and there’s nary a superteam to be found. How the four cores were constructed:

• Boston: Two straight top-three draft picks, plus trades (all involving at least one previous first-round pick) which all hold up well in hindsight.
• Indiana: One future-for-future trade, one trade deadline buy, and a first-round draft pick.
• Minnesota: Two first overall picks, two major trades for veterans, draft trading, and undrafted free agency.
• Dallas: Draft trading and one risky deal for a mercurial superstar.

There are star players on these teams, but they all arrived naturally. Kyrie Irving is the closest thing to a schemer in the bunch, but he only ended up in Dallas because his scheme didn’t work. (The Nets reportedly refused to give him what he wanted, which was a reunion in Los Angeles with LeBron James.) Irving is the best second-best player in any of these four lineups. His counterparts are Jaylen Brown, Karl-Anthony Towns, and Pascal Siakam. Good players, yes. But not superteam second options. These are normal teams. These are teams built in traditional, conventional fashion. They are not made from free agency Avengers. They are made from players playing, coaches coaching, and executives executing.

This is, hopefully, the culmination of a landmark shift for the NBA.

There’s still a waft of superteam in the air, and to be fair, the “teaming up” trend could return as this younger cohort ages into agency. There’s generational turnover going on, and it’s the old guys—mostly LeBron this offseason, ever the social butterfly—doing the scheming. Whoever wins the title—most likely the Celtics or Timberwolves—will look a lot like a superteam themselves, the younger parts of their core becoming an institution in the vein of Curry, Thompson, and Green in the middle of last decade. But the true “superteam” approach, the idea of these great players combining forces to form Big Threes? That’s on its way out.

Depending how you classify the 2007–08 Celtics (not a player-assembled superteam, but the first Big Three of its nature), there have either been thirteen or sixteen NBA seasons since the start of the superteam era. In those seasons, only five or six titles have been won by the ring-chasers. The 2008 Celtics, if counted. The 2012 and 2013 Heat. The 2017 and 2018 Warriors. The 2020 Lakers. This isn’t to say that every other champion was built by players putting their heads down and letting the front office do its job. The classification is a matter of degree. But if the superteam era’s ongoing, superteams have won less than half of the titles within it, and four of those can be traced back primarily to the preexisting transcendence of LeBron James or the Steph Curry Warriors.  

The core is important in the NBA. It’s essential. But the lesson the game keeps teaching, through the Warriors and Nuggets and Bucks and Raptors and whoever wins this year, is that there are more efficient ways to construct that core than making a package of three buddies from Team USA. I don’t know whether the problem is team culture or the scarcity of resources left over to build a supporting cast, but there’s more to the NBA than having the best best–players. That’s a good thing for the sport of basketball.

Is the NCAA Still Arrogant?

The latest with the proposed House v. NCAA settlement is that non-Power Five conferences are complaining to the NCAA. The belief from these leagues and their leaders is that power schools should pay more money, and they resent having massive budget cuts foisted upon them without any say of their own. This is a meaningful squabble and could dramatically alter the fabric of college sports. It’s also not the settlement’s significant question.

The significant question with the settlement is how exactly the payouts and the new revenue-sharing proposal will prevent future lawsuits. That’s the line that keeps getting tossed around with them, but it’s never accompanied by an explanation. My impression is that courts must approve all class action settlements, so perhaps that’s the thought here, but the entirety of the antitrust claim against colleges is large. It’s hard to believe this lawsuit is universal in its scope.

I’d love to have this explained to me. I think a lot of us who follow college sports would like this. My fear is that this is more NCAA arrogance in the style of that which led the NCAA to dig in its heels over the twenty years before legal action became overwhelming. My fear is that this is more of the Emmert-era NCAA belief that the NCAA is untouchable. We thought that belief shattered in recent years, the Supreme Court handing out humility while Mark Emmert took his blood money with him into retirement. What if it didn’t, though? Because this concept which colleges are pushing, through leaks—the concept that the House v. NCAA settlement will be a final battle after which all will live in peace—seems so naïve as to appear deceptive. Will the courts call game over if the settlement is reached? Are leaders still thinking there’s “help” coming from Congress?

To an extent, college sports are untouchable. Football and basketball will always look much like they look and have looked. But there are a lot of ways to get to a space where universities have football teams and there’s a big college basketball tournament in March. To an extent, college sports are untouchable. The NCAA is not.

I hope it knows that.

The Rest

The NBA:

• For as impressive as the Timberwolves’ comeback was last night, their comeback after Game 5 might have been even better. They committed to what they did well, engaged every player in his role, and ultimately broke the defending champions’ spirit. The Nuggets’ deficit was not technically insurmountable in last night’s final minute. In most instances, the team in their position would not have questioned whether to keep fouling. The Nuggets questioned. The Nuggets gave up.
• We talked about this two and a half weeks ago, when we updated Core Score, but the Timberwolves have the best depth in the league. They’re the only team in the NBA with six players in The Ringer’s top 100 rankings. Those rankings are fallible, but they’re not built to overvalue players in Minneapolis. All six of the T-Wolves’ key contributors are among the hundred best basketball players in the world. This is part of what made last night’s comeback so effective. There wasn’t just one spark. A Nuggets fan friend lamented Anthony Edwards heating up. The prominent reaction from media was that Karl-Anthony Towns turned it on at the right time. A corner of the media labeled Rudy Gobert as the fulcrum. The T-Wolves had options, and all of them ignited at once. It was like an ambush.
• Going off of this: The Nuggets missed Bruce Brown. Not Brown himself, necessarily, but his contributions. Champions always cycle out those successful role players, but the Nuggets didn’t manage to effectively replace their departure. They needed a little more depth, especially in the second half when the Wolves got to Jamal Murray. It wasn’t there.
• Of course Jalen Brunson broke his hand yesterday. This Knicks postseason couldn’t have ended any other way. I will say: While Tom Thibodeau should probably rest guys more, I’m not sure how many of these injuries were workload-related. Some were. But a lot just happened. Credit to the Pacers, of course—we’ll have more on them tomorrow as the Eastern Conference Finals tip off—but there was some bad luck involved with the Knicks.

The NHL:

• We get another Game 7 tonight, this one styled in the Canadian fashion, with the Oilers heading west to Vancouver. It’s a weird matchup: The Canucks won the division in the regular season but were a playoff underdog even before Thatcher Demko, their goalie, went down. Edmonton’s got the current default best player in the world in Connor McDavid, and he’s paired with another modern great in Leon Draisaitl. Vancouver will be without Brock Boeser for however long their playoffs last, the winger suffering non-life threatening blood clotting in his leg and needing to be placed on blood thinners. The result is that all of the pressure is on Edmonton, Edmonton’s probably the better team, and Vancouver has the better record and is playing at home. Also, it’s hockey, which is not especially a better–team–wins sport in a one-game sample. Series go seven games in hockey to avoid rolls of the dice like these. Both these teams failed to keep themselves away from the craps table.

MLB:

• Jordan Hicks was a bit of a dog yesterday, throwing up before the game but gutting out five innings without his best stuff to help the beleaguered Giants sweep the Rockies. You have to be choosy with your samples if you want to find optimism for San Francisco, but they’re 6–2 over their last eight now and they should get Blake Snell back on Wednesday.
• Austin Riley has now missed more than a week of baseball for Atlanta. He reportedly isn’t swinging a bat yet. He is not on the Injured List. So far, the explanation is that the Braves don’t trust their depth, but the funny piece of that is that at some level, David Fletcher’s part of that depth, and David Fletcher is suddenly under MLB investigation related to the Ippei Mizuhara scandal. Is Ippei Mizuhara making the Braves operate a man down?
• Finally, Yu Darvish recorded his 200^th win across America and Japan. He also stretched a scoreless innings streak to 25. If you’ve been watching the Braves offense against Dylan Cease today, that latter piece is probably the more impressive.

NASCAR, F1, IndyCar:

• Kyle Larson qualifying fifth took the headlines, but Scott McLaughlin took the pole for the Indy 500 in an exciting two days of qualifying (excitement is relative here—it was exciting by qualifying’s standards). Despite some issues with Chevrolet engines, Team Penske swept the front row, and each of the first eight cars is powered by Chevy. (Felix Rosenqvist is the first Honda, starting ninth.)
• On the F1 side, McLaren did indeed put more pressure on Red Bull, with Lando Norris finishing within a second of Max Verstappen while Oscar Piastri nearly nabbed a podium. It might be a flash in the pan, or it might be Red Bull struggling, but the racing does seem to be improving again. The benefit of how noncompetitive F1 can (and did) get is that this is more meaningful than it would be if constraints were imposed to artificially produce closer races.

Golf, Horses:

• I don’t know if this is relevant to Scottie Scheffler’s situation this weekend or not, but when I was in high school, a cross country runner at my school was in a bad accident the morning of the county meet. She was fine, and she ran the race, and she ran out of her mind. She never quite got back to that level the rest of the season, though. To bring it back to Scheffler: I wonder if the adrenaline crash on Saturday and Sunday was just too much. Congratulations to Xander Schauffele. Potential fun trivia answer in a few years, because of the Scheffler arrest.
• No Triple Crown this year. In horse racing. Ohtani might do it in baseball if David Fletcher doesn’t bring him down.

Chicago:

• It wasn’t the worst weekend for the Cubs. Avoiding sweeps is key, the Pirates’ pitching was dominant, and staying above .500/within a series of the Brewers is fine stuff for May. The one real complaint, I think, is how the Cubs have handled Nico Hoerner’s absence, allowing him to miss six games without hitting the IL. Bizarre, especially if they’re calling up Luis Vazquez, as reported. If Vazquez was a major league option on Friday, why not put Hoerner on the IL at that point? It’s like there’s a rule about not having Hoerner and Dansby Swanson on the IL at the same time.
• With Swanson coming off the IL tomorrow, per Craig Counsell a few days ago, it wouldn’t be a huge shock to see Hoerner finally visit the IL himself, especially with Vazquez also coming up. Reporting indicates that isn’t the case, but everyone seems to be leaving the door open. If Hoerner does stay active, Miles Mastrobuoni returning to Iowa would be an expected corresponding move. For the other? I do wonder if Pete Crow-Armstrong might be sent back soon, at least for a minute. His hitting isn’t far behind expectations, and his defense has been great, but if it’s the offense that needs a spark, you might want to take a flyer on the scorching Brennen Davis, or give Alexander Canario or Matt Mervis another shot. Maybe the weirdness of the Vazquez timing has me reaching. Maybe the Cubs are suddenly out on Miles Mastrobuoni (who has a good small-sample xwOBA) or Nick Madrigal (who does not). The Cubs could always send a pitcher down, going with 14 position players for a few days, but Vazquez reads more as a bench guy than a prospect, which makes it complex. It’s a strange situation in multiple directions.
• The Bulls added Dan Craig to their coaching staff. He’s 43, was most recently with the Clippers, and came into coaching in the Heat organization. Good pedigree.
• The Blackhawks extended Brett Seney for a year on a two-way deal around the league minimum. Seney was the IceHogs’ dude this year, so there’s probably more to make of it on that side than at the NHL level. Whether developmentally or competitively or a mixture of the two, teams care about the Calder Cup!
• The Sky won on Saturday, splitting their two-game set in Dallas. Double-double for Elizabeth Williams.