The NBA postseason, which progresses each spring alongside the capricious Stanley Cup playoffs, has always been the dependable tournament. Or the boring one. The drama of American pro basketball necessitates an obsession with stardom over the shock of unpredictability. It’s the reality television of sporting competitions. For proof, look at all the Kardashians in the arena.
The game is starting to smash convention now, however. By NBA standards, this conference final round is buck wild. It is historic in its parity: A No. 7 seed in the West and a No. 8 seed in the East have advanced out of the play-in tournament, beating the past two champions along the way. During its 77 seasons, the league has seen random teams scatter surprise runs across all the rampant normative behavior. But until now, it hadn’t watched two teams seeded this low tear through the same playoffs.
And they’re not just any underdogs. In fact, we should ban all dark horse descriptions. The Los Angeles Lakers, with a 38-year-old LeBron James and a (somewhat) healthy Anthony Davis, have risen from the 43-39 seventh seed to legitimate title contenders. And the Miami Heat, which has become a model franchise with its iron-willed culture, is a 44-38 eighth seed led by the indomitable Jimmy Butler. Both teams have too much top-end talent and savvy to dismiss.
The Denver Nuggets, the top team in the West all season, are the lone No. 1 seed remaining. The Boston Celtics are a No. 2 seed that should be respected as a No. 1 because they have a lengthy playoff history despite their youth. But even though they made it to the Finals last season, the Celtics don’t look like an overwhelming favorite, not after needing six games to discard the Atlanta Hawks in the first round and coming back from a 3-2 deficit to beat the Philadelphia 76ers in seven games.
In a league that flourishes by playing the hits, the NBA has found a different kind of familiarity this time. The conference finals might as well be dubbed Bubble Redux because Boston-Miami and Denver-Los Angeles hark back to the sport’s oddly enthralling pandemic expedition to Disney World. But this is neither an old story with new packaging nor evidence to forcefully discredit the asinine notion that the bubble playoffs were a fluke.
This postseason provides the strongest confirmation that this new day of NBA parity is sustainable. For the last couple of seasons, I’ve often characterized it as an intermission before the next superpower emerges. But it feels more significant than that. It’s starting to look like an era of hyper competitiveness.
If the Lakers don’t win it all, the NBA will crown a different champion for the fifth straight season. And even if the Lakers do take a confetti shower, they’re hardly the same team that triumphed in the bubble three years ago. They have a new coach in Darvin Ham. James and Davis are the only holdovers from that title team. Put all four teams together, and there are just 14 bubble players (not counting injured Heat guard Tyler Herro) who will factor into the outcome this time.
The NBA has long been a transient league. But for the decade after James made “The Decision” to form a Big Three in Miami, the motivation behind a lot of the movement was to stack superstars on high-profile teams. The players considered it empowerment. The teams considered it an arms race. Then Kawhi Leonard was traded to Toronto, and the Raptors ended the Kevin Durant variant of the Golden State Warriors’ dynasty as Durant and Klay Thompson suffered devastating injuries in the 2019 Finals. That summer, Leonard joined the Los Angeles Clippers in free agency, and Durant chose an ill-fated alliance with Kyrie Irving on the Brooklyn Nets. In addition, Butler signed with Miami instead of remaining with a young 76ers core of Joel Embiid and Ben Simmons. All of a sudden, the NBA had exited an era of super teams and three-star alliances, rebalancing the sport.
Since then, every effort to supercharge a contender has proved futile. The Nets traded a good amount of their depth to build a championship team around Durant, Irving and James Harden. It failed, as did the Lakers’ attempt to put Russell Westbrook with James and Davis. The Phoenix Suns have a pending experiment with Durant, Devin Booker and Chris Paul. But they just lost in the second round to the well-rounded Nuggets, and with decisions to make about the 38-year-old Paul and expensive, ill-fitting young center Deandre Ayton, the Suns need to prioritize role players over headliners.
Parity might not be a fad. In July, a new collective bargaining agreement takes effect, and it comes with all sorts of legislation that will limit the opportunities teams with high payrolls have to add talent. Great teams will figure out ways to prosper in the new system, but windows of contention will be tighter. Smart drafting and player development will be essential. The old inclination to clear out contracts and allow superstars to join forces — which doesn’t really work unless Pat Riley is orchestrating it all — will be thorny with reduced availability of salary-cap exceptions for teams well over the cap.
The NBA is almost halfway through a period reminiscent of the 1970s, when eight teams won championships. But this time may be even crazier because the regular season — full of major injuries as well as ailing or aging players involved in dreaded load management plans — is becoming as much about survival as performance.
The 2016-17 Warriors, who went 67-15 in their first season with Durant, are the last team with the NBA’s best regular season record to win the Larry O’Brien Trophy. In the past six regular seasons, the best team hasn’t made it to the championship round. The last four haven’t even advanced to the conference finals. Furthermore, teams led by the past four league MVPs have been bounced in the first or second round. Stephen Curry, way back in 2015, is the last MVP to end the season hugging the championship trophy.
The MVP award isn’t a pre-title coronation anymore. And the team most equipped to win in the playoffs rarely dominates the regular season now. Volatility is taking over the sport, and if it continues it will either change the way we judge success or — more likely — cause yearly volcanic reactions when greatness vanishes too soon.
Whether it creates a better league depends on the characters navigating change. But it’s an inevitable reality that may be more difficult to break than past systems. Get used to the parity. In the NBA, fickle is the future.