The Age of Parity in the NBA is Upon Us
Before this past season, the NBA and its players association ratified a new collective bargaining agreement that will govern the sport’s labor organization for the next seven years. For the players, the agreement netted them more money and a greater share of revenues. For the owners, the agreement served to decrease roster volatility, incentivizing players to stay with the franchises that originally selected them, and penalizing teams who overspend in the name of stacking their roster with talent.
Half a year into the agreement, Mat Ishbia’s Suns subverted the intent of the agreement and built a juggernaut oversaturated with top-end talent, blasting through the “second apron” tax threshold provision that will deprive them of roster-building tools because their players are so valuable. Ishbia is zigging where the league is zagging. The CBA discourages construction of “superteams” — teams that have three players who could head a competitive roster as a team’s primary player — and so Ishbia daring to construct one gives him the particular advantage of having no other superteams to compete with, at least not in the traditional sense. It is enough to elevate the Phoenix Suns to the highest levels of title contention on paper. Whether it translates in practice remains to be seen, but the upside of the gambit is fairly obvious.
As a caveat to Ishbia’s strategy, however: The collection of talent he has will be difficult to maintain over time. For one, there’s the luxury tax, a provision born from the 1998 Collective Bargaining Agreement that punishes teams who utilize exemptions to exceed the salary cap. Ishbia’s Suns will cost ownership $56,702,625 this season, according to estimates from Spotrac. Then there’s father time, which has its hands on two of the Suns’ big three, Kevin Durant and Bradley Beal. Durant is 35 and under contract until he turns 38, and Beal is 30 and under contract until he turns 34. Neither is due for another big contract, meaning they’re unlikely to net a big return in trade markets to restock Phoenix’s cupboard of assets. In other words, Ishbia’s strategy appears to be to gun it at the chance of winning 1–2 championships with this core as it ages, and start from scratch with a 30-year-old Devin Booker in a few years, looking to build it again. Compare this to the decade-long dyansties built in San Antonio, Chicago, Boston and Los Angeles in prior eras, and you start to understand the essential difference of the NBA today. You’re likely not going to win a championship without going all in, and going all in is increasingly unsustainable. What you get in the wake of that is parity.
The NBA has crowned five different franchises as champions in the past five years. The last time that happened was 1977–1981.
The “superteam era,” in which multiple trios of star players came together in their primes, was likely the end of the dynastic era of NBA basketball. With the dissolution of the Kevin Durant Warriors, the era of parity had arrived.
If a team other than the Denver Nuggets, Golden State Warriors, Milwaukee Bucks, Los Angeles Lakers, or Toronto Raptors wins the title this year (a team like, say, Ishbia’s Phoenix Suns or the Boston Celtics), the league will have tied its own record of longest streak without a recurring champion, of six straight seasons (set 1975–1980). That’s the longest ever. Comparatively, the NFL just had a streak of eight years from 2009–2016, and the MLB had a streak of eight years from 2014–2021 with different winners.
The problem the owners looked to solve in the recent CBA was that the NBA’s most talented players were spurning small markets in favor of more prominent franchises. In the NBA, size matters, and market size matters most, along with what can only be thought of as “market sex appeal.” Miami, Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Chicago, Houston and Dallas emerged as markets that could fight over top talent. While New Orleans, Milwaukee, Sacramento, Memphis, Minneapolis, Portland, Oklahoma City, Toronto, Salt Lake City were barren fields that would take in only those players deemed imperfect fits for the upper class of NBA teams, for one reason or another.
This market appeal paradigm was the logical result of an era in which players increasingly dictated where they could play, and in a league where an upper class held an iron grip on resources. The summer Dwyane Wade, Chris Bosh, and LeBron James decided to play together in Miami, they could have gone anywhere to do that. Three individuals can alter the ecosystem of the entire association. They could have gone to Chicago. They could have gone to Toronto, New York, Atlanta, wherever. They chose Miami and a day at the beach.
Now, such decisions would come with financial repercussions, for both the players and the team. In response to the “Heatles” formation, the CBA ratified the following year, after a lockout, included a luxury tax for teams who, for one reason or another (as there are many exemptions), exceeded the salary cap in multiple years successively. While leaving their respective teams as free agents would cost James and Bosh heaps of contract incentives, the penalties for team owners are harsher. By attempting to cap the maximum number of premium talents at two per team, the NBA encouraged greater talent distribution, which has been lacking throughout its history.
The Golden State Warriors won four titles in eight years (including three in four) by hitting the lottery with draft selections of three players that were stars that fit together uniquely and symbiotically. Essentially, they were the first dynasty-worthy roster in the “repeater” luxury tax era. Maintaining their dominance indeed proved much harder than in eras past. Now, they are in their tenth year since forming the core that won the first of those four championships, and they are financially strapped by their efforts to keep that core together. Holding on to what they have has cost them $556 million over the last eight seasons, according to Spotrac’s Luxury Tax Tracker, with an estimated $188 million being added to that bill this season for a total estimated bill of $744,343,346.
Since the repeater tax began punishing luxury spenders in 2011–12, eight of the 12 teams to be crowned champions that year paid the luxury tax, with two of those years in which non-taxpayers won it coming on the heels of large spikes in the salary cap that amounted to windfalls for high-spending teams. Trust and believe that the 2016–17 Warriors were not cheap.
As the NBA comes off its 76th season, 10 of its 30 teams, a third of all franchises, have never won a title, with five never having even made a Finals series appearance. Eleven NFL teams have never won a championship, and just six MLB teams have never won a championship. In both cases, however, fewer teams have been kept out of the league finals altogether, with two NFL teams never reaching a championship, and just one baseball franchise, the Seattle Mariners, failing to achieve a World Series berth. Meanwhile at the top of the league, the top two franchises in the NBA have 34 of 76 Finals trophies (44.7%), while the top two NFL franchises have just 12 of 57 Super Bowls (21.1%), and even the Yankees 27 championships plus the Cardinals’ 11 account for just 32.2% of all World Series wins. When you expand the count to top 5, you have 54.2% of World Series wins, 45.6% of Super Bowls, and 68.4% of NBA titles.
In other words, the NBA has a slightly greater number title-impoverished franchises and a greedier upper class of franchises compared to other major sports, including baseball, which doesn’t use a salary cap to encourage talent distribution. This after five years of increased title distribution in basketball.
Ten years from now, the basketball world could feel completely different. Since the Philadelphia 76ers deliberately converted all their valuable players into draft equity during the 2014–15 season, in a blatant effort to get worse, or “tank,” perhaps modeled after the Boston Celtics, who did so more organically the year prior in offloading star talents Kevin Garnett and Paul Pierce to Brooklyn in exchange for a heap of draft assets that became Jaylen Brown and Jayson Tatum, who now form their championship-worthy core. That 76ers era opened eyes across the league, and since then, teams have begun descending in the standings strategically, with coherent vision to create winning teams several years in the future. The San Antonio Spurs, Charlotte Hornets, Washington Wizards, Utah Jazz, Portland Trail Blazers, Detroit Pistons, and Houston Rockets can all be said to be doing this actively, with the Orlando Magic, Indiana Pacers, Oklahoma City Thunder all looking to transition from tanking to competing. In past eras, teams like these would acquire a borderline star talent and try fruitlessly to build around them. Now, teams are savvier as to what a team’s ceiling is with certain types of players, and are more judicious in choosing whom to build around.
Meanwhile, at the top of the league, 11 teams are projected as luxury tax teams, and 10 of the 11 can be said to have title aspirations (the 11th, the Chicago Bulls, are by a factor of 10 the least bit over the luxury tax, owing an estimated $329,102, compared to the next lowest team at $3,163,325 and the highest estimated at $188,166,395).
Teams are either building toward competing for a title, or they’re spending precipitously to give themselves every advantage in pursuit of one. These two factors — investment in competition in the long run and expenditure on competition in the short run — ensure that the NBA talent market will be too frenetic to hold off for a sustained period of dominance, and that there will be new contenders popping up each year that may impact the pecking order.