The NBA has entered a new era of parity. How did we get here and what’s next?

May 23, 2025 at 10:45 am

FROM THE ABOVE ARTICLE:

For as long as the NBA has been around, it has run not unlike one of many European monarchies, lurching from one dynasty to another. That, as much as anything, has been one of the league’s defining traits.

That period of successive rule, however, may be coming to an end.

Last year, the Boston Celtics became the sixth different champion in the past six seasons. It was only the second time in league history that has happened. If another team that has not won since 2019 wins a championship this season, the NBA will be in unprecedented territory.

While aberrational, it may also be a part of an emerging new normal. The NBA may be in its great era of parity.

It is a changeover of its own making and a drastic leap from the very principles that helped make the league what it is today. The league is hoping a break from its past can help with its future.

For decades, the NBA rode its stars and dynasties, helping the league reach immense heights. Now it is engineering a new path while trying to adjust to a turbulent media environment it argues demands leaguewide competition, not just a few great teams.

“It’s not necessarily artificial parity where we keep moving the chips around and saying we want to go into every season and make sure every team has an equal chance,” NBA commissioner Adam Silver said last month. “It is parity of opportunity in that you want each team to be in a position where if, well managed, they’re in a position to compete.”

The changes, both self-enforced and thrust upon the league by a dynamic local and national media infrastructure, have brought it closer to a NFL-like model. Now, when Silver goes to the podium, he can tout how many teams are still in postseason contention late in the season.

The demise of the super team — as unsuccessful as they have been in recent years — has been overstated. But the latest collective bargaining agreement was negotiated to engineer a flatter playing field. More teams are given a taste of the postseason each year with the Play-In Tournament. Roster-building and financial penalties have been instituted to punish, or snuff out, the high-spenders. All while the last two decades have shown the NBA it can cultivate and nurture superstars in small markets, and a tumultuous media ecosystem may incentivize teams to hold on to them.

Going forward, each team might need a star to build around, not just for its roster, but to increase viewership and sell subscriptions to digital content, including the streaming of games. Victor Wembanyama will be supremely valuable in San Antonio for more than just his basketball skills.

Still, it is an interesting maneuver. The NBA has long sold stars and rivalries and risen on the shoulders of its dynastic franchises. They have been the ones to push the league forward, creating characters and plotlines to pull in even casual fans.

The George Mikan Minneapolis Lakers of the 1950s gave way to the Bill Russell Boston Celtics of the ’60s. The Celtics and Lakers shared control of the NBA in the 1980s. Michael Jordan cleared the field in the ’90s. Tim Duncan, Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant, and Stephen Curry all had their reigns.

Tim Duncan’s Spurs and Shaquille O’Neal’s Lakers battled for NBA supremacy in the early 2000s. (Photo by: Andrew D. Bernstein / NBAE via Getty Images)
But the league has chosen to pull away from that model even as it says it is trying to create different opportunities, not outcomes.

“In this league, superstar players are still going to win a disproportionate number of championships, and well-managed franchises are still going to win a disproportionate number of championships,” Silver said. “Where I thought it wasn’t good for the game and it wasn’t good for the league, that there was no question that there’s a correlation between spending and the quality of the team, and that while I understand that dynasties are something that fans will get behind, at the same time what you hear from fans is they want those teams to be created the right way. So people aren’t that interested in seeing teams buy championships, so to speak.”

The great boogeyman of the modern NBA might just be the what the CBA calls the second apron, a draconian measure added to the league rules inside the 2023 CBA. Just as the 3-point revolution loomed over the league last decade, the second apron may be the defining part of the next one.

The second apron is a salary-cap threshold set this season at $188.931 million, about $18 million above the luxury-tax threshold ($170.814 million). With punishments for exceeding it that range from frozen first-round picks to ghastly luxury tax rates, it was designed to curb balloon payrolls and instill a sense of fairness to the league’s economic picture. Whereas the NBA had several levers to pull to control for revenue discrepancy across the league, it has now built a potentially powerful one to throttle spending as well. Some agents and executives have already come to describe it as a de facto hard cap, a ceiling long resisted by the National Basketball Players Association.

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LakerTom says

May 23, 2025 at 10:45 am

FROM THE ABOVE ARTICLE:

For as long as the NBA has been around, it has run not unlike one of many European monarchies, lurching from one dynasty to another. That, as much as anything, has been one of the league’s defining traits.

That period of successive rule, however, may be coming to an end.

Last year, the Boston Celtics became the sixth different champion in the past six seasons. It was only the second time in league history that has happened. If another team that has not won since 2019 wins a championship this season, the NBA will be in unprecedented territory.

While aberrational, it may also be a part of an emerging new normal. The NBA may be in its great era of parity.

It is a changeover of its own making and a drastic leap from the very principles that helped make the league what it is today. The league is hoping a break from its past can help with its future.

For decades, the NBA rode its stars and dynasties, helping the league reach immense heights. Now it is engineering a new path while trying to adjust to a turbulent media environment it argues demands leaguewide competition, not just a few great teams.

“It’s not necessarily artificial parity where we keep moving the chips around and saying we want to go into every season and make sure every team has an equal chance,” NBA commissioner Adam Silver said last month. “It is parity of opportunity in that you want each team to be in a position where if, well managed, they’re in a position to compete.”

The changes, both self-enforced and thrust upon the league by a dynamic local and national media infrastructure, have brought it closer to a NFL-like model. Now, when Silver goes to the podium, he can tout how many teams are still in postseason contention late in the season.

The demise of the super team — as unsuccessful as they have been in recent years — has been overstated. But the latest collective bargaining agreement was negotiated to engineer a flatter playing field. More teams are given a taste of the postseason each year with the Play-In Tournament. Roster-building and financial penalties have been instituted to punish, or snuff out, the high-spenders. All while the last two decades have shown the NBA it can cultivate and nurture superstars in small markets, and a tumultuous media ecosystem may incentivize teams to hold on to them.

Going forward, each team might need a star to build around, not just for its roster, but to increase viewership and sell subscriptions to digital content, including the streaming of games. Victor Wembanyama will be supremely valuable in San Antonio for more than just his basketball skills.

Still, it is an interesting maneuver. The NBA has long sold stars and rivalries and risen on the shoulders of its dynastic franchises. They have been the ones to push the league forward, creating characters and plotlines to pull in even casual fans.

The George Mikan Minneapolis Lakers of the 1950s gave way to the Bill Russell Boston Celtics of the ’60s. The Celtics and Lakers shared control of the NBA in the 1980s. Michael Jordan cleared the field in the ’90s. Tim Duncan, Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant, and Stephen Curry all had their reigns.

Tim Duncan’s Spurs and Shaquille O’Neal’s Lakers battled for NBA supremacy in the early 2000s. (Photo by: Andrew D. Bernstein / NBAE via Getty Images)
But the league has chosen to pull away from that model even as it says it is trying to create different opportunities, not outcomes.

“In this league, superstar players are still going to win a disproportionate number of championships, and well-managed franchises are still going to win a disproportionate number of championships,” Silver said. “Where I thought it wasn’t good for the game and it wasn’t good for the league, that there was no question that there’s a correlation between spending and the quality of the team, and that while I understand that dynasties are something that fans will get behind, at the same time what you hear from fans is they want those teams to be created the right way. So people aren’t that interested in seeing teams buy championships, so to speak.”

The great boogeyman of the modern NBA might just be the what the CBA calls the second apron, a draconian measure added to the league rules inside the 2023 CBA. Just as the 3-point revolution loomed over the league last decade, the second apron may be the defining part of the next one.

The second apron is a salary-cap threshold set this season at $188.931 million, about $18 million above the luxury-tax threshold ($170.814 million). With punishments for exceeding it that range from frozen first-round picks to ghastly luxury tax rates, it was designed to curb balloon payrolls and instill a sense of fairness to the league’s economic picture. Whereas the NBA had several levers to pull to control for revenue discrepancy across the league, it has now built a potentially powerful one to throttle spending as well. Some agents and executives have already come to describe it as a de facto hard cap, a ceiling long resisted by the National Basketball Players Association.

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