The NBA's tectonic plates have shifted
It wasn't long ago that the basketball powerhouses were on the coasts, but most of this year's title contenders are in flyover country
The writer and analyst Kirk Goldsberry had a piece at ESPN in 2021 on what he called the coastal elite status of the NBA’s superstars.
It had a compelling thesis: that the league’s best players were starting to cluster in certain destination cities, like New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Miami. It had some striking data points, too:
Between 1969 and 2010, only seven of the 41 Finals MVPs won the award after changing teams. Then (LeBron) James took his talents to South Beach and set the tone for a new era of superstar free agency. Suddenly, eight of the past 10 Finals MVPs have won the award after changing teams.
The article raised the key question of whether this was good for basketball in the long run. The NBA is obviously not the only sports league with free agency, but it does have some unique characteristics. There are far fewer players on a roster than in hockey, football, or baseball, and fewer still who have a significant impact on games. So the addition (or loss) of one superstar can dramatically swing a team’s fortunes.
The small roster size also means more money available per player, which has meant that stars didn’t necessarily need to grab the most money on offer under the terms of the CBA, which was with their current team. They could still leave as free agents and still sign for more money than they would ever be likely to spend — well over $40-million per season.
Given those factors, what would stop any superstar from seeing out the terms of their early contracts and simply moving to a glamour market at the first opportunity?
But, funny thing: Just a few years later, the NBA’s destination cities are in something approaching disarray. The Los Angeles Lakers won a title in the COVID bubble (which still counts) and then failed to build a sensible roster behind LBJ and Anthony Davis and are now firmly in the Play-In Tournament strata of the Western Conference. The Los Angeles Clippers, having elbowed their way into the upper echelon by poaching Kawhi Leonard from Toronto and Paul George from Oklahoma City, have since said goodbye George and are built around a creaky James Harden and the oft-injured Kawhi. The Golden State Warriors and Miami Heat are each staring at Play-In possibilities. The Brooklyn Nets might be the worst team in the league.
Of the teams in the glamour markets, only the New York Knicks are quite good. I know: the Knicks!
Meanwhile, two of the pre-season title favourites are Oklahoma City and Minnesota, previously known as the kind of teams that good players left. Denver and Milwaukee won championships. And small-market teams like Cleveland, Indiana and Orlando, if not quite among the East powers, are at least giving it a go.
What happened to the coastal elites? There’s no single answer. Some of this is a product of CBA changes that brought in stiff tax penalties for teams that spend above certain thresholds — or ‘aprons’, in the NBA’s parlance. And some of it is as simple as the boom-and-bust cycles of roster building. The two things are not unrelated. The Lakers, Clippers and Warriors all ran into problems trying to build competitive rosters around their highly paid superstars, essentially losing quality depth players because they didn’t want extreme tax bills. A team like OKC has conversely assembled a bunch of young, relatively cheap talent, and has some time before those guys become too expensive to keep together.
But what is most interesting to me is how much all of this has boomeranged in a relatively short time. That ESPN piece was well-argued: how would teams in smaller cities manage in the new NBA economy? But reality has gone in a different direction. The glamour markets wish they had the depth of talent of their small-market opponents.
I would not be foolish enough to declare this a trend away from destination-city dominance. Four years from now, someone else would probably be pointing out how it didn’t turn out that way.
In Case You Missed It, deluxe edition
Time to play catch up on things published elsewhere, which I meant to do in a separate post this week but it’s already Friday and so here we are.
Over at theScore, I wrote the inflection point of the Raptors this season, and specifically their team president, Masai Ujiri. He’s the most successful team builder in Toronto since Pat Gillick, and yet it’s possible his time is nearing an end.
Even an optimist has to think that days of possible contention are some way in the distance now. There are nine teams in the East - last year's playoff teams, plus Atlanta - expected to win significantly more games this season than the Raptors, who if they manage 30 victories will outperform their Vegas over/under total. This is the first season since Ujiri arrived in 2013 that his team is expected to be noncompetitive from the outset.
The full column is here.
The last ride for the Core Four?
It remains kind of hilarious that the Toronto Maple Leafs continue to follow the Dubas Strategy even though we are now two seasons away from Kyle Dubas running the team. After yet another early playoff exit and thundering calls for the team’s top-heavy roster to be retooled in some way, there they are with the same fellows again.
Does transferring the captaincy from Tavares to Matthews count as blowing it up?
This piece was published before the home opener last weekend, but it holds up.
This all feels …. familiar
Speaking of NHL teams that didn’t change a whole lot in the offseason, the Edmonton Oilers got off to a rough start that included some terrible goaltending and not a small amount of fear over What It All Means. Why, it’s almost as if they have done this before. That column is also over at theScore.
And, lastly…
I’m writing weekly(ish) for the Toronto Star on U.S. politics as we grind toward the Presidential election. The first of that series of columns can be found here, in which I listened to one of the most popular podcasts in the world, which is most definitely not aimed at middle-aged men.