The Superteam is dead. Long Live the Superteam
The Boston Celtics built a championship team the really old-fashioned way. It might not make it any easier to keep them together
The NBA season just completed was the fifth anniversary of the Toronto Raptors’ sole championship, which means we are coming up on the fifth anniversary of the weirdest free-agent courtship in history.
No one had any idea what Kawhi Leonard was going to do. At one point during that playoff run, a couple of reporters were chatting with Raptors president Masai Ujiri and someone jokingly asked if Kawhi was going to re-sign with Toronto. He laughed off the question, and then got serious for a moment and asked what we thought Kawhi would do. Dude: we’ve spent an entire season trying to get the man to say anything at all and none of us learned a damn thing. Kawhi could have been literally mute and he would have been no less inscrutable.
That uncertainty evolved into a brief window in which it seemed that maybe Kawhi was … coming back? Instead of being immediately snapped up by one of the hometown Los Angeles teams, Leonard was suddenly in Toronto, going to a Blue Jays game, visiting Niagara Falls, shopping in Yorkville. What the hell? Had he only just looked at a map?
Dreams of a Raptors dynasty ended, of course, when the Los Angeles Clippers successfully traded an absolute motherlode of assets to the Oklahoma City Thunder for Paul George, clearing the way for Kawhi to join the Clips with PG as his superstar running mate. It was the latest iteration of a superteam, with the novel twist that George wasn’t even a free agent when Kawhi recruited him to a team to which he didn’t even yet belong.
And it was part of Superteam Summer. In the space of a few weeks in 2019, power combos featuring some of the NBA’s biggest stars were formed in Los Angeles, (Leonard, George), Brooklyn (Kevin Durant, Kyrie Irving), Houston (James Harden, Russell Westbrook), and the other Los Angeles (LeBron James, Anthony Davis). It was received wisdom that the best, maybe only, way to NBA title contention was to acquire two megastars, and three if you could swing it, and then fill out the rest of the roster with whatever you could scrape together. Top-heavy lineups had won in Golden State, and Miami, and in LeBron’s second go-round in Cleveland. Boston’s Big Three, the Shaq/Kobe Lakers: there were plenty of examples where Superstars + Flotsam = Championship.
But, funny thing about the ensuing five seasons after Superteam Summer: Those teams won just one title, with the Lakers victorious in the 2020 COVID bubble. The Nets and Rockets failed spectacularly, and while the Clippers didn’t implode like those franchises, they have failed somewhat predictably. Leonard and George have been hurt a lot, and even with healthy there have been questions about how well the two stars fit together in a playoff setting. Even the Lakers, with that title in hand, have quickly devolved into a mess.
And yet, some of the league still seems intent on pairing big stars with other big stars and hoping it all works out. Phoenix took a team that had made the NBA Finals and blew it up to put Kevin Durant next to Devin Booker, and then added Bradley Beal and his giant contract as a third star. They finished sixth in the West and were swept by Minnesota in the first round. The Milwaukee Bucks blew up a title-winning team to give Giannis Antetokounmpo a new running mate in Damien Lillard, and they lost in the first round. (Giannis was hurt, yes, but there had been little evidence that the Bucks were better with Lillard, and bringing him in gifted guard Jrue Holiday to the now-champion Boston Celtics.) The Dallas Mavericks last year acquired Irving to be the second star alongside Luka Doncic, and that resulted in a surprise playoff run through the loaded West — right up until they ran into a Celtics team that overwhelmed them with better depth.
All of which begs the question: Is the superteam era over? It hasn’t really worked for a while now, and will be even harder to pull off now that the NBA’s salary cap rules place tough restrictions on the roster-shaping abilities of teams that spend well over the luxury-tax limit. It seems worth noting that two of the best teams in the West this season were Denver and Oklahoma City, neither of which has tried adding a big-ticket free agent to their homegrown superstars of Nikola Jokic and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, respectively.
Which brings us back to the Celtics. They are almost the anti-superteam, with their top six players all acquired via trades or the draft — and the best two of them, Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown, from the draft haul that came to Boston when Brooklyn traded for aging stars Kevin Garnett and Paul Pierce, an attempted superteam that might be the most disastrous of them all.
But the Celtics will eventually have to move toward superteam status, at least from a contract perspective, once some of their stars are signed to new deals. Brown is already on a contract that would pay him US$57-million in 2026-27, right when Tatum and Kristaps Porzingis are scheduled to be unrestricted free agents. The NBA’s salary cap will rise sharply by then thanks to its bazillion-dollar new television deals, but that will inflate all salaries, and still make it difficult to keep that Celtics core together unless players like Tatum and Porzingis are willing to accept below-market deals.
The irony here is that the provisions of the NBA’s new(ish) collective bargaining agreement were designed largely to respond to the events of Superteam Summer. The previous CBA tried to encourage star players to remain with the teams that drafted them by offering extra years and higher salaries on contract extensions that weren’t available if you switched teams, but many stars didn’t care. It turned out that even though $30-million is an awful lot of money, it matters less when it is the difference between $250-million and $280-million.
The current CBA attempts to solve that problem by making it difficult to build a roster around any more than two max-level contracts (and even two might be tricky). Put another way, once Tatum signs his next megadeal, the Celtics will immediately find themselves in something of a salary crunch.
The team that didn’t just go out and sign a couple of superstars, in other words, could yet fall victim to the rules meant to punish the teams that did.
The Caitlin effect
If Clark is trying to keep her head down and not get caught up in the media swirl that surrounds her, especially in the corners of the internet where racism and homophobia run rampant, that seems reasonable for someone who's been a professional athlete for a matter of weeks.
So says me, in my latest piece at theScore. Read! Download! Share!