Jalen Brunson, Anthony Edwards, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Tyrese Haliburton. (Illustration by Michael Domine/The Washington Post; Getty Images/Imagn Images photos)
To understand the wide-eyed and baby-faced charm of this NBA conference finals round, count the players with championship rings. You need only one hand and just three of the four remaining teams.
Okay, ready?
You good?
(You’re taking too much time.)
There are five jewelry-flashing souls. The Indiana Pacers have two: Pascal Siakam (with Toronto in 2019) and Thomas Bryant (with Denver in 2023). The New York Knicks have tw0: OG Anunoby (Toronto in 2019) and P.J. Tucker (Milwaukee in 2021). And the Oklahoma City Thunder has Alex Caruso, who won with the Los Angeles Lakers in 2020.
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If the Eastern and Western conference finals were any greener, Kermit the Frog would be envious.
The inexperience and novelty make this fun. There are so many layers of freshness. In addition to the players, three franchises have never hoisted the Larry O’Brien Trophy — I refuse to count the Thunder organization’s past life as the Seattle SuperSonics — and the Knicks haven’t won since 1973. And in this league of superstars, the four all-stars leading these teams are each 28 or younger and vying for their first in the NBA Finals appearances: Anthony Edwards, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Jalen Brunson and Tyrese Haliburton.
The inexperience and novelty also send the strongest message yet that NBA dynasties are done.
The league already is guaranteed to crown a different champion for a seventh consecutive season. The winds of parity have destroyed conventional wisdom, and maybe these playoffs finally have made that clear.
For the previous five champs, we applied old logic in believing they had more titles in them. None of them — not the Lakers after 2020, not the Milwaukee Bucks after 2021, not the Golden State Warriors after 2022, not the Denver Nuggets after 2023, not the Boston Celtics after last season — even has returned to the Finals.
Furthermore, the Lakers are the only one of the five to advance past the second round since winning it all. In 2023, Los Angeles made a surprise run to the conference finals before being swept by the eventual champion Nuggets. Combined, the past five champions are 8-13 in playoff series during the seasons following their triumph.
For most of its 79-season history, the NBA has been a stress test for greatness. The greater the player, the more titles he would collect. Their careers started with obstacles and difficult lessons, but once they passed all the tests, they broke a championship code. Every superstar carried an expectation to win multiple rings, and if he didn’t, his explanation had better be good.
No one truly challenged the system until Joe Lacob, the forward-thinking and bold-talking Warriors owner, helped build a team that he concluded was “light-years ahead” of the NBA. During their run, the Warriors have won four championships, made the Finals six times, and when they had Kevin Durant from 2016-19, they created the most formidable combination of shooting and versatility in NBA history.
The rest of the owners couldn’t take the perfect storm that enabled the Warriors to get under the salary cap to add Durant. The league had seen enough of a superteam era that began with LeBron James and Chris Bosh joining Dwyane Wade in Miami in 2010.
So in 2023, owners negotiated with the players to finalize a new seven-year collective bargaining agreement that established a level of parity the NBA had never experienced. It went too far, if you ask me.
The NBA’s current operating system punishes big spenders more severely, with both greater luxury tax penalties and harsh restrictions on team-building mechanisms, reducing salary cap exceptions, making trades tougher to execute and threatening draft picks if a team remains too far over the cap for too long. These rules don’t take much into consideration how a team was built, meaning that squads built through the draft are basically treated same as ones that gut their rosters to overspend on free agents.
Since the shift, the two champions of the parity era have felt the effect despite climbing the mountain the right way. The Nuggets have an impressive core of players they developed into championship pieces, including three-time MVP Nikola Jokic, Jamal Murray, Michael Porter Jr. and Christian Braun. To finish their team, they made an excellent trade for Aaron Gordon, who has been a perfect fit. But the new collective bargaining agreement has ruined their chances of sustaining championship-caliber depth. Some of it is self-inflicted because Denver management is clearly spooked by the new rules. But even the most wealthy and reckless owners wouldn’t be allowed to do much besides hope their late-first round draft picks outperform expectations.
Then there’s the case of the Celtics, who recently lost superstar forward Jayson Tatum to a torn right Achilles’ tendon that will force him to miss next season. Boston looked like the classic dynasty in the making. The Celtics took the hard route to the 2024 championship, but with Tatum and Jaylen Brown barely in their prime and a slew of impact role players, they appeared set to win at least one more. But before Tatum’s injury, there were concerns that they could keep a team together that would have a 2025-26 payroll near $500 million when adding luxury tax penalties.
No one will feel sorry for Boston, whose fans can use one of their 18 banners to wipe their tears. As long as the Brown-Tatum duo remains, the Celtics will remain contenders. But Brown, 28, is dealing with knee problems. Considering the way injuries have shaped these playoffs, it’s fair to wonder whether today’s stars can handle the kind of burden that this parity system will present.
As four fresh faces complete for glory, it’s best to stay focused on the present. This is true for the 68-win Thunder, the youngest team ever to make it this far, just as it is for the Timberwolves and the joyful 23-year-old Edwards, who has the talent to own the game. This is true for the Knicks even as they reenergize Madison Square Garden, just as it is for the Pacers and all their offensive brilliance.
In the new NBA, tomorrow is not promised. It’s only certain that today will end sooner than we think.