Is the NBA Going Through a Post-Parity Panic?
If unprecedented coaching changes by the Grizzlies and Nuggets are any indication, the league's wide-open era might be over.
The NBA’s year of Shams-bombs that make you stop, re-check your phone and go… “huh??” continued unabated on Tuesday, when it was reported that the Denver Nuggets were firing championship-winning coach Michael Malone with 5 days left in the regular season, despite the team holding the No. 4 seed in the West and ranking ninth in the league in net rating.
This came just 11 days after the Memphis Grizzlies fired coach Taylor Jenkins despite his own team ranking fourth in net rating at the time of the move, with what were nearly 100 percent playoff odds at the time. (Both figures have since dropped, as one might expect when you fire your coach with just weeks left in the regular season.)
Needless to say, the timing of these moves — and the quality of the teams in question — are highly unusual by the standards of NBA coach firings. Here’s a plot of every in-season coaching change during a full season (i.e., excluding pandemic and lockout years) since 2012-13, by the team’s net rating that year and the time in the calendar when the change took place:
As we can see, the Grizzlies’ and Nuggets’ moves stand out, both for when they happened — no other change in the past decade-plus happened so close to the end of the regular season — and the caliber of teams involved — only the 2015-16 Cavs’ swap of Ty Lue for David Blatt featured a team with a better net rating. While that team famously went on to win the championship with its new coach, the move was made 78 days earlier than what the Nuggets did this week. There’s shaking things up at the last possible moment… and then there’s blowing it up, or whatever both Memphis and Denver just did.
The big question is why? Shams’ reporting cited building tensions between Malone and general manager Calvin Booth, whose own contract failed to be extended as well. As team president Josh Kroenke said:
“There were certain trends that were very worrisome to me at different points in time," Kroenke told Altitude TV. “But they would get masked by a few wins here and there and in the world of professional sports, when winning and losing is your currency, winning can mask a lot of things.”
This echoes a bit of the reasoning that had been given when Memphis let Jenkins go last month:
“The team believed that Jenkins had lost the locker room over the course of the season and that making a change now might mitigate how the Grizzlies finish the season.”
Of course, plenty of contending teams’ coaches go into the final week or two before the playoffs with simmering problems under the surface, usually to be addressed in the offseason. But as we can see from the chart above, practically none of those teams actually jettison their coach with mere days left in the regular season.
The fact that not one, but two teams did this in the past few weeks feels significant. And I think it may signal something profound about where the league is, and where it’s headed.
Back before the season, I asked what was next for the NBA on the heels of its recent stretch of nearly unprecedented parity, with six different champions in six seasons. The league felt like it was at an inflection point: Would the stretch of one-off winners continue? Or would a team like the Celtics, so dominant en route to last year’s title, use that breakthrough as a springboard to a dynastic future? (Or at least, a future where we returned to the familiar NBA pattern of titles being hoarded by just a few franchises.)
As the regular season played out, it became clear that this was an unusually top-heavy season for the best teams in the league, as I wrote about here:
Does the NBA Have More Great Teams Than Ever — Or Just More Bad Ones?
With all the off-court drama leading up to this week’s NBA trade deadline, it’s easy to forget that games are still being played — and many of them are producing some pretty extreme results this season.
That reality has also come into focus in the Neil’s Substack 🏀 2024-25 NBA forecast 📈, which assigns a combined 82 percent title probability to just three teams — the Celtics, Thunder and Cavaliers — while most of the rest (16 percent) is gobbled up by a small group of eight other squads:
The Nuggets are included in that group… for now. The Grizzlies would have been; now they’re not. But the risks both teams have taken recently underscore the new mindset behind creating NBA chaos.
During the parity era, teams could believe that they just needed to get into the playoffs and see what happens. Playing it safe made sense when things were wide-open. But now, the data is telling teams like Denver and Memphis that anybody not named Boston, OKC or maybe Cleveland is a longshot at best — even if they have Ja Morant and Nikola Jokić on their side.
That’s a big shift in the league’s prevailing viewpoint.
So teams may now be trying to shake the snow-globe, deciding that the best strategy in such a top-heavy year is to embrace variance: Fire the coach at the literal last minute. Trade the franchise player. Blow everything up. The devil you don’t know is better than the one you do.
Will these big swings work? It seems doubtful, and there probably was a reason why no previous contender dared to change coaches like this so late in the game. But both Memphis and Denver seemed to feel like they had nothing to lose by trying something different, since they apparently believed the status quo was doomed.
And if a couple of nominal contenders felt that desperate with mere days left before the playoffs begin, it might mean that the league’s run of parity and abundant optimism truly is over.
Filed under: NBA