What's Next After the NBA’s Era of Parity?
After six years of fresh champs, the NBA’s familiar “Can They Finally Win?” storyline has faded some — but plenty of contenders are still searching for their breakthrough moment.
One of the most powerful questions in the NBA has always been:
“Can They Finally Get It Done?”
Because basketball is less prone to randomness than other leagues, it's easier to craft meaningful narratives around the rise and fall of NBA franchises. Michael Jordan had to overcome the Bird/Magic era, and the Detroit Pistons, before finally ascending to the championship. The Portland Trail Blazers, Phoenix Suns, Seattle SuperSonics, and Utah Jazz had to beat Jordan — or Olajuwon’s Houston Rockets while MJ played baseball — if they wanted to have their own breakthroughs.
The same was true for the next generation of would-be contenders, who had to go through the Lakers, Spurs, Heat, Cavs, and Warriors. (LeBron alone left a wasteland of Eastern Conference teams in his wake, locking them out of the Finals for eight consecutive seasons.) Throughout the '80s, '90s, 2000s, and most of the 2010s, the common thread was the tension between teams that monopolized championships and the many challengers trying — and usually failing — to break up that hegemony.
For the latter group, “Can they finally get it done?” was the narrative force propelling their season to its conclusion. But as the 2024-25 NBA season tips off tonight, that typical framing feels a bit off. The unprecedented parity of the past six years — with six different champions in six seasons — has left us with fewer veteran teams to ask that familiar question about.
Take a look at the eight teams with at least a 3 percent chance to win the NBA title according to my 2024-25 forecast model:
Three of this year’s top contenders — the Boston Celtics, Denver Nuggets and Milwaukee Bucks — have already won with their current cores, which is higher than the typical number going into an NBA season. (This list doesn’t even include the Lakers and Warriors, who’ve also won already and sit between 1-2 percent in the title odds.)
For three others, it’s still relatively early in their efforts with their core players. The OKC Thunder and Minnesota Timberwolves collectively had a .500 record as recently as 2022-23, and both teams’ stars are still relatively young — Shai Gilgeous-Alexander will be 26 and Anthony Edwards 23 this year. And as much as it feels like they’ve had him for longer, the Knicks only acquired Jalen Brunson in the summer of 2022. None have been at this quite long enough to build a substantial “Can they finally get it done?” narrative yet.
(The Indiana Pacers might fit into this group, too — they only have 2.1 percent title odds going into the season, but they are coming off one huge breakthrough season with Tyrese Haliburton as a big-time star. It’s still early with them as well.)
That really just leaves the Dallas Mavericks and Philadelphia 76ers as the teams who’ve had their core stars — Luka Dončić and Joel Embiid, respectively — for more than five seasons without winning a ring. These are your “Can they finally get it done?” teams. I’m not sure they can, but every NBA fan is familiar with the stakes around the question. And we’re just asking it less right now.
I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing, though.
The 2024-25 campaign could mark a season of transition — perhaps one of the one-off winners from the past six years will win again, sparking a new cycle of hegemon-versus-challenger battles, like we saw in the 2010s with the Thunder, Clippers, and Rockets trying to dethrone the Warriors, or in the late ‘90s when the Jazz, Sonics, Spurs, Heat, and Knicks all gunned for MJ’s Bulls.
Certainly the hoops cognoscenti regards the defending-champion Celtics with a certain air of invincibility, if not inevitability, and that is supported by the odds above. Boston is the only team above 15 percent in the model, and they are well above it. If any team is going to break the streak of one-off champs, it’s probably the Celtics — even if they might not be able to keep things together long enough for a run at a dynasty.
But we may well end up going seven-for-seven on unique winners. Look below Boston in the odds, and the next three teams (OKC, Minnesota and Dallas, collectively making up nearly 30 percent title odds) are either full-blown or burgeoning “Can they finally get it done?” teams. So are seven of the next nine teams on the list, a group that also includes the Suns, Heat, Magic and Cavs in addition to the Knicks, Sixers and Pacers.
That’s the beauty of a league like the NBA. Its history is overwhelmingly dynastic, which usually lends itself to the storyline of a large group of teams searching for their breakthrough against a single dominant power. But in the rare cases like our current era, there’s still plenty to wonder about.
We can still ask if Philly or Dallas gets their long-awaited title. We can wait for the up-and-coming crop of younger teams to either achieve their destiny, or fight through years of adversity trying. We can see whether the Celtics or Nuggets become a hegemon, or get passed by someone else’s rise.
Whatever happens, nobody really predicted this six-year run of uncharacteristic NBA parity, and — aside from the dawn of the Magic/Bird era ending the stretch where no team won back-to-back titles in the 1970s — we don’t really have a blueprint for how this era ends, either. That means it’s going to be a fascinating season for the league, even if we have to modify some of the usual narratives we craft around the championship chase.
Filed under: NBA