NBA Conference Finals show parity has arrived and dynasties are gone, and that's a good thing

It’s likely Pacers coach Rick Carlisle long ago recognized the opportunity available to his team in the 2024-25 NBA season, but in the immediate aftermath of Indiana’s advancement to a second consecutive conference final, he chose to make it clear that chance is not exclusive.

“The league is wide open,” Carlisle said, then paused before adding, “this year.”

Could he have stopped with those first five words, though, and still been correct?

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This is no longer the NBA of Russ and the Celts, of Magic and Bird, of MJ and Scottie, of Kobe and Shaq, of Tim, Tony and Manu. The D-word has disappeared from the sport’s lexicon in the 2020s. Whichever team is handed the Larry O’Brien Trophy in mid-June will the seventh different league champion in the past seven years. This trend looks like it will continue. Dynasties are a thing of the past.

And it’s not an MLB-sort of diversity, where different wealthy teams from massive markets share the championships among themselves, like the members of a country club alternating year to year which becomes the golf champion. The market size of the past six NBA winners shows a significant degree of diversity: Boston (No. 11 metropolitan area in the U.S.), Denver (19), San Francisco-Oakland (13), Milwaukee (40), Los Angeles (2) and Toronto (would rank 6^th if part of the U.S.)

The final four teams pursuing a position in this year’s NBA Finals represent a continuation of that trend: Oklahoma City (42), Indianapolis (33), Minneapolis-St. Paul (16) and New York (1).

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NBA Playoffs show league's parity

Parity has come to the NBA. No, sorry, it did not merely arrive. It’s been a revolution. A league built on the enduring supremacy of specific core groups now is ruled by a rotating series of squads that find successful formulas and remain healthy enough to implement them at the most crucial point of the season.

And it’s the best thing to happen to the NBA since Magic Johnson and Larry Bird rescued the Finals from late-night, tape-delayed broadcasts.

The NBA’s salary cap rules have been complicated from the start, but changes contained in a new collective bargaining agreement signed in 2023 made it more challenging for teams to keep their core groups together. That makes the competition more even and engaging.

Perhaps even more important is the way players have developed over the past 15 seasons. Superstars have grown up here and abroad, whether it’s Jayson Tatum, Anthony Edwards or Tyrese Halliburton, or Nikola Jokic, Giannis Antetokounmpo or Luka Doncic. But the gap between the best players and players who can accurately be described as stars –Donovan Mitchell, Trae Young, Tyler Herro – seems not to be as immense as it was with Magic, Michael Jordan, Shaquille O’Neal and LeBron James.

Some of that has to do with the decline of the big man’s importance, but not all of it. Jordan won without a dominant big; so did James. The Steph Curry Warriors showed how the 3-point game could make it less essential to have a dominant low-post presence, but let’s not forget they shot their way to what might have been the last dynasty for a while. They showed you can win a bunch of titles with the right group of perimeter players.

NBA parity isn't for everyone

Not everyone loves the concept of parity. There are those in the journalism business who find it problematic because it makes coverage more challenging; one must come to know more players, more coaches, more team histories and circumstances. It can impact broadcast ratings because audiences are less familiar with the most important players, or because the teams come from smaller markets that don’t have built-in audience advantages. Fans of teams that have been particularly successful lament the surgery that periodically must be executed on rosters.

This is supposed to be a competition, though: an athletic competition. It never should be a test of who’s got the wealthiest owners or most fans, or who gets luckiest in the draft lottery. Remember, when San Antonio wound up with the the first overall pick twice in a decade, the Spurs were gifted David Robinson and Tim Duncan. In that same period, the Kings got Pervis Ellison at No. 1 overall, and the Warriors got Joe Smith.

The NBA first adopted the concept of a salary cap in 1983, for implementation in the 1984-85 season. Before it even began, though, an amendment nicknamed “the Larry Bird exception,” later shortened simply to “Bird rights”, allowed teams to go over the cap to retain important players. That led to decades of dynastic rule.

Starting in the 1983-84 season, when the Bird concept began to have impact, eight teams won multiple championships, just two won a single title each and 20 were shut out altogether. Those eight teams also account for 44 percent of the Finals losses. So that’s just short of 70 percent of Finals appearances consumed by 27 percent of the league.

When this year’s Finals are established, we’ll have had only three two-time entrants in the past seven seasons and a total of 11 different teams represented in that short period of time. The only period in league history even close to this degree of participation was the 1970s, when only two teams won multiple championships (Knicks and Celtics), eight teams won at least one title and 11 teams reached the championship series.

There’s a 75 percent chance we will have an NBA champion that represents a first for its city. The Thunder, Pacers and Timberwolves never have won the league. The OKC franchise did it while playing in Seattle in 1979. Indiana won the ABA title three times, in 1970, 1972 and 1973, but the farthest they’ve gone in the NBA is a 2000 trip to the Finals. The Timberwolves had only eight winning seasons in their first 32 years, before the current run of four playoff appearances.

Only the Knicks have done this before, in 1970 and 1973, with the latter team featuring a rotation that included Hall of Famers Walt Frazier, Earl Monroe, Bill Bradley, Dave DeBusschere, Willis Reed, Jerry Lucas and Dick Barnett. There were only 17 teams in the NBA then. The sport was different. The league was different. This latest change has been among the best for both.