The Rise and Fall of the NBA Superteam (Part One)
What Happened to the NBA’s Dynasties?
I really thought the Denver Nuggets would be back in the Finals, but now that they’ve been eliminated, we know that, for the sixth year in a row, the NBA will not have a repeat champion in 2024. In that time, no defending champ has even returned to the NBA Finals the following year. In fact, since 2019, no runner-up has appeared in the NBA Finals the following year either.
This kind of run is pretty unusual in the NBA, which is generally a league of dynasties and repeat champions. The only other similar stretch in NBA history came all the way back in the 1970s: From 1973 to 1978, no Finals team made it back the following season. But even in that period, the Boston Celtics DID win multiple championships, albeit nonconsecutively, in 1974 and 1976. In contrast, the current period has not seen any team win multiple titles. It’s been an odd stretch of one-year wonders — no defending champ has even made it back to the Conference Finals since the 2019 Warriors.1
What could possibly explain this break from the historical norm in the NBA? Why has no team been able to put together the kind of sustained run that NBA fans are used to seeing? Where is this decade’s version of the Warriors in the 2010s, the Lakers in the 2000s, the Bulls in the ‘90s, the Lakers/Celtics in the ‘80s, and the Celtics in the ‘60s? How have the material conditions in the NBA changed?
To understand what is going on, I think we need to explore the rise and fall of the NBA superteam….
A Super Team Vs. A “Superteam”
We have to be clear about our definitions here, since the word “superteam” gets thrown around a lot these days:
When people call a team like this year’s Celtics a superteam, they seem to be defining it as just any team with a lot of good players, a team that sure is “super” — but that’s not really what I’m talking about. After all, every team that wins an NBA title has a lot of good players. What makes a “superteam” distinct is a more specific approach to roster construction that developed over the past 15 years or so. To wit:
A superteam is a team that is formed by putting together players who are already established stars in the league, with the goal of immediately becoming a title-contender. By this standard, the 2023-24 Boston Celtics do not qualify, since their two best players — Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown — were each drafted by the Celtics, and the team has gradually improved over their time together as those two emerged as stars. It’s true that this year they added two former All-Stars, in Jrue Holiday and Kristaps Porzingis, but the core of the team is the same core that made it to the Finals two years ago. In this way, the Celtics are more like a traditional NBA dynasty, which have historically been built through drafting and developing players over several years.
Indeed, the centerpiece of virtually every NBA dynasty was acquired in the draft, as were most of the key complementary pieces. Your Michael Jordans AND your Scottie Pippens; your Larry Birds AND your Kevin McHales. And those players usually developed gradually alongside one another, growing their games over several years to complement each other. That’s why they often have short playoff runs early in the careers of those stars, before finally emerging as title-contenders after a few years.
What makes the superteam different is the attempt to speed up the timeline by merging already established stars onto the same roster. So while dynasties made up of super players have been a big part of NBA since before the league even formed,2 the “superteam” concept is a more modern invention. It couldn’t really exist before modern free agency, because it was so rare for established superstars to change teams.
The first “superteam” I can really remember3 — although nobody called it that at the time — were the Houston Rockets of the late 1990s. After winning the 1994 Finals the old-fashioned way (Hakeem Olajuwon + a bunch of role players), they started adding a bunch of future Hall of Famers: In 1995, they traded for Clyde Drexler. The next year they added Charles Barkley, and in 1999 they traded for Scottie Pippen. But while the Drexler/Hakeem combo won Houston a second title, the rest of those teams were disappointments. All four stars were past their prime (Drexler retired after 1998 and never played with Pippen), and injuries combined with chemistry problems prevented them from ever reaching the Finals.
In 2000, the Orlando Magic tried something similar, adding Grant Hill and Tracy McGrady in the same offseason. But injuries to Hill spoiled these plans — the two played fewer than 60 games together over four seasons, before McGrady was traded to Houston.
For a long time, these teams served as cautionary tales. Their failures were proof that “superteams” were doomed to fail. There were all kinds of reasons offered — it involved too many egos, or it skipped over crucial development periods for a great team — but the upshot was that for a long time, few franchises attempted this strategy, and few stars pursued it.
And then came the 2007-08 Boston Celtics…
Boston, LeBron, and the Rise of Player Autonomy
That Celtics team was really the beginning of the Superteam Era. Each of Boston’s Big Three had already had a successful individual career: Paul Pierce already had five All-Star appearances; Ray Allen had seven; Kevin Garnett had 10, plus an MVP award. Yet none had ever played in an NBA Finals, and all three had missed the playoffs completely the previous season.
But as soon they came together in Boston, things clicked: In their first season, they won 66 games and the NBA Finals, becoming the first team in more than 30 years to win a title the year after missing the playoffs completely. Their success immediately changed the narrative around superteams. No longer were they doomed — it was just a matter of getting the chemistry right.
And the guy who really learned this lesson was LeBron James.
After LeBron’s Cavs were twice eliminated in the playoffs by the Boston superteam, in 2008 and 2010, he went to Miami and started one of his own with Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh. After making four straight Finals together, LeBron returned to Cleveland and made a SECOND superteam — he pushed the team to trade the #1 pick for Kevin Love shortly after signing, putting him alongside three-time All-Star Love and two-time All-Star Kyrie Irving. Once again, LeBron’s superteam made four straight NBA Finals.
In other words, LeBron James is who really made the superteam a phenomenon. And while fans often like to make these discussions about his psyche or his personal legacy, it seems more fruitful to see them as a response to his material conditions.
For one, James’ decision to leave Cleveland in 2010 was clearly a response to being surpassed in the Eastern Conference by the Celtics. Before Garnett and Allen went to Boston, it looked like LeBron’s Cavs were the ascendant team in the East — they’d made the Finals in 2007, before James even turned 23, while Boston had missed the playoffs completely. But after assembling their superteam, the Celtics won it all in 2008 and made it back in 2010, suggesting that this WAS the new way to build a dynasty.
But more importantly, LeBron’s Decision was ALSO a reaction to the Cavs’ inability to surround him with talent over the first seven years of his career. When you look at the rosters of those teams, it’s really amazing what LeBron was able to accomplish: His 2008-09 team won 66 regular season games, and the second-best player on the roster was probably Mo Williams. In 2007, the Cavs made the NBA Finals relying heavily on Larry Hughes and Eric Snow. It’s hard to think of any comparable examples of a star elevating such mediocre talent.4
It’s no wonder, then, that LeBron started to take matters into his own hands and assert some agency in the construction of his surrounding roster. This might seem obvious in retrospect, but it was a real departure from how the NBA had operated. Indeed, a lot of the backlash James got for The Decision came from a sense that this isn’t how things are done. Even though basically every other big star in NBA history — whether it was Michael Jordan or Magic Johnson or Larry Bird or Kareem Abdul-Jabbar or Bill Russell or Kobe Bryant — got to play alongside other future Hall of Famers early in his career, you aren’t supposed to CHOOSE that. You’re just supposed to luck into those teammates, or count on your boss to find them for you.
But that stigma really came from material conditions. After all, the reason nobody had ever done what LeBron did before 2010 was that you simply COULDN’T. For most of NBA history, free agency either didn’t exist at all or was severely restricted. And even after free agency loosened up in the 1980s, there’s only so much that can be accomplished through individual free agent decisions — that was a big reason for the failure of previous superteams.
It was really a perfect storm that allowed it to work out for LeBron James. So much had to align — from changes to the collective bargaining agreement that pushed the league toward shorter contracts, to the timing of the Olympics to give Bosh, Wade, and James the chance to play together before they were NBA teammates — for his superteams to work out. Plus, of course, LeBron was really, really good. As mentioned, once he got some talent around him, he made eight straight NBA Finals as the head of various superteams. The defining dynasties of the 2010s were the Warriors in the West and LeBron’s Superteams in the East. It’s easy to criticize LeBron’s decisions as quasi-GM — I’ve certainly done my fair share of that criticism! — but he won his first three rings that way, and obviously inspired dozens of copycats.
Now, nearly 15 years after LeBron’s first superteam, we take for granted that star players have control over where and with whom they play. And yet nobody has come close to replicating his success. Indeed, the notable thing about the Superteam Era is that it so rarely works, and the lack of any NBA dynasty over the last six years stems largely from the failure of these superteams.
So what gives? Why has the roster construction strategy that worked so well for LeBron failed so miserably for everyone else? And is the NBA doomed to one-hit wonders for the rest of time? Stay tuned for Part II next week…
One weird consequence/illustration of this is just how many coaches who’ve made the NBA Finals AND been fired since 2018: Tyronn Lue, Nick Nurse, Frank Vogel (fired twice!), Monty Williams, Mike Budenholzer, and Ime Udoka. Usually making the Finals gives you a little more job security than that!
This isn’t an exaggeration: The first pro basketball dynasty — those Minneapolis Lakers teams led by George Mikan — won its first title back in the old Basketball Association of America.
It’s before my time, but you can make an argument that the Philadelphia 76ers teams led by Julius Erivng and Moses Malone in the 1980s were a superteam, since neither Hall of Famer was drafted by Philly: Erving was acquired in a trade with Nets when that team joined the NBA, and Malone was signed as a free agent in 1982. They won a title in their first year together.