Would a superstar solve your team's problems?
Something for the 28 teams not in the Finals
The NBA Finals start tonight, and promise to be thrilling. But for fans of 28 teams, the questions are already beginning. What can we (including the Thunder) do to be in these Finals in the future?
A decade ago, the Brooklyn Nets were dreadful, winning just 20 games. But they scratched and clawed their way to a medium pile of poker chips by unearthing players like Jarrett Allen, Caris LeVert, and Spencer Dinwiddie.
Then in 2019, the Nets cashed all their chips in. They had a dream offseason, landing Kevin Durant, Kyrie Irving, and DeAndre Jordan. In 2021, they doubled down by trading for James Harden. Everyone knew, then, that they were on their way to contention.
Looking back from 2026, though, the Nets weren’t on a heater, they were on a boomerang. That “superteam” rolled through coaches and role players, but not the playoffs. Those Nets won a grand total of one series (over the Celtics, who started Evan Fournier in place of injured Jaylen Brown) and have long since been broken up. Durant is in Houston, Harden is in Cleveland, Irving is in Dallas, Jordan just finished a season on the bench in New Orleans (and Fournier is in Greece).
And the Nets? They are exactly back where they started: 20-62.
This fits a trend: getting huge stars has always been a mixed bag.
Before apron rules, signing or trading for a superstar at the peak of their powers seemed like a rite of passage to win a title.
Rasheed Wallace joined the Pistons and won it all in 2004.
Shaquille O’Neal joined the Heat in 2005 and won a title in 2006.
Kevin Garnett and Ray Allen went to Boston and won a title in 2008.
The Lakers won the 2009 title not long after they acquired Pau Gasol.
The Heat paid Jermaine O’Neal a ton of money, and even that kind of worked; his expiring contract made space to sign LeBron James and Chris Bosh in 2010, and they won titles in 2012 and 2013.
If you’re reading this, you’re probably a big NBA fan, and as such you’ve grown used to the idea that the best teams assemble the biggest stars. As the thinking, and the media frenzy goes: If we can figure out where players like Giannis Antetokounmpo, Jaylen Brown, LeBron James, or Kawhi Leonard will end up, we will learn a lot about which teams will be good next year.
But it was always easy to miss the failures. The Suns traded for Shaq and turned a great team mediocre. The Pistons took on Allen Iveron’s huge contract and became a bad team. LeBron’s Cavaliers tried again with Shaq, and soon fell to the bottom of the standings. (Two years after signing him, they were 47 wins worse.)
In this era, before the NBA changed the rules, teams acquired players with top-30 contracts 52 times. Mostly it worked out OK—three years later, on average they won 1.1 more games than before the acquisition.
Then we entered a different phase. After the 2011 lockout, the NBA stepped up rules to punish big spenders, and over the next decade, from 2012 to 2023 top-30 salary players switched teams 51 times.
Huge wins made headlines:
LeBron and Kevin Love won the 2016 title in Cleveland.
Kevin Durant won titles with the Warriors in 2017 and 2018.
Marc Gasol arrived on the Raptors in midseason and won a title in 2019.
Chris Paul’s Suns made the Finals in 2021.
Andrew Wiggins won with the Warriors in 2022.
But those successes masked an increasing list of failures.
Joe Johnson didn’t save the Nets.
Russell Westbrook and John Wall both flopped as Rockets.
The Suns only got steadily worse after trading for Durant.
And there was another oddity: in some cases, the damage outlasted the player’s stay. Most prominently, the Warriors dedicated a ton of salary and minutes to Durant which didn’t go to younger players. When Durant left, the Warriors tumbled down the standings. Four years after the coup of signing Durant, the Warriors had won two titles. But, less discussed is the associated reality that they were 56 wins short of where they had been before Durant arrived.
On average, teams that got top-30 salaried players in the decade from 2012 to 2023 ended up worse–eight fewer wins–three years later. The trend went from flat to down.
Then it got worse. In 2023, the league made the rules far tougher on big spenders, introducing the dreaded second apron, which (in addition to steep tax penalties) handcuffs the biggest-payroll teams from using many of the tricks of elite roster building. For instance, second-apron teams can’t aggregate contracts in trades, can’t include cash in trades, can’t use trade exceptions, can’t trade draft picks far in the future, don’t get to use the mid-level exception, and can’t sign waived players.
It’s a pretty boring set of punishments, but effective. The richest teams essentially go to the back of the line when interesting players come available. And arguably it hurts roster building of teams in the first apron, too; compared to prior eras, they’re reticent to add salary.
After all of that went into effect in 2023, acquiring expensive players has become a strategy to decline more and faster than in the past. The Celtics added two huge contracts to an already elite team, and won a title in 2024. But the average team has fared terribly.
Bradley Beal to the Suns, Damian Lillard to the Bucks, James Harden to the Clippers, Anthony Davis to the Mavericks, Jimmy Butler III to the Warriors, Luka Dončić to the Lakers, Paul George to the 76ers, Zach LaVine to the Kings, Darius Garland to the Clippers, Kevin Durant to the Rockets, Trae Young to the Wizards … none of those teams is better now than before the acquisition.
Karl-Anthony Towns to the Knicks might turn out to be the best deal of the bunch: the team has improved a little every year, and the Knicks are in the Finals. The Pacers were brilliant to get Pascal Siakam, who took them to the Finals. But right now their record is far worse than before they got him, largely because of Tyrese Haliburton’s torn Achilles.
Two years after acquiring a major player, the average team had gained 0.7 wins in the pre-apron era, lost 4.0 in the first-apron era, and has already lost 7.3 in the second-apron era. The second-apron number rests on only six deals with two years of follow-up. None of the six improved—but the era is young, and that figure will firm up as more seasons accumulate. What’s already clear is the direction: each tightening of the salary rules has made acquiring an expensive veteran measurably worse.
You might be noting that the story would be different with healthy players. Beal, Butler III, Luka, Trae … all suffered famous injuries that cost them massive amounts of time.
This is absolutely true. The league’s highest-paid players miss nearly twice as many games as they did 20 years ago. This points to, arguably, the best reason not to get a player with a SuperMax contract.
For decades, the highest-paid players averaged 12-14 missed games a season. But since 2019 that number has leapt to 22. A discussion for another day is the measurable reality that the game is more intense now, players move faster, jump higher, and get hurt more often.
But there’s another reason the highest earners miss so many more games now. Thanks to changes in the CBA in 2017, the players with the biggest contracts are old.
Teams acquiring a top-30 salary player today should expect them to miss 22 games per season on average. In effect, this makes your player even more expensive. They count against the salary cap for 82 games, nudge you into the first and second apron for 82 games, and keep you from paying other players for 82 games. Then they only play 60. (Or in many cases, they sit out entire seasons—to devastating effect.)
Meanwhile, we recently explored the very real relationship between giving minutes to young players and winning down the road. That doesn’t happen much on win-now superteams like the Durant Nets.
In 2017, the Nets drafted Jarrett Allen, played him 1,441 minutes, and he emerged as the kind of player any team would want. Durant signed with the Nets in 2019 and first suited up in 2020. That star-laden team preferred that DeAndre Jordan start at center. So in 2021, Allen went to Cleveland in a four-team trade that brought James Harden to Brooklyn.
To keep their stars happy, the Nets populated their roster with a steady stream of old guys like Patty Mills, Goran Dragic, Blake Griffin, LaMarcus Aldridge, and Paul Millsap. In the process, Brooklyn stopped being a place where young players thrived. Kyle Kuzma was traded to the Lakers, Mfiondu Kabengele and Jay Scrubb to the Clippers, Saddiq Bey to the Pistons, Nickeil Alexander-Walker in a package to Atlanta for Taurean Prince. Rodions Kurucs, Džanan Musa, RaiQuan Gray, and Kessler Edwards either weren’t good enough or didn’t get to play enough to feel out their full potential. Cam Thomas played a fair amount as a young player, but even he was shown the door at age 24.
Nic Claxton and Day’Ron Sharpe are the exceptions. Claxton just finished his sixth season as a Net. Sharpe arrived and barely played when the Nets were loaded with stars, and signed a two-year extension at a modest salary in 2025.
Meanwhile, a ton of players from the Nets roster of that era have shone elsewhere. Jarrett Allen is a mainstay of the Cavs, who made the conference finals. Landry Shamet is hitting big shots for the Knicks, who are in the Finals. Caris LeVert just played deep into the playoffs for the Pistons. Bruce Brown (and Jeff Green, who played a smaller role at age 36) won a ring in Denver.
Mostly, the Durant Nets repelled young talent—which is often a hidden tax on teams with big stars.
This points to another trend that cuts across all eras: newly added superstars sometimes help great teams become champions. But they hardly ever do anything meaningful for mediocre teams, likely because older stars are short-term solutions but being a so-so team is typically a long-term problem. Bad teams need minutes, touches, and money for lots of young players, stars inhibit all of that.
This is what weighs on me when I see reports that young teams like the Nets or Blazers might want Giannis: precisely incorrect. Trading the upward trajectory of young players and picks for the last few good years of an increasingly injury-prone player who’ll be 32 when next season starts is the kind of move that history shows has failed more than three quarters of the time in recent years.
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