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The NBA's Chokehold On Great Teams
Or, how I learned to stop advocating for small markets and hate the CBA
Hardwood Paroxysm
Apr 29, 2025
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Kateryna HliznitsovaFor Unsplash+
We’re at an inflection point in NBA team building, where old models are sliding out of control and slamming into the walls of the new CBA. The consequences for franchises in contention are dire.
Depth has always been a tricky issue in the NBA playoffs. 10-man rotations have rarely been used, and rarely work. Certain guys are too young, too green, or unable to adapt their play to the playoffs. When you’re too thin, that causes disaster in bad matchups or with injury.
Being the deepest team usually reveals you’re not a true contender. Depth is something you don’t need in the playoffs… until you do, and then if you don’t have it, you’re sunk.
This is more true in recent years because the gap between regular-season play and playoff play has become more extreme. You need optionality in matchups. Stretch fives. Bigger wings. Quicker wings. Better spot-up shooting or more shot creation. You have to build different lineups for each problem the playoffs present.
And this CBA is built to crush that, if you have stars.
THE TOP-HEAVY PROBLEM
Currently, public perception is that the Nuggets’ roster sucks and that Nikola Jokic has no help.
I find this fascinating because each of their next four rotation players, Michael Porter Jr., Aaron Gordon, Jamal Murray, and Christian Braun, were starters or sixth men on the title team.
Certainly, Murray has not been Playoff Murray in a minute. Gordon is a little older, a little slower after so many minutes. MPJ has dealt with injuries; his matchup viability is always razor thin. Braun’s been good, even if he hasn’t been the kind of defender they drafted him to be this year with an increased minutes load.
But those players are all still good. The problem is that the roster construction under the new CBA made it impossible for them to reload around Jokic and that core without taking gambles… which they lost badly on.
They have no one else.
MPJ is my favorite example of the difference between the previous two CBA constructions. Under the previous CBA, when Porter was up for extension, you had two choices: lose him for nothing, or keep him but pay the tax for the salary addition. That’s it. It didn’t cost you MLE accessibility. You weren’t limited in who you could add in a buyout. It didn’t restrict how you could make trades.
So you kept him. Yeah, it’s an overpay, but you overpaid to get his elite shot-making next to Jokic to win a title. And guess what? It worked! MPJ was a major contributor in the title run.
This new CBA, however, is built to crush the ability to retain guys like that, or at least to pay them the $36 million MPJ makes this season, topping at $40 million in 2027.
If MPJ were up now, the Nuggets would be forced to offer him half of what he’s making now. Some would argue that’s good, that teams shouldn’t just bloat their salary constructs out of laziness. “Oh, well, we need to keep him, so just pay him whatever.”
But fans don’t care how much a guy makes if it’s not restricting the team’s ability to improve the team. They don’t care about the luxury tax bill, nor should they.
The new CBA with the apron restrictions on trades, the Mid-Level Exception, buyout contracts, and more has put teams in the opposite position: it’s better to just lose a guy than keep the good player at a big contract.
Even then, though, MPJ was signed under the previous CBA. The Nuggets agreed to a deal under old rules, and then the league changed the rules to make that decision punitive under the new rules.
The problem is not making teams make tough decisions (though that has other problems); it’s punishing them for decisions they have already made in their title windows. 12
THE TWO TIMELINES CONUNDRUM
We find the same problem with the Bucks. The Bucks built a top-heavy roster around Giannis with Jrue Holiday, Khris Middleton, Giannis, (insert starter here) and Brook Lopez. Mid is a multi-time All-Star. Holiday is the perfect defensive guard. Brook is a DPOY winner who can space to 3-point range.
It worked! They won a title! Giannis is not without rings!
But while 2022 and 2023 were mostly lost to a. injuries and b. Heat voodoo, they made the major changes you want to see a franchise make around a player like Giannis. They traded for Damian Lillard. Yes, they had to give up Jrue Holiday, and Holiday is the kind of player that makes me want to be like, “Is Dame really better though?” but it was Damian Lillard. 3
But look at how the CBA shifted under their feet.
The Bucks were already struggling to fill out the roster around Giannis. They opted for the traditional format: veterans. Wes Matthews, deep in his 30’s after Achilles surgery. Jae Crower. George Hill. Serge Ibaka. Joe Ingles.
You’re just looking for competency, even if the ceiling is limited. And the results were that the Bucks didn’t feel like they had enough guys.
The Bucks had a chance to reconfigure the roster and chose to keep good players with whom they had won a title and whom fans loved. That’s what is supposed to happen!
If you move off of Brook or Middleton, or even Jrue for multiple parts, you get that versatility and optionality you need to build different lineups and make every lineup better, but you lose how good your best lineup can be in terms of pure talent.
So then you go two timelines.
The Warriors and Nuggets went this route, opting to supplement the old(er) cores with young players. James Wiseman, Brandin Podziemski, Jonathan Kuminga, Moses Moody. Christian Braun, Peyton Watson, Jalen Pickett, Julian Strawther, Hunter Tyson.
If it works, then you are able to pay the new guys just as the old guys start to slow down and make less money. Or you can trade them for more pieces and/or picks and start the process over.
There’s one essential issue with this. If you’re a good team… you’re not going to have good draft picks. The draft structure is basically top-ten guys wind up as stars or starters, the middle 10 wind up as starters or rotation players with a few stars thrown in, and the last 10 are a coin flip between rotation and not NBA guys.
There are exceptions, for sure. Nikola Jokic and Draymond Green are two excellent examples. But those are diamonds in a sea of second-round picks that wound up being nothing. It’s not that you shouldn’t try to find those diamonds.
It’s that you can’t rely on them.
This isn’t to say mistakes weren’t made. The Warriors drafted James Wiseman. Zeke Nnaji is the fifth-highest-paid Denver Nugget. Think about that. 4
The problem is that the current CBA makes it so that mistakes are unsurviveable.
Whiffed on a draft pick? Doomed. Handed out an extension to a young player with versatility who it turns out the team collectively doesn’t feel can play in a first-round series? Doooooomed.
In large part, the most impressive thing that Boston has done is not make any mistakes. Tatum and Brown were a hit. They gambled a little on Porzingis, and hit. Jrue Holiday fell into their lap but they got the best version of him, too. Derrick White? Brilliant.
They deserve credit for all those acquisitions, and their individual strength means you can always have successful lineups on the floor. Pritchard, Hauser, and Kornet help and are good players, but are mostly held up by being slot-in role players around multiple starters.
Even then, Boston’s bill is coming due, and you can already see the future where they have to break up the core. What this team looks like after that might be a lot closer to Denver and Milwaukee.
THE KIDS HAVE TO BE ALLRIGHT
Let’s be clear: OKC’s time with this is coming, too. In a few years, it’ll be the extension for Chet, likely a supermax. Jalen Williams’ extension is going to look a lot like the dilemma of Harden’s extension.
One of the very apparent things this CBA is designed to do, along with lowering owner costs, destroying the NBPA middle class, and building a system where you don’t have to win to spend because spending hurts you, is to break up dynasties.
But for now, things are being flipped upside down in the historical age paradigm of the playoffs.
Young players make mistakes because they don’t know better. Every possession in the playoffs matter. But the new CBA will make younger players have to be viable in the postseason. Tatum and Brown are on the right side of 28. The OKC kids are just that, still kids. We’ll see on Cleveland, but their core is younger.
You can have younger stars on cheaper contracts, or you can have younger role players on cheaper contracts. But they have to fit in somewhere. You just can’t make the entire ship out of them like Denver tried.
THE IDEAL STRUCTURE
Three stars is dead. Look no further than Phoenix. Jamal Murray has accomplished more, but Bradley Beal has had a better overall basketball production career than Murray.
Maybe it would have been different if Beal had played with Jokic from the start, just as Murray might have looked better if he had been The Manon a lottery team.
But three stars is over. The salary restraints just won’t allow you to have three players making $100 million.5
You can have two, you need two. If you have a superstar big, you need the star guard. If you have the superstar guard, you need the do-it-all big. Or two wings. Or whatever.
From there, you need a big dropoff to the third guy, somewhere around $25 million. Then you need to fill out the next four roster spots with veterans on affordable deals that are all movable.6 Then two young guys who can become either stars to replace your stars or role players.
AS ALWAYS, BLAME THE BILLIONAIRES
In labor disputes, I’ve tried my best to be objective, understanding the realities of business in a capitalist system7 while also trying to advocate for a fair system for what the players bring to a Players’ League.
The NBPA needs to take ownership when it has issues with domestic violence, and the owners should not try to screw the players out of every penny.
But this new CBA is so transparently double-sided in favor of ownership.
Bomani Jones commented that the purpose of the new CBA was to remove competency as a prerequisite for winning.
I slightly disagree. I think owners want to reward competency and they view cost efficiency as a credit of competency. They don’t want Steve Ballmer to shortcut ingenious cost shaving by just paying for talent and facilities. They don’t want the Dodgers.
But what this has done has made it to where the owners most invested in the fans, who most want to give the fans and communities a winning team and are willing to spend for it are punished.
A system where market advantage doesn’t exist is best for competitive balance. A system where resource commitment is a net negative is just being a bunch of cheap asses.
There are specific owners who I suspect were behind this initiative, the same ones who pushed for a hardcap back in 2011. Here’s the net impact:
Now, my good friend Seth Partnow would scream at me and rightfully so that the players still make the same amount. The players still get the same cut of BRI. The players aren’t losing out on money in this instance.
- The NBA’s role player middle class is going to get aggressively squeezed as teams remain committed to “he’s not a perfect player but he sells jerseys and is a bucket” guys. The dudes who do the dirty work to help you win games are going to suffer for it.
- Dynasties are going to be impossible, because while continuity can get stale quickly, you also can’t build real familiarity because you’ll have to swap out pieces to retain the top end talent.
- Trade markets will remain restrictive as it was at the deadline despite The Trade because second apron teams literally can’t make those deals and teams will look to avoid situations that restrict them. Even the first apron will make teams hesitant to take on dead money because if you’re not in a position where you’re sure you’re a contender, why do anything to restrict flexibility?8
- Teams will justify not spending to keep free agents or pay stars because of what it means for the cap. This is another sneaky thing the owners did: you can justify not paying every star like a star if they’re not a Superstar. You don’t just have to automatically hand over the extension. 9
This is more of a flattening of talent. If you’re a great role player who helps teams win but doesn’t fill the box score you will make closer to what an OK role player who kind of helps his team win sometimes does.
More importantly, because no one can field rosters that are that good now, the lesser and cheaper teams can be more competitive. You don’t have to pay for a great team. You can pay for a pretty good one and be within range of the great teams, and those great teams will have shorter shelf lives so they’ll be in your way longer.
Spend less, make more. Good work if you can get it.
SO THEN… WHAT?
Then nothing. This is how it is. The next opt out isn’t until 2029. Neither side would risk trying to change this model because it would put at jeopardy the incoming money from the new media rights deal. There’s gold in them thar hills.
People want to blame CJ McCollum and the NBPA leadership group, and I get it. But bear in mind that the NBPA has been much more star-led since 2011 and this structure still favors the true elites of the NBPA. Anthony Edwards isn’t going to miss a dime, outside of the limits of the max. And ultimately the players as a whole are responsible for setting the terms of what leadership should negotiate for.
Some get a little of what they want here. The players get no interruptions to a lockout. The stars get their same status. The owners spend a little less individually if not collectively.
Who loses? NBA front offices trying to build contenders around their stars in an already stressful environment. Coaches trying to build contenders with incomplete rosters.10 And fans hoping for teams with players they love for a half-decade or more, that they can build a connection with. It’s an era for Stans.
The owners got what they wanted. Championship legacies are paying the price.
1
This is why most new CBA structures have been accompanied by an amnesty provision. If you’re going to radically reshape how teams need to put together rosters, you have to grant them the ability to reset to a baseline.
2
MPJ is also an extraordinary case because they signed him to an extension, and then he had another back surgery. MPJ has played 220 out of a possible 246 games since his injury, but that injury history makes it difficult to trade him, let alone trade him for comparable value.
3
They also fired Budenholzer. That’s a whole other can of worms we’ll get into another time.
4
Calvin Booth would continue to argue that if Nnaji were a. given floor and development time and b. played at his natural position of power forward (which the Nuggets had redundancy at) then he would have succeeded and been tradeable.
5
Or whatever the percentage of the cap that will be after media rights increase.
6
Minnesota is maybe the most interesting in all these analyses. Because currently they have the superstar max guard (Ant), the non-superstar max center (Gobert), and then Julius Randle making $33 million with a player option for next year. But the big reason they made the KAT trade was to save money and open up savings. Randle’s having a great first round. (Warriors might be a brutal fall to Earth for him.) Does that change the equation on the Wolves? Do they pay to keep Randle? Because if they do, I bet you they’ll wind up moving Gobert. Also, if you’re wondering what I’m talking about when I say filling out the roster with capable veterans on moderate tradeable deals? Naz Reid makes $13 million. Think about that.
7
That is heavily regulated in favor of the owners, funny how that same regulation they are always actively lobbying against is fine when they get to use it to their advantage.
8
This is the other irony, and one Denver wound up in. “Oh, we can’t re-sign KCP, we have to remain flexible so that we can do… nothing because Zeke Nnaji and the kiddos have zero trade value and our owner doesn’t want us to trade MPJ yet.” You wind up talking yourself out of costly moves to save the possibility of a future one you won’t make, so you just… don’t spend.
9
“Oh, so the actual Superstars can get paid any amount and aren’t capped by an artificial max limit right?” Haha, good one, you sweet summer child.
10
I’ll return to this later but I consider both Michael Malone and Taylor Jenkins victims of the new CBA.
The NBA's Chokehold On Great Teams
Or, how I learned to stop advocating for small markets and hate the CBA
open.substack.com