The NBA has never been this wide open before - treasure it
Superteams are dead. Or dormant, at the very least.
The NBA opened the 2022-23 season - its 77th campaign - amid an era featuring championship parity the likes of which hasn't been seen since the mid-to-late 1970s.
Four different teams won the last four championships, with seven different squads appearing in the NBA Finals between 2019 and 2022 (only the defending champion Warriors appeared twice). The NBA last had a four-year run like that between the 2006 and 2009 Finals, but the league's much more balanced now than it was then.
Coming off that previous four-year run, the NBA entered the 2009-10 season with the defending champion Los Angeles Lakers as consensus favorites, and the Cleveland Cavaliers and Boston Celtics joining them in a class head and shoulders above the remaining 27 teams. All three began that season with better than 5-1 odds to win the 2010 championship, according to Basketball Reference. No other team had better than 10-1 odds. Los Angeles and Boston wound up meeting in the 2010 Finals, while Cleveland won a league-best 61 games during the regular season.
In stark contrast, this year's title race is the most wide open in league history.
There's no consensus favorite, as the Warriors, Celtics, Los Angeles Clippers, and Milwaukee Bucks can each be found as a title favorite depending on the sportsbook. The consensus 6-1 odds of those co-favorites marks the biggest such figure for any season-opening favorite on record, according to ESPN. In addition, Boston's league-best over/under win total was set at only 53.5 - the lowest total for a top team in the 28-year database of Basketball Reference.
We struggled to narrow down our own list of potential title contenders in our season preview, ultimately settling on 16 teams divided into multiple tiers of contention. In other words, more than half of a league historically known for its championship exclusivity enters the season with at least somewhat realistic Finals ambitions.
To tank or not to tank
With 2023 draft headliner Victor Wembanyama turning heads, much of the recent NBA discourse has been fueled by speculation of an epic tank for the ages.
The San Antonio Spurs, Utah Jazz, Oklahoma City Thunder, Houston Rockets, and Indiana Pacers are already well-positioned to occupy space in the league's basement. With LaMelo Ball sidelined to start the season, the Charlotte Hornets should have a head start on joining them in the Wembanyama sweepstakes. That's already six projected cellar-dwellers, and getting into the lottery offers no guarantees. The seventh-best odds only offer a 7.5% chance of winning the No. 1 pick. Only the worst eight teams have a greater than 5% chance of winning.
There's been so much focus on a potentially shameful race to the bottom that it seems many have lost sight of what's shaping up to be the greatest race to the top the league has ever seen.
Philadelphia 76ers president of basketball operations Daryl Morey has long believed that teams with at least a 5% chance of winning a championship should go all-in toward an aggressive pursuit of a title.
Historically, even those modest odds were reserved for a very select few teams. In the first six years of FiveThirtyEight's NBA predictions model, only three to eight teams entered each season with at least a 5% chance of winning the title. Before this season tipped off Tuesday night, FiveThirtyEight gave 11 teams a 5% shot of winning it all and 13 teams at least a 5% chance of making the Finals.
Using Morey's 5% rule and observing how crowded the bottom of the league already is with tankers, even the middle of the pack - historically a depressing no man's land for NBA teams - can sniff legitimate contention this season. When compared to whatever remnants of lottery odds will be left for them, the projections indicate that, for the first time ever, a middling team would be better served making a win-now trade than one that expedites its free fall.
How we got here
This golden age of NBA parity can be traced back to the summer of 2019.
First, Kawhi Leonard's Toronto Raptors halted (or at least paused) the Warriors' dynasty, defeating the NBA's last great superteam in the 2019 Finals. That kick-started the run of four different champions in four years. Kevin Durant, whose absence from the majority of that series aided Toronto's quest for the 2019 title, then left Golden State in free agency weeks later. The Warriors weren't exactly left for dead, but without Durant, they were merely a great team. With him, they were inevitable.
Later that summer, Leonard chose the Clippers over the Lakers and Raptors. By teaming up with Paul George, Leonard ensured he'd be leading a perennial contender, but this turned out to be the least damaging option for the league's competitive balance.
Had he joined LeBron James and Anthony Davis on what could've been an unfathomably terrifying Lakers squad, the era of the superteam would've continued into a new decade. Had Leonard stayed put north of the border, the Raptors would've been favored to repeat as champions. The new-look Clippers merely joined a group of fellow contenders that's only increased in size and grown in balance in the three years since.
During the three years Durant spent with the Warriors, Golden State's league-leading preseason championship odds ranged from 39% to 55%, according to FiveThirtyEight. No team entered this season with greater than 21% odds.
The Warriors' dynasty is alive and well, and there is an outrageously unique, potentially transcendent talent waiting in the wings for the league's bottom-feeders in the 2023 draft. But there's an equally unique race shaping up for the Larry O'Brien Trophy that should be marveled at and celebrated, too.
It took 77 years for the NBA to get here. Enjoy it while it lasts.
Joseph Casciaro is theScore's senior content producer.