DENVER — The Denver Nuggets are NBA champions, the fifth straight new team to win it all in the league. While Denver’s path was a long time coming and they were seen as contenders all season, their rise places the NBA squarely in an era of parity.
Locked On NBA host David Locke and Locked On NBA Insider Howard Beck discussed what Denver’s title means for the league big-picture and what it tells us about where its competitive landscape is headed going forward.
Did Denver winning it all move the NBA out of its super team era?
“It can work, it has just to be the right three guys, and it’s going to be really hard to do under this system,” Beck said.
The new NBA collective bargaining agreement limits spending at the highest level and more strongly punishes teams who do overspend.
“It’s going to be harder now,” Beck said. “Not only will there never be another (salary) cap spike, the new CBA that’s kicking in this summer will make it progressively more difficult to stack up max-type players.”
That means even teams who organically build through the draft will eventually be forced to shuffle the deck and refigure their supporting casts. The mostly homegrown Nuggets, who gave Nikola Jokic a supermax extension last summer, could do the same for Jamal Murray soon, and already have role players Aaron Gordon and Michael Porter Jr. making $20-plus million.
“The possibility of super teams in the future is going to require guys wanting so badly to play together that they’re willing to take less than what they’re eligible for,” Beck said.
This offseason doesn’t have as many big-name free agents or obvious big dominoes as maybe 2016 or 2019, but how NBA teams approach this era of parity and new financial rules could mean more action than expected.
“There’s going to be kind of a rebalancing of the NBA economy I think, as teams reckon with all the impacts of the new system,” Beck said. “I think this is actually going to be a crazy summer.”