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So here is your list of most recent NBA champions:
2019 — Raptors.
2020 — Lakers.
2021 — Bucks.
2022 — Warriors.
2023 — Nuggets.
2024 — Celtics.
2025 — None of the Above.
We’re officially in the non-repeat phase of the league’s long championship life cycle — seven straight seasons without a franchise going back to back in hoisting the O’Brien Trophy.
This is very much how the NBA’s owners want it, as they’ve devoted hundreds of other people’s man-hours to building a system of rules & regulations that make it difficult to get on a sustained championship roll — difficult, and astoundingly expensive.
Combine that change in league mindset with the factors that have almost always conspired against sustained success, and you get what the NBA has here in May of 2025: Four teams left standing, one of which last won a title in 1973, the other three of which last won a title never.
Knicks. Pacers. Thunder. Wolves. Not a legacy group among them, unless you personally harken back to the halcyon days of Willis Reed in New York, or think the fact that Spike Lee and Walt Frazier are still at most Knicks home games means the club hasn’t been wandering the title desert for the past half century.
For some number of NBA fans, this is a refreshing development; for those of us who’ve always considered the dynastic model in sports to have some value, maybe not so much. But it is definitely the way things are, and where they’re going. The league has made that much pretty clear.
We aren’t far removed from an achievement that I think will take on more luster in the years to come. From 2014 to 2018, the Golden State Warriors played in five straight NBA Finals and locked down three titles in a four-season span, a tear interrupted only by LeBron’s Cavaliers and Draymond Green’s dumb flagrant foul in ‘16.
That’s nuts. Those Warriors teams had a steady core of Steph Curry, Klay Thompson and Green, plus a rotating raft of excellent pros (Andre Iguodala et al), and they were blessed with a coach, Steve Kerr, who proved adept at managing elite talent and massaging elite ego. But the franchise also benefitted from the fact that its ownership group was willing to spend to the moon and back — and that the NBA’s structure at the time allowed them to do it.
Put it this way: When you make it to two straight NBA Finals and then add Kevin Durant to, you know…get better, then you are living in a Wild West payroll landscape in which you can be rewarded for taking some outsize risks. (Not that Durant was much of a risk; he was the NBA Finals MVP in each of the next two seasons. Sigh.)
Since then, it has become more difficult to keep star rosters together. A franchise could always get insanely lucky in the draft (the Warriors selected Curry, Thompson and Green on their own), but in general, teams get better by trading for talent or acquiring it via free agency. Both those routes cost more money than ever and usually imply some veteran status by the players involved, and older guys get injured more often.
Most recently, the NBA’s owners voted to add what is called a second apron to their payroll tax structure. Put simply, if a team crosses a certain threshold on salaries (the first apron), it has to pay a fairly stiff additional penalty, which we used to call the luxury tax. Now, if a team does that but also crosses a second payroll limit, the penalties go into the stratosphere and stay there. Result: No team wants to land on the second apron, so adding proven star talent is a real problem.
We haven’t even touched on the classics: 1.) It’s hard for great players to stay great; 2.) Health is everything; 3.) Owners don’t like to spend Mars money forever; 4.) The NBA continues to get bigger, stronger and faster while playing on the same size court as always.
Though the numbers may be subject to revision, early indications are that injuries spiked nearly 15% in 2024-25, including a spate of lower-body injuries by star players. It’s tough to stay on top unless most of your best guys are playing their best games. I would bet that the defending champ Celtics (Tatum, Porzingis) and the Nuggets (Gordon, Porter Jr.) would agree.
Have we seen the last of repeat champs? I truly hope not, and I say that as a Thunder fan. But let’s be honest: The NBA would have been legions more interesting over the past few years if LeBron James and the Lakers had become even a mini-me Evil Empire, a team we all loved to hate because they were winning. Instead, the Lakers proved how hard it is to win even once, let alone year over year. That’s a lot of things, but interesting isn’t one of them.
I mentioned the Thunder, and they might have one way to do it: Be terrible for years on end, dishing off your best players every year at the trade deadline in return for stacks of draft picks, which you then cash in at what seems like a 95% success rate. Not sure the NBA really wants to see more of that — and anyway, other teams have tried it and discovered that they’re not so good at threading the talent-evaluation needle.
This was always the NFL’s thing, parity. The pro football owners flatten payrolls and jimmy schedules and try to set every franchise on equal footing — and look! The Chiefs still made five Super Bowls in the past six seasons. If you want hope, there it is: Sometimes, a franchise can still foil its league’s dastardly plans. I just can’t find the one in the NBA that’s about to do it.