Smart Decisions, Not Big Ones, are the New NBA Currency

The Portland Trail Blazers stand among 30 NBA franchises, all trying to vie for a coveted championship trophy. Once upon a time, title rings were the purview of a select few, teams with transcendent superstars. A new era of parity has swept the league, opening up chances for nearly everyone, as the last seven league champions–all different–would attest.

Today Tim Bontemps of ESPN fleshed out the league’s new opportunities, and the corresponding cost, in an article describing how hard it is to build a dynasty in the modern NBA. The piece is extensive, covering everything from the salary cap to tax aprons to aging stars and talent scouting.

The article highlighted traps and pitfalls that await teams trying to gain elite status. In particular, it emphasized the importance of contract management over the long haul.

For a team to buck the current trend, and emerge as a potential dynasty, it’s not just about collecting talent, which is hard enough. A team also needs to avoid negative or overpriced contracts.

The system, more than ever, prioritizes flexibility. It hurts teams that aren’t constantly focusing on maintaining it and punishes franchises that sacrifice it to fuel a title run.

“You have to be right on every decision,” one Western Conference scout said. “Now, you have to look at things in not a one-year window, but a three-year window. You literally can’t mess anything up. It puts pressure on the organization to think differently and smartly to make sure you are best-positioned to make the right decisions.”

There might be relief on the horizon, however. The league’s rising salary cap, buoyed by an influx of broadcast revenue, may create a new equilibrium:

“We’ve seen a lot of issues with financially all-in teams being able to pull things off the past few years,” one East scout said, “[but] I don’t think people have realized how quickly the cap is going to rise moving forward. It isn’t baseball where there’s no salary cap, but we’ll be back to where there’s going to be the ability to take on money that we just haven’t seen teams be able to.”

For now, it appears NBA franchises that want to grow have to focus on smart decisions, not just big ones.

How the Trail Blazers will fare remains to be seen. They’ve got a host of young players on affordable contracts with more draft picks ahead, but between now and 2028 they also carry significant salary obligations to aging veterans Jerami Grant, Jrue Holiday, and Damian Lillard. Positive grown or negative ballast will be shown on the court and in the boxscores.