How long does an NBA championship window stay open?

Travel back in time with me, all the way to 2010. The Miami Heat have pulled off perhaps the greatest coup in NBA history, convincing LeBron James and Chris Bosh to team up with Dwyane Wade on South Beach. (Well, Biscayne Bay, but we’ll go with LeBron’s terminology.) The team holds a spectacular, smoke and fireworks-infused introduction party where James declares that he and his new teammates plan to win, “Not five, not six, not seven…”  NBA championships, trailing off as he imagines himself and his buddies taking over the league for the ensuing decade.

Of course, that’s now how things turned out. Miami lost the 2011 Finals to the Dallas Mavericks, then won back to back championships in 2012 and 2013 before getting smoked off the floor by the San Antonio Spurs in 2014. That final series sent LeBron back to Cleveland, where he formed an all-new Big Three with Kyrie Irving and Kevin Love.

That trio stayed together for three years and made three consecutive Finals trips, but won only one. Of course, they squared off against another super-team, in two different incarnations. The Golden State Warriors won the first battle in 2015, then lost in 2016 — a year where they went 73-9 during the regular season. The loss inspired them to sign Kevin Durant, which sent the team to three more Finals series, two of which they won. The last of those three trips ended with a loss to the Toronto Raptors just last month, and two weeks later Durant left to join up with Irving in Brooklyn.

Those three iterations of super-teams went to a combined 13 Finals series, ultimately winning six. That’s not exactly the inevitability that was expected upon their formation. Even going back further, the stories have played out pretty much the same way. The Boston Celtics’ Big Three of Paul Pierce, Kevin Garnett, and Ray Allen lasted five years, during which they went to the Finals twice and won once. The Kobe Bryant and Pau Gasol-led Lakers teams that rose back to contenderdom at the same time made three consecutive trips to the Finals, winning two rings along the way.

If you’re sensing a theme here, it should be this: the window of contention, no matter how good a team appears poised to be when it comes together, is likely going to be far shorter than you think. And this has held true for a pretty damn long time.

Consider the following chart, which maps out the “title contenders” for each of the past 20 seasons, determined by the following criteria: In order to be considered a title contender in a given season, a team must:

• Make the conference finals; OR
• Tick off four of the following five boxes:
  • 50-plus wins (or the lockout-shortened season equivalent)
  • Top 10 offense AND top 10 defense
  • Plus-5 Net-Rating
  • Plus-5 SRS
  • Make the second round

Setting such strict criteria obviously leaves certain teams on the outside looking in (this year’s Rockets and 76ers come to mind) and over-includes others (hi, 2016-17 and 2017-18 Celtics). But the cut-off had to be set somewhere, and this line of demarcation seemed as good as any other. To account for possible discrepancies, though, we’re considering a title contention window to be continuous unless and until a team does not hit “contender” criteria in back-to-back seasons.

This way, the 2000-2004 Lakers count as one contender rather than two, while the 2003-2007 Mavericks and the 2011 Mavericks count as distinct entities. Similarly, if the Rockets get back to the Conference Finals next season, then their current contention window will have been open for six years rather than four.

So, the aforementioned chart:

Over the past 20 seasons, every team but two has had at least one season where it filled the criteria of title contender. (The exceptions are the Charlotte Bobcats/Hornets and Washington Wizards.) Within that span, there have been 40 distinct windows of contention open across the league, ranging from single one-year windows for the Hawks, Nuggets, Timberwolves, Grizzlies, Knicks, (New Orleans) Hornets, and 76ers to an incredible 17 (!!!!!) years of continuous contention for the Spurs. The Celtics, Pacers, and Suns have seen their windows open three different times, while the Cavaliers, Heat, and Lakers have each had two separate multi-year runs of contention.

On average, the 40 league-wide title windows have been open for … 2.85 years. And if you take out the Spurs’ unprecedented 17-year window of title contention, the remaining 39 windows were open for an average of just 2.49 years. In other words, nobody tends to take over the league for all that long a period of time — even the teams that seem all-powerful from the moment they get together.

This leads to the massive developments in the summer of 2019. Durant and Irving have teamed up in Brooklyn. Sure, KD is injured and will miss all of next season, but it’s unlikely that duo was going to take over the East for longer than the span of their respective four-year contracts anyway. Kawhi Leonard and Paul George are now together with the Clippers. How long should we expect them to remain near the top of the West? Well, probably not much longer than the three years remaining on George’s deal, if history is our guide. The same goes for LeBron James and Anthony Davis across the hall, Jimmy Butler and whomever Miami ends up trading for to pair with him, Giannis Antetokounmpo and the current iteration of the Bucks, the budding Joel Embiid and Ben Simmons-led contender in Philadelphia, Dame and CJ in Portland, and whatever true contender the Nuggets can eventually build around Nikola Jokic.

Even when teams like the Hornets and Wizards and Knicks and Kings and Timberwolves and Hawks and whoever else finally get things right and reach the peak of their conference, we should not expect them to remain there for long. That’s just not how the league works, even when it seems like it will.