When the Dallas Mavericks, with a teensy-tiny chance to win the NBA’s draft lottery, leaped from 11th to first last week, did you shriek?
When the Cleveland Cavaliers and the Boston Celtics—easily the East’s two best teams all season—were ejected from the playoffs days later, did you gasp?
What about that shocking Saturday night in February, when Luka Doncic was traded? Did your jaw drop? Did your eyes pop? Did your fingertips burst into flames as you fired off a mighty “WTF!” to the group chat?
Or did you simply sigh and shrug and say—perhaps to yourself or to the nearest woozy bystander—in a world-weary tone, “Well, that’s the NBA for ya.”
Really, does anything that happens in this league even make us blink anymore? Or have we at long last attained a herd immunity to astonishment? Because by just about any metric, any standard, any historical reference point, we are witnessing an era of absolute, unprecedented havoc in the Association.
No 20-point lead is safe. No 60-win team is secure. A franchise icon can be traded, without notice, months after leading his team to the Finals. The coach and the general manager of a title contender can be fired with three games left in the season. No champion can repeat—or even get back to the Finals.
Next month, the NBA will crown its seventh different champion in seven years, a first in league history. We’ve taken to calling this an “era of parity,” but that doesn’t quite capture the sheer volatility and bonkers plot twists we’re now witnessing on a regular basis: the upsets, the firings, the devastating injuries (oh, the injuries), the trade demands and team hopping, and the insidious payroll rules that sabotage all hope for continuity and make dynasties a distant memory.
“The job,” says former Suns general manager Ryan McDonough, “is harder than it’s ever been.”
Welcome, dear friends, to the NBA’s Age of Chaos. There’s more than just “parity” at work here now. Records mean nothing. Odds mean nothing. Contracts and loyalty and fan feelings mean nothing. Uncertainty rules. Whatever once seemed probable is now iffy … and the once unlikely is now thoroughly possible.
Witness this week’s conference finals, where three teams—Indiana, Oklahoma City, and Minnesota—are vying to win their first title in franchise history. The fourth, the New York Knicks, is aiming for its first in half a century. Meanwhile, the last five champions—the Celtics (2024), Denver Nuggets (2023), Golden State Warriors (2022), Milwaukee Bucks (2021), and Los Angeles Lakers (2020)—are all at home, pondering the nature of existence.
No champion has repeated since the Warriors in 2017 and 2018. No franchise has even won two nonconsecutive titles since then. In fact, no defending champion has made it past the second round since then. The Nuggets and Celtics were each considered a potential dynasty … until they weren’t. Dominance is illusory, or at least temporary.
And the regular-season standings mean less than ever. The Timberwolves, a 6-seed in the West, are now the seventh team since 2020 to crash the conference finals without being a top-four seed. From 2000 to 2019, just one team—yes, one—made the third round after finishing lower than fourth in the regular season (the fifth-seeded Memphis Grizzlies in 2013). The average seeding of a conference finalist from 2000 to 2019? 1.95. The average seeding from 2000 to 2025? 3.45.
The fact is, there’s simply more volatility than ever—both year to year because of superstar movement and night to night because of the power of the 3-point shot.
Just about every day, it seems, we’re wrapping our heads around some historical anomaly.
Two weeks ago, in Game 2 of the Eastern Conference semis, the Pacers erased a 20-point deficit to beat the Cavaliers, marking the fourth comeback from at least 20 down in this postseason—a record in the play-by-play era, per Keerthika Uthayakumar, an independent NBA researcher and Substack author. The next night, the Knicks wiped out a 20-point deficit in Boston—for the second straight game—to bump the record to five. That’s as many 20-point comebacks in two rounds of one postseason as the league saw in the entire 2005-06 regular season.
And there’s been a massive spike in regular-season comebacks, too. Per Uthayakumar: From 1996-97 to 2016-17, the league averaged 12 20-point comebacks per season. Since 2017-18, it’s nearly 28 per season. Chaos, it seems, is the new normal.
Even home-court advantage is fading. At one point this postseason, road teams were 30-30.
Injuries, especially to stars, have also spiked in recent years, putting a crimp in nearly every postseason and paving the way for upsets in every round. In recent years, we’ve seen the Bucks falter without Giannis Antetokounmpo, the 76ers suffer without Joel Embiid, and the Clippers collapse without Kawhi Leonard—and that’s just a small sample.
This year, it was Stephen Curry (hamstring), Damian Lillard (Achilles), and Jayson Tatum (Achilles) whose absences potentially altered a series. All told, five current All-Stars have missed at least one playoff game this year, according to data compiled by Tom Haberstroh of Yahoo, continuing a yearslong trend. Over the last 11 postseasons, an average of 5.7 All-Stars per year have missed games, more than doubling the average (2.4) from the prior 24 postseasons—and a sevenfold increase since the late 1980s, per Haberstroh.
Fans and pundits used to debate whether Magic Johnson’s hamstring injury altered the course of the 1989 Finals against Detroit; now, those types of discussions are a rite of spring.
Would the Cavaliers have prevailed against the Pacers if Darius Garland hadn’t missed the first two games (both losses) and if star forward Evan Mobley hadn’t also missed the second? Would the Celtics have engineered a comeback if Tatum hadn’t gone down in a critical Game 4 loss to the Knicks?
The demises of Cleveland (64 wins) and Boston (61 wins) marked just the second time in NBA playoff history that multiple 60-win teams lost before the conference finals, per Basketball Reference. Likewise, the triumphs of the Pacers and Knicks in those series ranked as two of the biggest playoff upsets since 1988, based on pre-series odds, per Lev Akabas of Sportico.
In another era, the Cavs and Celtics would dust themselves off and vow to win it all next year. But salary-tax pressures, and the dreaded second apron, might force both teams to shed key players—if not this summer, then soon after. Tax and apron concerns have already eroded the championship cores of the Warriors, Nuggets, and Bucks. Those same forces caused the Timberwolves to trade star Karl-Anthony Towns to the Knicks last fall and the Clippers to part ways with Paul George.
Continuity was already hard to come by for the last 15 years of the so-called “player empowerment era,” with stars routinely changing teams via free agency or trade demands. This summer, it could be Giannis asking out. Kevin Durant is expected to change teams for the third time in six years.
Of course, the franchises induce plenty of chaos themselves. The playoff-bound Grizzlies fired coach Taylor Jenkins with just nine games left in the season—a shocking, unprecedented move that was soon trumped by the Nuggets’ even more shocking decision to fire coach Michael Malone and general manager Calvin Booth with just three games left in the season. The Suns fired their coach for the third straight year. The Kings fired their coach and general manager just two years after the franchise’s best season in nearly two decades.
And then there’s the commissioner’s office itself. It was the league, after all, that decided to flatten the lottery odds, in an attempt to dissuade teams from tanking. Which is how we got the lottery night shocker of the Mavericks leaping into the top spot of the draft order. It was the league that pushed for shorter player contracts in each labor deal, unwittingly giving stars more leverage. And it’s the league, in particular commissioner Adam Silver, that has repeatedly pushed for measures that rein in high-spending owners, distribute talent across the league, and generally promote competitive balance.
So here we are, with more uncertainty than ever. More parity than ever. More payroll restrictions than ever. More variance and volatility than ever. More pressure than ever. And, of course, less patience than ever. So buckle up, take a deep breath, and brace yourself for the dips and turns and shocks yet to come. The NBA’s Age of Chaos is here. All we can do is try to enjoy the ride.
