State Of The Nba: Parity… Or Just Plain Dumb Randomness?

I have this thing happening to me. Every day I go to bed, and without fail, I always find myself waking up at around 4:30 to 5 a.m. Funny thing is, the stuff tends to work in waves; sometimes it disappears and stays that way for a month and I sleep uninterrupted nightly, then it might come back for a week, or two, or eight, or whatever. Must be about aging. Whatever.

I woke up earlier today and checked the time exactly at 5:00 am. There was a notification on the phone; it was Russell Richardson in the P&T Slack letting us boys know about the infamous Jaylen Brown trade.

I checked it, was surprised, couldn’t really believe it, but that was it. Turned to the other side of the bed to try and catch some more sleep till the alarm sounded around an hour later, fully knowing my destiny was not to earn a single extra second of unconscious rest. It’s always the same.

With all of our crew sleeping overseas, I tasked myself with covering the trade in the early morning here in Spain after reading a bunch about it to get the full picture of it. You can read about in my earlier post linked above. And if you read that little story, you know I cut it short of where I wanted it to go because I have to admit I was going to go overboard. Hence, this new (Part II?) post.

With the near-factual feeling across the NBA world regarding how unexpected and ridiculous and hilarious and nonsensical (so much so Brad Stevens extinguished his Instagram account) Boston’s decision to flip Brown — coming off his best NBA season — for a 36-year-old human and four dubious draft picks, it just hit me that while this was ludicrous, the truth is that we’ve been watching similar stuff unfold in front of our eyes for a full week and change.

So consider this post your “how does Brown’s deal affect the Knicks?” silly breakdown, only expanded to the full Eastern Conference and linked to the beaten-to-death concept of parity.

Too much has been written and said about the new NBA Parity Era. And hey, it might be true, because there have been eight different champions in eight consecutive years — including your reigning, defending, undisputed NBA Champions of the World, the New York Knicks. But also, hey, it might be just the damn whole lot of roster-building randomness the NBA is dealing with these days, isn’t it?

After nine days of offseason transactions, from the draft to the first two days of free agency, the Knicks are the only team that can claim to have something no other team in the Eastern Conference can confidently say: ridiculous continuity. Yes, New York has lost Mitchell Robinson (RIP) and has a bench featuring a whole lot of guards, one unproven forward, and… no centers at all. As I type this, pending further moves, it’s a reason for concern.

But the East, simply put, is utterly unrecognizable these days. You don’t need to come out of a ten-, five-, or two-year-long coma to spot the differences. Just a little week-long trip to a hospital without Wi-Fi could have your head spinning as you read this.

• Miami landed Giannis Antetokounmpo but lost Norman Powell and a bunch of rotation players.
• The Hornets followed by sending their two best players away in LaMelo Ball and Miles Bridges to the Western Conference, taking a step back and looking forward to a brighter future.
• Philadelphia answered the Heat’s blockbuster by acquiring Brown in the most shocking trade since Luka Doncic went to LA.
• Toronto brought Kawhi Leonard back, but sent two starters in Brandon Ingram and Grady Dick the other way.
• The Pistons have lost J Cole and could whiff on bringing Jalen Duren back, although even if they do, they are just going nowhere, so don’t worry.
• Indiana flew under the radar and was awful last season, but they will have Tyrese Haliburton back and nearly all of the roster that graced the 2025 NBA Finals.
• Cleveland is perhaps the closest to the Knicks in terms of staying the same, only they might have the biggest FA signing of the year coming their way in LeBron James.
• Atlanta, Orlando, and Chicago mostly stood pat but they don’t scare anybody.
• You already know Washington is my dark horse for ECF, but all they did was luck into the No. 1 pick.
• Then there’s the Nets.

In four words, it’s all a mess. That said…

Miami still needs to build half of its roster with pocket money. Philadelphia has one of the highest ceilings in the conference, but Joel Embiid’s health won’t hold, and we’ll see how the Maxey-Edgecome-Brown trifecta meshes. Toronto looks better defensively, but again, the chem might not be there for them to contend. Boston will be kinda good anyway, but they will lack the ultimate punch come killing time. The 2025 Pacers were a mirage. Cleveland is Cleveland. And the Pistons are the biggest lie in recent history.

The Knicks enter the season knowing exactly who they are. That doesn’t guarantee another trip to the Finals, but it’s a much better place to be than trying to build chemistry around another blockbuster trade coming off a championship.

But again, when it comes to parity, and while the reigning champs are the one team keeping the core together and running it back for the most part, it’s just impossible to bet on them against the field for the 2027 NBA title, given how much the league has changed in a matter of days. How can you expect any consistency when one whole damn conference has changed entirely, and the other one has done the same, as this business is a zero-sum game?

• If you don’t recognize the LA Lakers roster above, you’re not alone. It’s the same story out West. Los Angeles parlayed LeBron’s departure into literally $450 million, all of them spent in a 15-minute flurry of moves.
• The Timberwolves are putting all their money in a fun LaMelo-Ant backcourt that might equally win games or force Minny’s fans out of the arena out of frustration.
• The Blazers don’t have money for their coach or their G League team, but they just traded for Ja Morant.
• Phoenix is now linked to an awful person forever.
• The Clippers are back to where they belong in Los Angeles sports lore.
• Golden State might soon lose the G from its name.

Shouts out to the Thunder and the Spurs — even though they’ve made a few moves — for nearly keeping their squads together, barring blatant dumpings and hiring a rapper.

So with all of the above written, how does the NBA or any fan out there expect anything else than “parity” or, better said, just plain dumb randomness? Who can really predict the outcome of a system whose variables change massively from one iteration to the next?

And again, even if the same suspects and longest-running teams will always at least be considered to be in the picture once again—your Knicks, Spurs, Thunder—there is nothing you can really do if you’re dealing with 15 different, new teams every year. As Knicks fans, we know it from the inside. New York slowly started to put together a team to beat the Celtics (which they did a year ago), but ultimately didn’t even meet Boston on their way to the title, and now the C’s look nothing like they did in 2024.

The Wolves appeared to be locked into building a tank to stop the Nikola Jokic Nuggets (which they achieved), only now they have flipped their roster entirely, while Denver remains nearly the same. Get back in time, and you’d find the Rockets attempting to build the anti-KD-GSW machine, only for Durant to bolt out after the 2019 title. The Big 3 Celtics (for the young lads, the ones featuring Kevin Garnett, Paul Pierce, and Ray Allen) were built for countering LeBron James before he even moved out of Cleveland to form his own Voltron in Miami.

Who’s to say how the Eastern Conference picture will look come April? If you ask me this very minute (I have scheduled this story to publish five hours from now, who knows how the picture will look by that time…), this might be it compared to how things were by June 15 (not a per-se standings table, just a perception).

Long story short, you can plan and make moves for the present, but as is the case with our brains and attention spans, rosters are so much in flux and long-term planning is shrinking into a yearly affair that it just doesn’t make any sense to think more than two springs ahead. You can keep your team together (good), but you can plan for chaos elsewhere. And even if you get better or worse, there are still a thousand pieces moving around and out of your control that can swing your position up or down in the table at a moment’s notice.

These days, the League looks like a snow globe in the hands of a wicked two-year-old with erratic hand-shaking tendencies.

Parity, randomness… who cares? It will all have changed again before you close this page.