How NBA Champions Fade
Why it's gone slowly, and now quickly, for the Bucks and Nuggets
Every perennial contender eventually becomes a pretender. It’s an unbreakable cycle. Time’s undefeated, right Sly? And while that’s interesting on its own, I’m more interested in the way those teams are perceived.
We tend to be slow on the uptake. People get used to certain ideas, like the relative strength of a basketball team, and they need to be presented with evidence to the contrary before they move off of that impression.
It’s kind of heartwarming in its way. Essentially, once you earn people’s confidence — say, by winning a championship — then you need to be pretty bad for a pretty long while in order for them to count you out.
So it is with a heavy heart that I hereby declare: I think that’s what we’re watching with the Milwaukee Bucks and, to a lesser extent, the Denver Nuggets. I mentioned this briefly in Royce Webb’s last 5x5 and wanted to expand on it, so here we are.
The Bucks won the title in 2021 behind a historic effort from their star, Giannis Antetokounmpo, who made his case for best-player-in-the-world status by dropping 50 points, 14 boards, and 5 blocks(!!) in the deciding Game 6. He was Shaq-like, putting up 40 and 10 three times in the series. Similarly Shaq-like, he’d been awful from the line throughout the entire playoffs. Until Game 6, when he went 17/19 to seal it. And people forget: he had a knee injury in the first round of the playoffs that seemed like it might end his season. He delivered.
A lot has happened in Milwaukee since, but here are the main ones that stand out to me:
Khris Middleton hasn’t looked quite right since;
Brook Lopez was four years younger;
They effectively traded Jrue Holiday for Damian Lillard;
And the Mike Budenholzer era sputtered out, leading to what now look like two failed replacements in a row.
The Bucks’ defense has greatly suffered for reasons 2, 3, and maybe even 4, and though he would’ve gone the way of Lopez by now, that team also had PJ Tucker putting in his usual bulldog work. A top-ten defense went to the bottom ten, and the offense hasn’t been able to make up the difference. Simple math.
So those are some of the measurable, tangible reasons for their decline. And those are always there, usually clearer in hindsight. There was ample reason to doubt this team coming in. And yet, they began the season with the seventh-best title odds, just after the Mavericks and Timberwolves, two teams that went a lot deeper than the Bucks last year.
I assume that has the most to do with Giannis individually, which is as good a reason as any to hold some optimism. History tells us you need a guy like that to win. Sometimes that’s enough.
And to be clear, while the Bucks’ odds have gotten about 50% longer, they’re still only down to eighth-best now. None of the sportsbooks are overreacting to this start, so why should I?
I’ll tell you! I don’t think they have it anymore. Not as currently constructed. I liked the Gary Trent, Jr. and Delon Wright pickups. I thought they’d be better. They still might! But I think you could also say today that this team is more likely to trade Giannis than it is to win another title with him.
That’s a vibes take, I freely admit, but tell me I’m wrong. They’re a second-apron team hemmed in by the money they’ve committed to two stars whose fit does not look all that improved after an offseason together. I’m not sure this team would even be competitive in a series against the Celtics. Same with the Knicks, and I’d probably pick the Cavs to beat them today. The less said about the 76ers, the better.
Basketball is an unusual sport in that it doesn’t produce all that many one-and-done champions. It’s not uncommon, going back over the last 40 years at least, that the same core group ends up winning multiple titles. It’s much weirder to get the one-offs.
The ‘83 Sixers were one such team. Then you get a nice little bunch: the ‘04 Pistons, the ‘06 Heat, the ‘08 Celtics and the ‘11 Mavericks. You can count the ‘16 Cavs, though making it four years in a row undercuts the random a little. Then it’s the ‘19 Raptors and, very possibly, the ‘21 Bucks.
That might sound like a lot, but remember, that’s over the course of 41 seasons. You’re talking roughly one out of every five, which is kind of nuts. It just doesn’t happen much, and that is precisely why it can take fans’ expectations and title prognostications alike a little while to catch on. More often than not, you stay competitive. Then, one day, you’re not anymore, and people stop expecting that from you.
Will that also be the story of the ‘23 Nuggets? As a non-rooting-interest basketball fan, I hope not. I went on the record last year with how much I enjoyed their style of play and admired their team-building efforts, some of which has aged pretty poorly.
It’s not like they’re a disaster. They’re 5-3. They’re not cratering. But you wouldn’t call them ascendant, and I think they showed us last year that they’re not the team they were the year prior, and now they’re worse.
I mention my self-own on the Nuggets optimism because my confidence in them last year was an example of the exact phenomenon I’m describing today. They had earned my confidence, so I thought they were better than they were. I couldn’t see the cracks as clearly as they appear to me now.
Losing Bruce Brown hurt, which we knew at the time, but we didn’t know how much. Jamal Murray was preternaturally clutch in ‘23, but he’s still never made an All-Star team, and you wouldn’t be crazy for thinking he never will. Michael Porter, Jr. might not be a discount after all, since he seems to have stopped developing altogether.
This year, the glaring lack of a bench has taken another step backward with the loss of KCP, and I don’t know if the youth movement in Denver is up to replace it. Nor does Russell Westbrook, an addition that continues to confuse me. Haters be hating, but I’m pretty sure his gem on Wednesday against the Thunder will prove to be an outlier.
Still, though, it’s really Murray that gets me. Jokic is so good, but he’s not a superhero. Or, better put, he can’t be that every time out. If Murray can’t be a reliable second option, then the Nuggets’ ceiling is lowered accordingly. Is that a problem they can solve? I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe not.
Now, look. This could all be recency bias. We’ve barely made it two weeks. Both of these teams have such good star players that it’s entirely possible the rest of the roster rounds into shape and finds its way into a deep run in June. On the basis of those stars, both Denver and Milwaukee are still so much closer to round three playoff teams than they are the Cooper Flagg sweepstakes. (Dragg for Flagg? We’ll workshop that.)
My contention, though, is that the Bucks and Nuggets are now closest to the NBA’s upper middle class. Teams that are almost there, and have a lot of the right ingredients, but they’re a guy — or two, or three — short.
If they’re a real title threat at all, it would take some bad injury luck among the top-tier teams to give them an opening. It’s still early, and nothing’s off the table. I’m just not sure how much is on the table, so to speak, for these two franchises.
And hey, if all that wasn’t enough for you, check this shit out! A fancy new graphic with a cheeky purposeful typo! So, without further ado — our finale:
🏈 Will the Chiefs ever lose again? Hard to say! I’m circling the Bills and Texans, but man. 16-1 doesn’t even look like a big stretch at this point. They make it look easy. Y’know, by making it look hard.
👨👦 And there goes the Bronny experiment. I have to give the Lakers credit: this hasn’t been the clown show I feared it might be coming into the year. They kept this pretty brief, and I suspect he’ll benefit from some time in the G League.
🏀 I’m getting married on Flag Day next year (I know, I know, big conflict), and the way his arrival is going in Durham, it’s time to start considering how to work a Cooper Flagg pun into the wedding decor. Do they still make Fatheads?
🎾 This picture of the WTA Finals in Saudi Arabia has been making the rounds, as an estimated ~400 people came to watch Coco Gauff and Jessica Pegula in the year-end event. Not great! Reviewing the decision to hold a marquee women’s tennis event in Riyadh, if the moral outrage case doesn’t convince you — and maybe that sounds familiar this week — then how about the attendance case? That’s a 5,000-seat stadium at single-digit capacity, folks. Depressing.
