Welcome to our new era of NBA parity, where one team in each conference is favored by Vegas to lap the field by several games. Wait ..
. what? Yes, it’s true: Despite the seeming increase in parity over the last several years, and some structural changes that make it seem likely to continue, the Boston Celtics and Oklahoma City Thunder begin the year as heavy favorites in each conference. Advertisement So where are we, exactly, and how much parity is there? The discussion of parity in the NBA gets pretty nuanced once you start rifling through the weeds, and the cognitive dissonance of my introductory sentence is a perfect example.
Let’s start at the top and try to parse out what is happening right now, why it’s happening and whether it’s likely to continue. GO DEEPER The NBA has entered a new era of parity. How did we get here and what's next? What do we mean by “parity”? Whether you think there is parity now, and how much, turns first on what exactly you mean by “parity.
” On one hand, talking about parity seems a little ridiculous when the Celtics just finished breaking the NBA, rolling to the third-highest scoring margin of the last half century while winning 80 of their 101 regular-season and playoff games and cruising to the championship. We’ll circle back to them — and to a budding dominant West team in the Thunder — in a little bit. However, by a few different measures, we certainly have had parity for the last half decade or so.
That’s especially.
