The NBA is facing a bunch of new frontiers in 2026. New owners, new draft rules, a fairly-new salary cap structure…it’s a brave new world out there. Evolving into it is hard for any General Manager. As franchises negotiate their way through this era, we’re starting to see some odd results. That’s the subject of today’s Blazer’s Edge Mailbag question.
Dave,
I’m wondering why more teams don’t KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) and put together functional rosters? You know like when you have clearly defined
roles and expectations. What happened to the good ol’ days where positions made sense and teams tried to find complementary SGs for their PG for example? I always come back to the Dame / Wes / Batum / LMA / RoLo lineup. Everyone had an obvious role that was more or less suited to their abilities. And they tried to fill out the bench with a couple vets who understood their assignments as well. Has “positionless” basketball gone too far and, if so, do you expect the pendulum to swing back the other way?
Ca$hConsiderations
It’s slightly more complex than that, I think. Most teams nowadays are build on a regular, predictable model. But there’s more reason than ever to have an oddly-crafted team. Let’s explore some of them.
Positionless Basketball
We’ll start where you did, positionless basketball. The league is different than it was 10 years ago, let alone 30. Skills and athleticism are prized far more than position or scoring talent. That’s a huge change.
Trends happen for a reason. Usually, it’s because they work. It’s possible to buck them, but you want to go against the grain as you catch the next evolving wave, not because you’re trying to get back to the last one.
You could go back to building a roster based on the 1990’s or 2000’s pattern with a ball-dominant point guard, big center guarding the lane, and low-post power forward grabbing rebounds. That’s good as far as it goes, but it’s not going to help when the other team keys in on your solo dribbler, outruns your center, and rains threes over the head of your forward. This era overtook the last because it proved more successful, at least for now.
Your Lillard-Matthews-Batum-Aldridge-Lopez lineup might kind of work in the modern era because of a few factors. Dame can shoot threes. LaMarcus had a good face-up shot at the elbow extended. The two can play pick and roll/pop together. Batum and Matthews could hit threes and were rangy defenders, precursors of the 3-and-D players who became riotously popular right after. All of that disguises Lopez a bit, enough that you could run that team without worrying. But that’s down to the talents of the two stars and the fact that you build an early version of a modern team.
If you don’t have prime-years Lillard and Aldridge plus your multi-talented, defensively-strong wings, that scheme doesn’t work. For our purposes, it’s more accurate to say those players made the system rather than the system made those players. Milwaukee or Toronto couldn’t just cobble together five guys at defined position and expect the same results as Portland got (or would get with a time machine transporting that team).
Gaming the System
GM’s also run into another potential problem when locking themselves into an archetype. If that system brings success, your team won’t be the only one using it. If somebody else is doing the same thing better, following that pattern is a fool’s errand, even if it technically improves your team. It’s a conundrum plenty of board game players know well. Usually there are 3-4 good ways to win a game. If somebody has a head start executing Plan A, following down that path is a near-guaranteed loss. It’s better to take a wild swing at Plan C or Plan D than cement yourself in second place. If that leads to some weirdness, so be it. At least the path to victory is open.
The Trail Blazers found this out in the mid-2010’s facing the Golden State Warriors. Portland had maybe the second- or third-best offensive guard tandem in the NBA in Lillard and CJ McCollum. Golden State had the best. Every time the Blazers ran into the Warriors in the playoffs, boom. Game Over. In retrospect, it might have been better to take a different course, even a riskier one, than to add incrementally to a system that had a finite ceiling short of the championship.
Then we have to account for teams that aren’t in contention. If you’re a GM in the lower half of the league, you might have one or two bankable, long-term assets around which to build your future. In that situation, what are you going to do? You can finish out your team with predictable, serviceable veterans and eke out another four wins maybe. That still leaves you in the middle, at best. Up until this year’s lottery changes, that was the worst place to be. Even if it wasn’t, do you use those spots to get average players who make you look better now and have no utility in the future or do you take swings on recuperating stars, young talent, or project players even if that looks odd (and leaves you with a weird roster) right now?
A Game Within the Game
Longtime readers will know that I often cite the WWE for comparisons to real-life things because lots of trends and human proclivities play out in that cosmetic world. Here’s another one. Twenty years ago, when people talked about wrestling, they talked about the action in between the ropes. Fans would debate whether The Rock could get a People’s Elbow and Rock Bottom in before Stone Cold Steve Austin nailed him with The Stunner. Nowadays, if you listen to wrestling call-in shows, that’s not true at all. Nobody—literally zero people—talk about the moves in the ring. Everybody talks about the booking, how wrestlers are being used in the shows, what positions they’re in, how they might be upwardly mobile or failing.
NBA GM’ing has undergone a similar, though less drastic, revolution. On-court product still matters. But on non-game days, everyone is talking about the next trade or signing, ways to build into the future. One level of management is defined by the statistical production of the players on the floor. A second level lies on top, players as assets: what you paid for them, what you can get for them, how good their value is. This kind of talk didn’t exist beyond tight circles of professionals back in 1985. It’s a cottage industry now.
Assembling a strange roster wouldn’t make any sense to Level One management. On Level Two—with players as assets with value in their own right, beyond just what they produce—a collection of strategically-placed assets carries its own logic even if those players are mismatched a bit when they play. This is particularly true if the franchise is not in the immediate championship queue. Carrying five point guards and four centers could be a good thing if all of them have the potential to pay off in future deals. How to make it all work? Well, that’s the coach’s problem.
The Tyranny of the Cap
We haven’t even gotten to the best part. We’ve saved that for last. On top of all this lies a third layer of management that has become all but tyrannical in the past couple years: the salary cap. Luxury tax apron rules have increased the value of every dollar, every contract and roster spot, exponentially. The NBA is closer to a hard cap than ever before. That means General Managers dare not waste roster spots, nor the money associated with them. Roster management is approaching a zero-sum game: what you spend on one player will cost you directly in your ability to acquire or retain another. GM’s can’t go out and acquire a serviceable vet with their Mid-Level Exception just to make it by for a year. That player will either cost them the ability to get the free agent they really want next summer, cost them the chance to re-sign their current star when their contract comes up next, or cost them tens of millions of dollars beyond the base contract in luxury tax penalties, potentially with draft positioning and trading options limited on top of that.
This phenomenon is so strong that it’s literally affecting the composition and tenure of teams, including the most successful ones. The Oklahoma City Thunder probably didn’t want to get rid of Isaiah Joe and Andrew Wiggins this summer. They’re good players! They had to divest, though. They couldn’t keep the roster together because of cap regulations. General Managers have to look at cost now, potential cost in the future, the overall scope of the roster, and plan not just for this year’s team, but how it’s going to evolve three seasons from now. That’s a huge challenge, a massive change to our preconceptions about roster building.
This underlines the reality that there’s ZERO chance a General Manager would sign a player (above the minimum level) just to fill a position. It’s not sane nowadays. Conversely, there’s every chance a GM would take a flyer on a player who fits the timeline and flow of the roster—including the financial flow—even if that player isn’t a perfect fit by position.
Conclusion
Most teams won’t be weird, but given the emphasis on floor-spreading, ball movement, and covering the floor on defense…plus the ever-changing nature of rosters and the new emphasis on players as assets…plus the near-hard-cap financial demands, I understand why more of them are. It’s systemic, in the nature of things now. Perhaps that will change as the league evolves further. Until then, if you’re not a true contender, prepare for some odd flyers.
Thanks for the Mailbag question! You can always send yours to blazersub@gmail.com. We’ll try to answer as many as possible!
