Are Celtics-Warriors Finals signaling the end of the super team era?
With the Golden State Warriors and the Boston Celtics in the NBA Finals, it is fascinating to watch how the two teams are very much alike in many ways.
One of them: how their rosters were built.
The stars in Boston and Golden State were drafted and cultivated from their respective teams and the same can be said about multiple role players.
For Boston, Jaylen Brown, Jayson Tatum, Robert Williams, Grant Williams, Marcus Smart, Payton Pritchard, Aaron Nesmith, and Sam Hauser have all only called the Garden home in their professional careers.
Stephen Curry, Klay Thompson, Draymond Green, Jonathan Kuminga, Kevon Looney, Moses Moody, Jordan Poole, James Wiseman, and Juan Toscano-Anderson all have been with the Warriors their entire careers.
The amount of home-grown talent is highly unusual in NBA Finals matchups.
But to what extent?
Well, per HoopsHype research, Warriors/Celtics players who have not played for any other team have combined for 69.8 percent of the minutes available at the 2022 Finals so far.
That would be the highest number since 1968.
Could this be the decline of the super team, or is this merely a fad?
Looking back at the past two seasons, the Milwaukee Bucks and Phoenix Suns of the 2021 NBA Finals came in at 35.97 percent, while the Los Angeles Lakers and the Miami Heat from 2020 were at 32.95 percent.
In the LeBron-heavy Finals of the 2010s, it never went above 58 percent.
However, it is important to remember James is well known for getting mercenary role players to help him win a title, and trading away all the homegrown talent from the teams he was on.
With the NBA being such a copycat league, it would not be surprising if more teams in the future use the approaches of the Warriors/Celtics to cultivate their own talent for the bulk of their rosters. Watching a team like the Lakers trade away all their young core only to see them implode this season could serve as a cautionary tale for franchises to be wary of.
HoopsHype’s Alberto de Roa contributed research to this report.