What makes an NBA champion?

There are so many ways to answer that question. The tried-and-true maxim around the league is that stars win championships. Nico Harrison said defense wins championships. Rudy Tomjanovich said a team must have the heart of a champion.

And that may all be true, but there has to be some kind of empirical way to spot a champion — traits they share and how well they played during the regular season. It’s easy to spot champions in June; it’s harder to predict them in April.

But why not try? One way to separate title contenders from the pretenders is to examine characteristics of past champions. What were they not only good at, but also, how did they finish relative to the league in those seasons?

From simple metrics like wins to shot profiles, are there certain thresholds that champions have to hit? We took a look at every title winner since 2005 to determine the answer.

Wins

Let’s start with an easy one. To be a champion, you’ve got to win a lot of games but not necessarily the most games in the league. Eight of the last 25 champions have won at least 60 games (while the 2020 Los Angeles Lakers were on a 60-win pace before that season got upended). But the 2006 Miami Heat won 52 games, the 2022 Golden State Warriors and 2023 Denver Nuggets won 53 and the 2021 Milwaukee Bucks were on a 52-win pace in that 72-game season. Every other champion since 2005 has won at least 57 games or been on pace to do so.

If we go by that threshold this season, then only the Oklahoma City Thunder, San Antonio Spurs and Detroit Pistons have hit 57 wins. All the other title contenders, step aside.

Trait: 57+ wins
Teams that qualify: Thunder, Spurs, Pistons

Offense and defense

Do you need a great offense to win a title? Not necessarily.

Since 2005, four title winners have posted an offense outside of the top 10 (the 2008 Boston Celtics, 2010 Lakers, 2020 Lakers and 2022 Warriors). That’s actually more teams than have won the title with the best offense in the league (2013 Heat, 2017 Warriors and 2024 Celtics). Generally, though, having a top-five offense is a good signal of becoming a champion. Since 2005, 13 teams have won a title with a top-five offense.

But to be clear, if your team doesn’t have a great offense, it must have a great defense to compensate. Those four teams with offenses outside the top-10 had top-three defenses.

Thirteen champions since 2005 have had a top-five defense. Only two teams won a title without a top-10 defense (2018 Warriors, 2023 Nuggets), while the 2006 Heat and 2016 Cleveland Cavaliers ranked 10th in defensive rating. The 2018 Warriors might be an exception to this rule; they were playing for their third title in four years and were so stacked with Stephen Curry, Kevin Durant, Klay Thompson and Draymond Green that they could put the season on cruise control. So maybe the rule is that, unless your team has four future Hall of Famers, then it should have a top-10 defense.

This season, that bodes poorly for the Cavaliers, Lakers and Nuggets, who all have at least 50 wins but have bottom-half-of-the-league defensive ratings. Only two teams — the Spurs and Celtics — have top-five offenses and defenses this season, while the Thunder, Houston Rockets and Pistons have top-10 units on both ends.

Just two champions since 2005 didn’t have at least one top-five unit, either on defense or offense: the 2006 Heat (No. 7 offense; No. 10 defense) and the 2011 Dallas Mavericks (No. 9 offense, No. 8 defense). The lesson there: If you’re not elite on at least one end, have at least one top-30 player of all time.

The teams with at least one top-five unit this season: Nuggets, Celtics, Knicks, Hornets, Spurs, Thunder, Pistons, Timberwolves

Trait: Top-five offense or defense
Teams that qualify: Nuggets, Celtics, Knicks, Spurs, Thunder, Pistons, Timberwolves

Rating

Instead of fixating on offense and defense, let’s just bring things together into one metric. Net rating is a lot stingier when it comes to figuring out a champion. Since 2005, eight champions have also had the best net rating in the league that season, two have been second, three were third and three were fourth.

The 2011 Mavericks had the eighth-best net rating that season and are the lowest team to win a title in this timespan. They are also the only champion since 2005 to finish outside the top six in net rating. If it weren’t for them, then everyone except the Thunder, Spurs, Celtics, Pistons and Knicks need not apply.

Trait: Top-six net rating
Teams that qualify: Thunder, Spurs, Celtics, Pistons and Knicks

Talent

OK, so what about talent? Because that matters.

Every champion since 2005 has had at least one player on one of the first two All-NBA teams. Even the 2004 Detroit Pistons, who fall just outside this window and are seen as the platonic ideal of team over star, had Ben Wallace make second-team All-NBA.

Only the 2011 Mavericks, 2014 Spurs, 2017 Warriors (improbably), 2019 Raptors, 2022 Warriors and 2023 Nuggets did not have a player make first-team All-NBA. But they had one on the second team. Ten champions had two players on an All-NBA team that season.

Luka Dončić and Cade Cunningham will make All-NBA teams this season after they were granted a reprieve from the 65-game rule, but Anthony Edwards won’t.

Experience

Playoff experience is often talked about but kind of hard to ascribe. What counts as experience? Is it one playoff run before the season a team wins it all, or is it multiple? Is it the time teams spend together or just that of their star? Top two players? It’s hard to draw the line.

Here’s one attempt: How did the team do the year before it won a title? Most champions since 2005 — all but six  — won a round in their N-1 season.

The outliers matter, too. The 2008 Celtics didn’t win a title in 2007 because they acquired Kevin Garnett and Ray Allen that summer and became a whole new team. The 2011 Mavericks went from out in the first round to champions, but many players had been together for a while, including Dirk Nowitzki, and made the finals in 2006. The 2015 Warriors had a first-round-and-out the year before, but the core of the team had been together and made it to the second round in 2013; they fired Mark Jackson before the 2014-15 season, hired Steve Kerr and the rest is history.

The 2020 Lakers are akin to the 2008 Celtics; they acquired Anthony Davis before that season and became, essentially, a new team, and LeBron James had plenty of playoff experience. The 2022 Warriors didn’t even make the playoffs in the two prior seasons, but they finally got healthy, and their postseason bona fides were well established. The 2023 Nuggets were eliminated in the first round the year prior but had a two-time MVP, and the core of that team had been together for years and made playoff runs before.

The thread here might be that inquiring champions should have won at least a round in the year or two before they won it all (see: 2025 Thunder) or drastically changed their roster in the preceding offseason. What does that mean for a team like the Spurs, who missed the playoffs last season, or the Pistons, who lost in the first round? They don’t match those qualifications. Is Victor Wembanyama a large enough asterisk? Can Cade Cunningham buck the trend?

Trait: Playoff round win with current core
Teams that qualify: Celtics, Knicks, Cavaliers, Thunder, Nuggets and Timberwolves

Playstyle

It matters how well a team plays, but does it matter how a team plays?

One interesting stat to look at is turnovers. Basketball fans have heard ad nauseam how important it is for teams to limit turnovers, but that doesn’t seem to matter much when it comes to winning championships.

From 2005 to 2023, all but four champions ranked outside the top-10 in turnover rate. Seven were bottom 10 in the NBA in turnover rate in the season they won the title. Being a relatively high-turnover team was no barrier to winning it all. The average champion in that window ranked 16th in the NBA in turnovers.

But something interesting happened in the last two seasons. The last two champions — the Celtics and Thunder — each led the league in lowest turnover rate. This season, the Thunder, Celtics, Nuggets and Spurs all rank in the top five, and the Cavaliers are seventh. The Knicks are 12th, and the Pistons are 23rd — no outlier this century but bucking the recent trend.

Taking a significant portion of your field goal attempts from 3 certainly helps. According to Cleaning the Glass, a majority of champions have finished in the top 10 in percentage of shots taken from 3. But intriguingly, that happened more frequently in the first decade of this window than more recently. Since the Warriors upended the sport with their 3-happy approach, only two of the last eight champions have finished top 10 in the metric (the 2022 Warriors were second, and the 2024 Celtics were first). The 2020 Lakers were 23rd, the 2023 Nuggets were 22nd, and the rest ranked in the tens.

It also hasn’t been that important to be a league-leader in percentage of shots at the rim, according to Cleaning the Glass. Five of the last eight champs were in the bottom 10, while the 2020 Lakers were second and the 2023 Nuggets were sixth. Those two teams chose to prioritize the rim, while the other recent champs went for a smattering of both.

Getting to the rim has also not mattered much. Only three of the last 21 champions have finished in the top 10 in free-throw rate, according to Cleaning The Glass, and none since the Heat in 2013. They did that in back-to-back title-winning seasons.

The big key to winning a championship is a high effective field goal percentage. Only one team has won a title since 2005 while finishing outside the top seven in effective field goal percentage: the 2010 Lakers (16th). But only four teams have finished outside the top five, and not since the Lakers in 2020 were sixth.

That could cause some problems for a few contenders. The teams with 50-plus wins and a top-five effective field goal percentage: the Nuggets, Lakers, Thunder and Cavaliers. The Spurs, at No. 7, and Knicks, at No. 8, might just not be efficient enough. The Rockets (17th) and Pistons (18th) might not be the contenders we think they are.

Trait: Top six eFG%
Teams that qualify: Nuggets, Lakers, Thunder, Cavaliers, Timberwolves

Record versus plus-.500 teams

There’s one last indicator to examine: record against teams at .500 and above. Every champion since 2005 has had a winning record against non-losing teams but one. The 2006 Heat went 19-21 against those teams. The 2019 Raptors went 22-20, and the 2021 Bucks were 19-17, narrowly avoiding becoming outliers.

That only eliminates one possible contender this season: the Lakers. Los Angeles is 23-25 against teams .500 and above. (The Timberwolves fit this bill, too.)

Trait: Winning record against non-losing teams
Teams that qualify: Pistons, Celtics, Knicks, Cavaliers, Thunder, Spurs, Nuggets, Rockets

Final tally

So where does that leave us?

It puts the Thunder in a great position and the Lakers as pretenders. Oklahoma City is the only team that qualifies in every category. The Spurs are close. The Pistons are a few categories short. Are we looking at a repeat? Here’s the tale of the tape, with teams ranked by the number of categories in which they qualify (teams that didn’t qualify in any are not included):

Thunder (7)
Spurs (4)
Pistons (4)
Nuggets (4)
Celtics (4)
Knicks (4)
Cavaliers (3)
Timberwolves (3)
Rockets (1)
Lakers (1)