Known Basketball Genius Rick Carlisle Had An Interesting Stance On The Shift That Will Ultimately Define This Era Of Team Building In The NBA

Justin Casterline. Getty Images.

For pretty much my entire life, I've always been a big Rick Carlisle guy. From his days as a player on the 80s Celtics, to what he did as the head coach with the Pistons/Pacers in the early 2000s when he was winning 50+ games, to his run with the Mavs where he led them to arguably the toughest NBA championship ever won, to now his second stint with the Pacers, it's very obvious this man is a basketball genuis. Over the next few years, we're going to see him enter the top 10 all-time in wins as a coach, and I don't think it's crazy to suggest that before he hangs it up, he'll also be one of 7 coaches with 100 or more playoff wins (currently at 86, 10th all-time).  The man knows basketball, and seeing as how he's had success in pretty much every era of the NBA since the 80s, I'm going to go out on a limb and say he knows a thing or two about the league and what teams need to have/do in order to consistently win at a high level.

That's why my ears couldn't help but perk up when he touched on this topic in his incredible sitdown with Pacers writer (and fellow basketball genuis) Caitlin Cooper. I highly recommend the entire episode for any person interested in actual basketball coverage, but for the sake of this blog I want to focus on this one part around team building and roster construction in today's new NBA world

When it comes to building title contenders, we've seen the league go through a wide variety of eras and styles. For a long time, you needed to stack your roster and build these "superteams," where as long as you had an elite top 3, the rest of your roster wasn't really that important. NBA history is littered with teams that were top heavy and still became champions, because their top end talent was that good. 

But as we move into this new world in the NBA and you take a look at which teams are more successful, you see a shift starting to happen. In previous eras, a team like the 2025 Suns who punted on depth and signed 3 star players to form a superteam would have had all the success in the world. Now? They stunk, largely because the rest of their roster stunk. Listen to what Carlisle said again

“The NBA game has now become a play hard league. It's not just being top heavy with stars. Roster construction is changing. It's become more important to have more good players than be top heavy with two or three great players that get all the touches.”

Carlisle's Pacers are a great example of this approach, and they aren't alone. I know some people continue to try and pretend like the Pacers run in 2025 was some sort of fluke, but anyone who does that is mostly exposing themselves for not knowing what the fuck they're talking about. And while not every team in the NBA can play with the style or the pace of the Pacers (no pun intended but intended), I do think Carlisle is right on the money in terms of what it takes to truly succeed in today's NBA, and how that's going to reshape the way teams approach their rosters in this new CBA world. 

The one thing that I do think carries over from the previous era of roster construction to now is that if you want to win the NBA title, you need a top 5 player. From SGA, to Tatum, to Jokic, to Steph, to Giannis, to LeBron, to Kawhi, that has remained true even in this most recent era. That's partially what made the Pacers run so special, because while conventionally people don't talk about Haliburton as a top 5 player, he was putting up top 5 production. Ultimately though, the title ended up with the team with the top 5 guy.

But outside of that, Carlisle is right on the money. The Thunder, Celtics, Nuggets etc all had that combination of top 5 talent AND incredible depth. How those two pieces worked together, playing egoless and team basketball where everyone eats is what allowed them to break through. The NBA is a copycat league, so it's no surprise that the thought process throughout the league is trending more towards the idea of depth > top heavy superteams. In reality, you now need both if you truly want to win. You can have a top 5 guy, but if you don't have the depth, you're cooked. Teams like the Bucks, Sixers, Warriors, and Lakers come to mind there. You can have depth, but if you don't have that top 5 guy, you're also cooked. Teams like the Rockets (pre-KD), the Pacers, Clippers (with no Kawhi) come to mind for that.

So why does this now matter more than ever? Just think of the decisions these front offices now need to make when it comes to their pending extensions/roster decisions. For some like BOS/OKC, it was a no brainer to just hand out massive extensions to everyone they could, seeing as how they just won the title. But what if you're not coming off a title and you have to make that type of decision? Aside from all the apron penalties, could we see teams move star players to turn that one horse into 2-3 ponies? If you're a team that has their #1 option/top 5 guy, does it make more sense to use up all your cap space to keep an expensive core together, or do you unload those stars to help beef up your depth? That's the big unknown at the time. At the moment, we're seeing teams pay their stars maxes and then figure the rest out later. The Celtics did it, the Thunder just did it, hell even the Spurs just went this route yesterday with De'Aaron Fox

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What made those teams unique is that they already had the depth. An interesting case study I think is a team like the Knicks, who just forked over $150M for Mikal Bridges. This is a team that's fairly top-heavy with uncertain depth. Should they have tried to flip that asset for multiple pieces? They have a player that plays at a top 5 level (Brunson), but as we saw in their loss to the Knicks, depth was a factor. It's a big reason why the Pacers beat the Knicks in back to back playoffs, despite having less talent "on paper".

Finding that delicate balance between having enough blue chip talent to truly be contenders while also having enough depth that's good enough to win at that level is why winning the NBA title is so goddamn hard. It's no longer a give in that the team who has the "best player" is going to win, which is something that pretty much was always the case in NBA history. It's why hitting on the Draft in both rounds is now so much more important than it ever has been. The idea of the traditional "superteam" is mostly dead, whereas now a "superteam" means you have 10+ guys that are all awesome and ALL play a role in how the team operates. This is no longer just give the ball to LeBron and let him carry you to the Finals. Those days are over, and it was pretty cool to see Carlisle openly admit that the teams who are able to adapt to this new world are the ones who are going to succeed. 

P.S.

And for all the haters and losers of which there are still many who cry about how boring the NBA is because everyone "plays the same way" or whatever. Boom roasted