Top NBA Teams All Time

Durant joining a core that had just set a regular-season wins record turned the playoffs into a procession. The super-team shortcut is also the ceiling on its reputation: this roster wins nearly every hypothetical matchup while getting the least credit for it, because nobody romanticizes an avalanche.

Two three-peats across the 1990s with a baseball sabbatical in the middle, powered by the best player the sport has produced at his absolute peak. The counterargument writes itself: an expansion-diluted league, title runs that never had to solve prime Magic or Bird, and a supporting cast that gets romanticized. Every other team here still measures itself against them.

Three stars in their primes who chose each other, playing a switching, swarming style nobody could solve, with a midseason win streak that felt like a dare. Star-stacking bought thin depth, though: one Ray Allen corner three separates this team from consecutive Finals defeats and a very different memory.

Showtime turned the fast break into theater and kept winning across an entire decade against the deepest field the league has ever had. Magic made everyone around him better. The blemish is that the Celtics took one of the era's defining Finals from them, and that rivalry stayed more even than Lakers fans like to remember.

Shaq at his most unstoppable, Kobe growing into his prime, and a three-peat from 2000 to 2002 that felt like a foregone conclusion by each June. The feud that tore it apart is baked into the story; this group should have won more than it did, and the 80s version of the franchise aged far more gracefully.

Bird, McHale, and Parish were the best frontcourt of their time and played with a meanness the box score never captured. But they lost the decade's biggest arguments to the Lakers more often than they won them, and by the late years their legs were gone while Showtime kept running.

Young Kareem and an aging Oscar Robertson cut through the league like it owed them money and swept the 1971 Finals, but the years right after brought a Finals loss and then a teardown, which leaves this team as a peak on the graph rather than a dynasty.

Moses Malone arrived, promised a clean sweep of the 1983 playoffs, and came within a single loss of delivering it while Doctor J finally got his ring. One spring of perfection in an era of near-misses; every other year, the Lakers had their answer.

Duncan and Popovich won on fundamentals and player development while flashier teams cycled through drama, and four titles arrived between 1999 and 2007. Their knock is the mirror image of the Heat's: no single Spurs season feels untouchable, because the brilliance was spread across many merely great ones.

Garnett, Pierce, and Allen turned a lottery team into a champion inside a single year, on a defense that made good offenses look helpless. A lone banner sits awkwardly among the dynasties on this list, and the same core lost the 2010 Finals rematch with the Lakers, which caps how high they can climb.

LeBron's block and Kyrie's shot ended half a century of Cleveland misery against a Warriors team that had looked unbeatable all year. Measured as a moment, untouchable. Measured as a team, the Warriors owned the era between them, and the lone ring sits surrounded by Finals defeats.

Russell's Celtics won the title nearly every year of the 1960s, a run no franchise in any American sport has matched. Skeptics point to a tiny league and short playoff paths, and they have a case. But you can only beat the era in front of you, and this team almost never lost a series that mattered.

The thinking fan's champion: two titles, in 1970 and 1973, built on ball movement, team defense, and Willis Reed limping out of the tunnel. They gave New York its basketball identity for good. Against the decade's true juggernauts they were more clever than overwhelming, and the window slammed shut fast.

The Bad Boys wore down Bird and then wrote the Jordan Rules, winning back-to-back titles in 1989 and 1990 on a physicality that would be a suspension montage today. No team here is more hated or squeezed more from less raw talent. The reign was brief, and the Bulls ended it without much ceremony.