The NBA Finals tip off Thursday night, and the Dallas Mavericks, a fifth seed from the Memphis Grizzlies’ own Southwest Division with only one player on this season’s All-NBA team, will represent the Western Conference against the end-to-end East favorite Boston Celtics.

How should the Grizzlies, watching from the couch, feel about that? 

Two ways: They’re bitter at what was definitely a good opportunity lost but also hopeful the circumstances allowed the Mavericks’ breakthrough seem likely to repeat next season.

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What makes an NBA title team? 

The parameters have expanded of late. Have they expanded enough for a team built like the Memphis Grizzlies to squeak through? 

As has been widely noted, the Dallas-Boston winner will mark the sixth-straight season the NBA will crown a different champion with no prior champ cycling back to win another in this stretch. 

• 2024 - Dallas Mavericks or Boston Celtics, TBD
• 2023 - Denver Nuggets
• 2022 - Golden State Warriors
• 2021 - Milwaukee Bucks
• 2020 - Los Angeles Lakers
• 2019 - Toronto Raptors

To find another stretch like this in NBA history, you have to go back to the late 1970s, just before Magic Johnson and Larry Bird ignited a multigeneration eruption of superstar-dominated dynasties.

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Related to the lack of title repeats in the past half-decade is the changing nature of title teams. 

The past five champions have averaged 1.2 players to make the All-NBA team in their title season with only the LeBron James/Anthony Davis Lakers having more than one. The Mavs (Luka Doncic) or Celtics (Jayson Tatum), with one each, will lower that average.

By contrast, in the previous 10 seasons, 2009-2018, champions averaged 1.8 All-NBA players with seven of 10 champs having more than one such player and the 2017 Warriors boasting three. 

With tightening-league financial rules making it harder to acquire or keep more than one superstar, the “one All-NBA player leading a well-constructed team” formula has become a winning one. And that is how the Grizzlies are constructed. 

Grizzlies’ point guard Ja Morant made second-team All-NBA at age 22 and seemed well on his way to an age-23 repeat before off-court activities and injury sent him on a season-and-a-half detour. Needless to say, Morant’s ability to get back to that level at age 24 and stay there is a prerequisite for the Grizzlies. When Morant has played in a thrilling nine-game tease last season, he’s been every bit his prior self.

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Flanking Morant are a couple of players in Jaren Jackson Jr. and Desmond Bane good enough to nose into All-NBA conversations if their best seasons and their team’s best seasons align. 

The Grizzlies came into last season with a three-year window in which Morant, Jackson Jr. and Bane would all be entering their primes and under contract together. The run of this core could well be longer, but those three seasons were all that was guaranteed. 

And the Grizzlies acted like a team that understood the value of this moment. They traded Tyus Jones, a great regular-season backup point guard with more limited playoff utility, and two first-round picks for a playoff-proven veteran in Marcus Smart. They fielded a team they thought would have a chance, but Morant’s post-return injury and center Steven Adams’ injury-aborted return scuttled those hopes. 

Now the three-year window is two, and the Grizzlies face a couple of big questions, which cast a shadow over many smaller ones: Will this competitive opening last? And is Morant good enough to lead them through it?

Looking ahead in the West

Things look promising on the first front. Phoenix’s “super team” attempt went kaput. Kevin Durant will be another year older. How much can a coaching change mean there?

The Lakers have two-thirds of a super team in theory with James and Davis still there. It’s not clear a third star will materialize this summer, and even if one does, James will turn 40 next season.

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If anything, the Warriors are fading faster.

The West’s final four this season was formidable and likely will be again, but none are set up to be meaningfully better. The Nuggets and Minnesota Timberwolves will struggle to keep what they have together amid increasing financial pressures. The Mavericks will likely run back what they have now, title or not. 

The one potential wild card is the Oklahoma City Thunder, the young team that topped the conference in the regular season. The Thunder have more room for internal improvement than any other West contender, and an opportunity this summer to make a major addition. Will they seize it?

As for the rest, there are plenty of hopefuls, but all have deeper concerns or a lower ceiling than the Grizzlies.

It feels like the landscape that allowed the Mavs to make a playoff leap will be similar next season.

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There’s promise there: A healthy Grizzlies team that catches some good breaks for a change should be in the contenders mix. If you’re looking for a model for a team that misses the playoffs one season and wins the conference the next season, you don’t have to look far: these Dallas Mavericks. The “gap year” can be real. 

There’s also peril: A lower ceiling makes the contending class bigger. There will be at least 12 and perhaps as many as 14 teams in the West next season with serious playoff hopes and only eight spots available. 

Can Morant lead the way?

If the era of super teams and dynasties is at least on hiatus, there is one traditional title-team requirement that has remained firm: The player hoisting the Finals trophy at the end might be the best in the world. 

Setting the unknown Dallas/Boston outcome aside, let’s replay the list above not as the past five title teams but as the past five best players on a title team:

• 2023 - Nikola Jokic
• 2022 - Stephen Curry
• 2021 - Giannis Antetokounmpo
• 2020 - LeBron James
• 2019 - Kawhi Leonard

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Four of those players have won multiple MVP awards. The only one who hasn’t, Leonard, has won a Finals MVP for two different teams and at his playoff best was clearly at the MVP level. Each in the moment of winning the title could make a claim to being the best player in the world. 

If Dallas wins this title, Doncic will be able to stake that claim. As good as Boston co-stars Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown are, neither are quite at that level. 

From one vantage point, the Celtics look like the title team: They won the East by 14 games with the best record and point differential in the NBA, and no other team even close. The Mavericks finished fifth in the West. 

But in this more recent NBA landscape, maybe it’s the Mavericks who look more like a title team. 

The 2022 champion Warriors were a three seed, as were the 2021 champion Bucks. The only commonality among the past five champs: a “Best Player in the World” candidate at the center.

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You no longer need a “super team” to win a title. But can you win one without a super player? If this Boston team with all-star-level starters at all five positions, dominant all season on both ends of the floor, can’t do it, there will be reason to wonder if anyone can.

What about Morant? 

He’s been a case of out of sight, out of mind. 

But let’s compare Morant’s career-playoff numbers to those of the two young stars facing off in this series, Doncic and Tatum, and the other two young West stars who advanced in this year’s playoffs and are now universally considered ahead of Morant, OKC’s Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Minnesota’s Anthony Edwards.

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Doncic is a step above. You can see it on the record, which now includes two top-five MVP finishes and three additional top-10 finishes, all before age 25. You can see it more clearly on the floor where his ability to control the game as a kind of super-sized guard evokes the likes of LeBron and Magic.

Even setting aside Morant’s off-court detour, there’s a clear case to be made for each of Tatum, Gilgeous-Alexander and Edwards ahead of Morant based on defense and durability. 

But while this case is clear, it’s also somewhat narrow. 

Out of sight, out of mind: Only six players have ever scored more than 45 points in a playoff game before their 23rd birthday. Doncic and Morant are among them. 

Only one player has done this twice: Morant.

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Morant’s play has put him in the same general class of second-tier stars as Tatum, Edwards and Gilgeous-Alexander. Clear All-NBA-caliber players, but not really the Best Player in the World candidates. 

These are not quite the level of players who have carried a team to the mountaintop, even as the dynasties have faded. 

The superior Doncic just bested Gilgeous-Alexander and Edwards in back-to-back playoff rounds while on a lower-seeded team. Now it’s Tatum’s turn to see if a talented team without an MVP-level alpha can stop such a force.

The marginal difference among contending-class teams has grown thinner, but so far, having a single player in the Doncic — or Jokic or Curry or Antetokounmpo — class has been the difference.

The time is now

If the Grizzlies still don’t have the clear markings of a title contender, the opportunity is greater for a team of its type than it has been in nearly 50 years. The alignment of league opportunity and the team’s talent base isn’t perfect but has never been better and may never be better again. 

The Grizzlies should watch these Finals with regret, but with the realistic belief it could be them next season.

And then they should act accordingly.