LeBron James will turn 40 in December. Stephen Curry is 36 years old. Kevin Durant will be 36 and Jimmy Butler will be 35 when training camps begin in the fall.
They have been playoff stars for years, players who stand out in the most important moments.
But not this year. The next wave is no longer waiting its turn. They’re here – a bunch of 20-somethings, with one of them set to be the best player on the team that will be crowned the best in the NBA a month from now.
It will be Boston, Dallas, Indiana or Minnesota as the last team standing when the NBA Finals end next month. The best players on those teams — Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown for the Celtics, Luka Doncic for the Mavericks, Tyrese Haliburton for the Pacers and Anthony Edwards for the Timberwolves — are all in their 20s.
Brown is 27. Tatum is 26. Doncic is 25. Haliburton is 24. Edwards is just 22. James, Curry, Durant and Butler are still considered greats, but some of the NBA’s stars seem to have already passed on. for the next generation.
“They’re not afraid,” Dallas guard Kyrie Irving said of the young stars. “They no longer see OG stars as guys they look up to as much. They want to destroy our records. They want to kill us every time they step onto the court. That was the first thing I noticed about Luka, that he simply wasn’t afraid to face the best in the world. He always walks around like he’s the best player in the world. I think that’s the confidence of a champion. That’s where it all starts.”
Of the 21 regular starters used in the playoffs by the four remaining teams, only six have turned 30: Boston has 37-year-old Al Horford and 33-year-old Jrue Holiday, the Mavericks have 32-year-old Irving. , the Timberwolves have 36-year-old Mike Conley and 31-year-old Rudy Gobert, and the Pacers have 30-year-old Pascal Siakam.
“Thanks for calling me old,” Siakam said to Haliburton on Sunday, after Haliburton tried to explain how the Pacers have a bunch of players who are basically new at this stage and one in Siakam who has a championship from his time in Toronto.
To be fair, in these playoffs, 30 might seem old.
“These are high-stakes games and they’re going to be crazier as we go along,” Siakam said about playing this time of year. “But I think as long as we stick together, we’ll have a great group of guys… I think we can count on each other. They can count on me for experience, I can count on them just continuing to learn how to play with them. We just have to go out there and play and believe it’s possible.”
Experience, at this point, certainly favors Boston.
The Celtics have five players (Brown, Tatum, Horford, Holiday and Derrick White) with more than 200 career points in the Conference Finals and NBA Finals; the other three teams still in these playoffs have two of these players, combined (Irving and Siakam).
“It feels like it’s been a long time coming to get back to this position, to get back to the playoffs or the conference finals,” Irving said. “It’s just a long way back.”
Irving is truly a rarity in the NBA Finals four: He has a ring, won with Cleveland in 2016. Almost everyone left in these playoffs doesn’t. Siakam was on the 2019 Raptors team that won it all, Dallas’ Markieff Morris was on the Lakers team that won it in 2020 and Holiday was on the Bucks starting lineup in 2021.
The pressure is increasing now. It will rise again on June 6 when the NBA Finals begin. We’ll see which of the young stars are ready to take the last – and biggest – step.
“It showed us who we are,” Edwards said after Minnesota defeated Denver in Game 7 on Sunday.
The Celtics should be here; they were the favorites at the start of the season and are the bigger (-150) favorites now. Dallas was +4500 to win the title at one point this season; the Mavericks are +500 right now, according to BetMGM Sportsbook. Minnesota started the year at +6,600; the Wolves are now +260. And it seems no one saw Indiana coming; the Pacers’ championship line was +25,000 at the start of the season. They are +3,000 now.
“We’re the uninvited guest,” Pacers coach Rick Carlisle said. “So here we are.”
He’s right. Indiana’s youth – along with young stars from Boston, Dallas and Minnesota – crashed the party. In fact, they took over the entire party. One of those clubs will be the newly crowned NBA champions, the sixth different in the last six years, corresponding to the longest streak of parity in league history.
The NBA’s old guard isn’t gone yet. But the new group appears to be ready for prime time.
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