The league copies your best idea within about a season and a half

Tactical advantages in basketball have a shorter shelf life than in any other team sport, and dynasties are built on that clock.

There are thirty teams, they all play each other, and every possession is filmed from four angles and available to every video coordinator by midnight. That is the whole reason tactical edges evaporate so fast in this sport.

Compare it to football, where a manager's structural idea can take three or four seasons to spread because the personnel required to run it are scarce and expensive and cannot be acquired mid-season. Basketball has five players on the floor and a roster of fifteen. If your innovation is a coverage or an action rather than a person, someone else can install it in a training camp.

So the useful question about any great team is not what they invented. It is what part of it cannot be copied. Usually the answer is a player, or an unusual combination of two, and that is why the honest history of tactical revolutions in this sport tends to collapse into the history of the individuals who made them viable. Everyone can run the same actions. Not everyone has the man who makes the defence guard them.

The second layer is that copying is imperfect in a way that matters. A team installs an action it saw work, runs it with players who lack one of the required skills, and the action produces worse shots than what it replaced. That happens constantly and it is why the copycat wave following any successful team includes several franchises who get demonstrably worse by imitating it. The idea travels. The preconditions do not.

Which leads to my actual view, which is that the tactical advantage of a great team is almost always exhausted before the roster is. By year three, everybody knows the scheme, the counters are established, and the team is winning on execution and talent rather than surprise. That is fine. Execution and talent win a lot of games.

But it means the coaching staff has to produce a second idea in year four, from a position of much less freedom, with a roster built for the first one. Most cannot. That is what people are describing, imprecisely, when they say a team got figured out.