The highest-seeded teams in the 2025 NBA playoffs have not had much success. This follows a pattern started in 2023.
The Oklahoma City Thunder were the best team in the league for the majority of the regular season. Tuesday night, they withstood an offensive barrage from Denver center Nikola Jokic to claim a 112-105 win and a 3-2 lead in their second-round series.
Nothing in the previous paragraph is surprising. What is surprising is how different it’s been from the rest of the 2025 NBA playoffs.
Earlier Tuesday night, the Indiana Pacers eliminated the 64-win Cleveland Cavaliers from the playoffs, sealing the deal in just five games. The New York Knicks lead the 61-win Boston Celtics 3-1 and can eliminate the reigning NBA champions with a win Wednesday night or in a potential Game 6 or 7. With Celtics star Jayson Tatum out for the remainder of the series (and likely most of next season) after tearing his right Achilles, it seems likely the Knicks will be able to grab one more game.
The No. 1 and 2 playoff seeds have had mixed (to put it kindly) results.If the Knicks wind up advancing past the Celtics, that would mean two 60-win teams will be out before the conference finals. That’s only happened once in NBA history – in 2007, when the top-seeded Dallas Mavericks won 67 games but lost in the first round to the Golden State Warriors and the Phoenix Suns lost to the San Antonio Spurs in the second round after winning 61 games in the regular season.
That’s just an amuse-bouche for statistics about how poorly the top seeds have fared in the playoffs. And some of the numbers indicate a trend as opposed to a one-year outlier.
May Madness in the NBA Playoffs
There have been only four NBA playoffs since the field was expanded to 16 teams with the 1983-84 season that three of the four top-two seeds have been eliminated prior to the two conference finals.
Or perhaps HAD only been four years. This year seems likely to make it five if the Celtics follow the Cavaliers and Houston Rockets to Cancun. If the Thunder also lose two straight to the Nuggets, this would be the first year when all the four highest-seeded teams fall in the first two rounds.
If we make the same assumption about the Celtics losing, the combined total of the four seeds in the conference finals will be at least 14. The only two years with higher combined seeding totals in the conference finals since 1983 were 2023 (18) and 2024 (15).
Yup, the last two NBA playoffs.
Trending Toward Upsets
If 2025 were just one year of unpredictability, it would be easy to dismiss as a one-off. Anything can happen in one season. A few of the wrong players get hurt and the whole playoff field changes.
But 2023 and 2024 were also among the years when the higher seeds did their worst. One year might be a blip; three straight years feels like a trend.
It’s fair to question whether regular season success is less linked to playoff success than ever and one of the biggest reasons for this isn’t going away.
In past years, we’ve seen teams that were willing to pay a high luxury tax continue to build a deeper lineup even after acquiring multiple star players on max contracts. Think of how the Miami Heat signed three players to near-max level contracts in LeBron James, Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh and still had several exceptions to use to retool their roster every year. Or how the Warriors used a cap spike to sign Kevin Durant when they already had a bunch of expensive players on the books.
Both of these examples were isolated incidents, sure, but they help illustrate how forgiving the soft cap could be if teams were willing to stomach massive tax payments. The harshest penalties were simply financial.
That’s not the case anymore. We’ve touched on the restrictions before, but when the Suns want to supplement their highly paid superstars, there are fewer avenues to do so now.
What does this have to do with highly seeded teams losing? Well, it means that teams’ championship windows are shortening. Front offices have to make tough decisions faster because once a team is expensive, there are far fewer undo buttons.
Look at the Celtics. They’re still the envy of the league, but, in a past era, the team might have been inclined to keep Tatum, Jaylen Brown, Jrue Holiday, Al Horford and Kristaps Porzingis together for as long as possible. In the modern NBA, the Celtics seemed destined to send off a big salary this offseason even if they repeated as champions. Their roster is still the envy of most other teams, but it’s not as easy as “run it back.”
Because if running it back doesn’t work, there isn’t a plan B.
This phenomenon has caused some teams that might’ve had staying power in previous eras to decline in talent. The Nuggets – NBA champs in 2023 – are still a threat with Jokic, but when they resigned Michael Porter Jr., they felt the need to let Kentavious Caldwell-Pope leave. Bruce Brown also departed from their championship team, and the franchise didn’t have any avenues to replace those players’ salaries. They had to hope to hit on some draft picks.
The Milwaukee Bucks situation is even worse. The team made a gamble with the Damian Lillard trade and hasn’t been able to add significant talent to its roster otherwise. The Bucks had to take another gamble in trading Khris Middleton for Kyle Kuzma. Now, Lillard is hurt (his Achilles tear may sideline him all of next season) and the Bucks don’t resemble title contenders at all.
It’s no guarantee these teams would’ve succeeded in past eras, but they would have had more avenues to building deeper rosters that were good enough to supplement their star players in the regular season. Now teams with veteran superstars can’t keep adding veteran talent. That thins out a roster, which makes the team worse in the regular season.
Young and Hungry
Not every team that has had success in the NBA playoffs sees its roster thin out and de-emphasizes the regular season. But a lot more do than in past iterations of the NBA.
That leaves some higher seeds there for the taking. And the teams there to take them are ones that haven’t had recent playoff success.
Young teams like the Houston Rockets are ready to meet the challenge of the regular season every day, with a hunger to improve and a roster filled with players talented enough to cover for stars’ injuries or fatigue.
The Cavaliers aren’t as young as the Rockets, but they’re a team that had a lot to prove this season. They came in focused, won 15 straight games to start the campaign and kept pushing all the way to the top seed in the Eastern Conference.
But the regular season success of these teams might not translate to the playoffs. The last three years, we’ve seen teams like the 2025 Rockets, 2024 Thunder and 2023 Memphis Grizzlies all have great regular seasons before losing in the playoffs to more battle-tested foes. A decade ago, those battle-tested foes were more likely to be the higher seeds.
Sustained Success
While a lot of top seeds are losing more quickly than ever, the last two championships have been won by a No. 1 seed, and the Thunder are the favorite to win this spring.
There’s likely to be more chaos in the years to come, but it only takes a few teams getting on a roll to restore order. The Thunder appear as though they will be good for a long time with their roster and war chest of assets. Nothing is guaranteed, but they could win a championship and have the ammo to replenish their team around All-Star guard Shai Gilgeous-Alexander to stay competitive in both the regular season and playoffs for years to come.
Sustained success will still be possible; it will just be harder than it used to be. Perhaps the lesson here is to be even more impressed by teams like the Pacers (and possibly the Minnesota Timberwolves, who as a No. 6 seed eliminated the Los Angeles Lakers in the first round) that are able to make the conference finals in consecutive years.
While the future is uncertain, one thing is certain: NBA playoff seeding isn’t the guarantee of success it used to be.
Research support provided by Stats Perform’s Chase Weight.
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