In 2011, Tom Haberstroh of ESPN's TrueHoop made a bold claim that payroll doesn't really matter as much as everyone thinks. Over a decade of NBA basketball, big-market and small-market teams had roughly evenly split championships. Tom's argument claimed that the league was more balanced than others believed.
However, that was in was 2011. Since then, the NBA has changed dramatically. The salary cap has exploded, and the luxury tax has become an admission price for contenders. Superteams have formed and collapsed. A new generation of front offices has reshaped how teams are built, and how much they cost.
Twelve years of data later, this claim deserves to be looked into again.
The Champion's Wallet
Starting with the biggest question: do NBA champions tend to be big spenders? The chart below shows the payroll rank of each champion from 2014 to 2025, where rank 1 means the highest-spending team in the league that year.
The picture is mixed, but shows an important trend. Champions are mostly clustered near the top of the spending ladder. The most notable exceptions, San Antonio Spurs in 2014 and OKC Thunder in 2025, are outliers.
Source: Spotrac NBA Cap Tracker. Payroll rank among all 30 teams each season.
Payroll vs. Wins
The scatter plot below plots every team-season from 2014 to 2025 on the same canvas. Each dot is one team in one year. Teams colored red made the playoffs; gray dots did not.
Use the year buttons to filter by season, or hover over any dot to see the team name, payroll, and win total. There seems to be a messy pattern but there's a significant upward trend. Higher spending correlates with more wins.
Each point = one team-season (2014–2025). Source: Spotrac, Basketball Reference.
The correlation isn't perfect, but the trend is noticeable: teams below $80M rarely make the playoffs, while teams spending $160M+ are almost always in playoff contention. The bar has risen over the decade.
The Rich Get Richer
I don't think the most intriguing story is that money correlates with wins. It's how much the gap between spenders and non-spenders has grown. The line chart below tracks every team's payroll from 2014 to 2025.
Hover over any line to highlight that team's trajectory. Note how the top lines have moved away from the bottom over the past decade. The NBA's financial outlook has changed, along with the competitive balance.
Source: Spotrac NBA Cap Tracker.
In 2014, the gap between the highest and lowest spenders was around $50M. By 2025, that gap had increased to $100M. The salary cap has risen, but not all teams have risen with it.
So, Does Money Buy Wins?
Haberstroh was right, in 2011. The data from that era showed true competitive balance, and that argument held up. But as of 2025, the NBA looks different. Payroll correlates with wins more than it did a decade ago, champions are more likely to be top spenders, and the financial gap between the league's lowest and highest spenders has grown.
The scatter plot above tells a different story than Haberstroh's original data: across 360 team-seasons from 2014–2025, higher payroll consistently trended toward more wins. The champions bar chart emphasizes this. While the author pointed to balanced championship distribution, my data shows that low-spending winners like the 2014 Spurs (22nd in payroll) and 2025 Thunder (26th in payroll) are becoming increasingly rare exceptions, and not evidence of true parity.
But, this doesn't mean money guarantees a win. Ask the 2023-24 Golden State Warriors, for example, who spent the most in the league and won just 46 games. But it does mean that underspending has become increasingly difficult to overcome. The OKC Thunder's 2025 championship is a wonderful story, but also an anomaly.
The original argument made a strong case for parity. However, the twelve years of data since then show that window may be closing.