Teams can spend years, decades even, trying to find a player good enough to lead them to a championship. We can call them Window Openers.

The number of Window Openers in any given season is small. Of 450ish players in the NBA, we’re talking about 5-10 guys. For example, this season, the list is:

In their prime title winners: Nikola Jokic, Giannis Antetokounmpo, Steph Curry and Kevin Durant.

Probably in it, but need to see more: Joel Embiid, Jayson Tatum, Luka Doncic.

Likely still hanging on: LeBron James, Kawhi Leonard and Jimmy Butler.

That’s 10 players, which is on the higher end of most seasons. Sometimes the league has just half of that. Take the 2013-14 season for instance. Here’s the list of Window Openers 10 years ago: James, Durant, Chris Paul and Tim Duncan. Even if we throw Carmelo Anthony (second in the league in scoring) and Stephen Curry (a year away from breaking the game) in there, it’s only six. 

The point is, it’s rare to have a Window Opener and, if you do, you owe it to your franchise to do everything you can to build a championship team around him.

LeBron probably threw away two years of his extended prime by pushing for the Russell Westbrook trade, but now he’s back in it after the Lakers front office rebuilt the team around him and Anthony Davis. The Lakers had to trade away a future first-round pick to do it, but they knew what they had wasn’t working and they needed to maximize whatever time they had left.

This is the art of going for it. 

In today’s Excel spreadsheet-led conversation around team-building, front offices are praised more for draft-pick hoarding and salary-cap finagling than hanging banners. 

An executive can be widely regarded as one of the NBA’s top GMs just for having collected a dozen future first-round picks despite not having won a championship. That’s not a shot at anyone in particular, but more of a gentle reminder that the goal of basketball isn’t to acquire as many draft picks as possible. It’s to win as many championships as possible.

Does the Lakers’ decision to part with a potentially very valuable first-round pick in 2027 guarantee anything? Of course not. But you know who they (probably) won’t have in 2027? A still-somehow-in-his-prime LeBron who is ready to make a run at the Larry O.

This is the same decision the Bucks and Celtics made this summer. 

Milwaukee, facing the possibility of losing Giannis, decided to make the blockbuster deal for Damian Lillard. That trade germinated its own questions about depth, defense and the value of the Bucks’ long-term draft assets, but it also made Milwaukee the home of the league’s best pick-and-roll duo overnight. I like to imagine that at some point during the meeting about the trade, someone blurted out, “Hey, it’s Damian Freaking Lillard, let’s stop overthinking it and just go get this guy.”

Then there are the Celtics, who made the Finals in 2022 and nearly made it back in 2023, but there was a sense that the group around Tatum and Jaylen Brown was getting stale. So they switched it up, trading away Marcus Smart, Robert Williams III and draft picks to add Kristaps Porzingis and Jrue Holiday. The Celtics are looking to jolt things around their 25-year-old, four-time All-Star. Tatum is ready to win championships now, and there’s no guarantee how long this time will last.

It felt like that window used to be open longer: 4-5 years, about the length of a star’s contract. Now, with the new CBA introducing more punitive spending penalties and in the age of player movement, that window has shrunk to 2-3 years. 

That means that organizations that have a Window Opener are on the clock as soon as that player hits his prime. That’s the Celtics with Tatum, the Mavericks with Luka, and the 76ers with Embiid.

But those organizations already know that. All three teams recently made huge trades to upend their core in hopes of providing their Window Opener a co-star. The Celtics signed their No. 2 to the richest contract in league history, and sacrificed depth to land a bona fide No. 3. The Mavericks acquired Kyrie Irving before last season’s trade deadline. The Sixers traded away Ben Simmons for James Harden. 

Those moves can all be debated on their own merit, but it’s important to remember that sometimes the perfect trade isn’t out there. Deciding to go all-in on the perfect trade is easy. It’s the ones that are imperfect, that bring about their own level of risk but have the potential to raise a team’s ceiling, that take guts to pull off. 

Getting a player who can open the championship window is what all the draft-pick hoarding, roster shuffling and salary cap finagling is for. Then, it’s about knowing when to take the next step in the team-building life cycle and deciding to pounce. To prioritize the present over the future. 

It’s not an exact science. There’s no blueprint to follow. Making a big move could end up working out or disastrously backfiring, but it’s at this intersection where teams can go from could-be’s to champions. This is the art of going for it.