Unlike the NFL, the road from the bottom to the top is rarely a short journey. It takes years of solid drafting, timely free agent signings, and internal player development before teams can even get in the conversation of being a top team in the NBA. The league‘s top teams have all gone through meticulous rebuilds to get to where they are now.
The process starts off with being terrible at the beginning (or tanking as some may call it). Recent NBA Champions like the Golden State Warriors, San Antonio Spurs, and Miami Heat had at least one year of bottoming out in the standings before landing cornerstone players who eventually lead them to multiple championships.