Building a dynasty in the NBA is a cruel and fickle task. 

The Boston Celtics saw just how fragile this process is on Monday night, when star forward Jayson Tatum went down with a ruptured Achilles tendon that will likely cost him all of the 2025-26 season. 

Just hours earlier, it felt like the Celtics were in great position to tie to the series at 2-2 with the Knicks, with a chance to head back to Boston and win two games for another conference finals trip.

Instead, the entire outlook of the franchise’s future has been altered. A potentially budding dynasty, or at least a significant run, likely removed from the history books before the pen even got a chance to hit the pad. When Tatum returns in 2027, who knows what the Celtics organization will look like around him. And we’ve seen how quickly stars ask out when they get disgruntled in this league. 

Gone are the days where dominant franchises like the Celtics and the Los Angeles Lakers had a chokehold on the sport’s historical record. Given the league’s financial aprons, it’s even hard to imagine another brief run of dominance like the mid-2010s Golden State Warriors had. And that’s before you mention all the natural occurrences, like a star tearing their Achilles, that can take a team from contender to pretender in the literal blink of an eye.

Down 3-1 to the New York Knicks, there’s still a minuscule chance for a miracle in Celtics Land. However, it seems like both this final stand in 2025 and the 2026 season are now lost causes. If that’s the case, the Tatum/Brown era in Boston could join this list of budding dynasties that got cut short before they could certify themselves as such. 

Let's take a look at three that were gut-punches to the respective franchises.

Late 70s Portland TrailBlazers

When BlazerMania took the NBA by storm in late 70s, it finally felt like another dynasty was going to emerge alongside the Celtics and Lakers in an NBA that was still growing into what it would eventually become. 

The Portland TrailBlazers were the youngest team in the league when they ran the table in 1977, sweeping the L.A. Lakers in the Western Conference finals and downing a ultra-talented Philadelphia 76ers team in the finals, 4-2, on their way to the franchise’s first and only NBA championship. They had who they believed was a bona fide franchise cornerstone in Bill Walton, who took the franchise from irrelevance to the top of the mountain in ‘77 in what was really the only fully healthy season he played in the NBA.

Walton was in the midst of his only MVP season in 1978 at 26 years old, having led the Blazers to a 50-10 start, when he suffered a stress fracture in his foot that began the unraveling of both Walton’s trajectory as a star and the TrailBlazers trajectory as a franchise. Portland tumbled to the finish line but their performance before Walton’s injury still earned them a first-round bye. 

Nonetheless, they were eliminated in six games in ‘78 by the No. 4 seed Seattle SuperSonics. Walton never played another game in a Blazers uniform, as he sat out the entire 1978-79 season before signing with the San Diego Clippers in the 1979 offseason.

Mid 90s Orlando Magic

With less than a minute to play in Game 1 of the 1995 NBA Finals, it looked like the Orlando Magic’s youth movement was going to be the driving force of the late 90s. After all, Shaquille O’Neal, Penny Hardaway and company sent Michael Jordan’s Chicago Bulls packing in six games just two rounds earlier in the conference semifinals. 

Then, Nick Anderson missed four straight fateful free throws with the game on the line and the Magic choked away what was sure to be a Game 1 victory and a potential fast track to the franchise’s first NBA title. Orlando’s collapse in ‘95 was abrupt from that point on, as the team was promptly swept by the Houston Rockets in four games.

Orlando’s crystal clear championship window was shattered by the Bulls’ reemergence in 1996. The Magic’s franchise-best 60-22 record was overshadowed by Chicago’s NBA record-setting 72-win campaign. To salt the wound, the Bulls got revenge in the ‘96 playoffs by sweeping the Magic in the conference finals on their way to a fourth NBA championship in six seasons. 

After that loss to Chicago in ‘96, O’Neal left Orlando for the Los Angeles Lakers in free agency. The rest is history. While Penny battled knee injuries for the rest of his NBA career, Shaq led what could have been Orlando’s dynasty in Los Angeles with a young cat named Kobe Bryant instead.

Early 2010s Chicago Bulls

Derrick Rose wasn’t just the youngest MVP in league history in 2011 at 22, he was the centerpiece of what was poised to become a dominant force in the Eastern Conference. The Chicago Bulls won 62 games that year before falling to LeBron James and the Miami Heat in the Eastern Conference Finals and the entire NBA landscape knew that was just the tip of the iceberg of what was possible in Chicago. 

The Bulls were again the best team in the East during the 2012 regular season, this time going 50-16 in the lockout-shortened season before tragedy struck in the first round against the Philadelphia 76ers. With a 12-point lead and less than 1:30 remaining in Game 1, Rose tore his ACL while going up for a floater. Like Walton and the late ‘70s Blazers, Rose and Chicago’s trajectory was never the same. The Bulls would lose that series to Philadelphia in six.

Rose sat out the 2012-13 season, but with an emerging young Jimmy Butler and a post stalwart in Joakim Noah, the Bulls still made the Eastern Conference semifinals before again falling to the Miami Heat. Rose made his return in October 2013 but suffered a torn meniscus in just his 10th game upon returning, which continued a snowball effect on injuries that had a catastrophic effect on Rose’s career. The Bulls suffered another first-round exit to the Washington Wizards later that season before a first-team All-NBA season from Noah propelled the Bulls back into the Eastern Conference semifinals. Though he was with Cleveland instead of Miami this time, LeBron James still sent them packing in six games, however. The Bulls haven’t won a playoff series since. 

It's hard not to wonder how classic those battles between LeBron and D-Rose could have been throughout the 2010s with NBA Finals berths at stake. Instead, LeBron got to waltz through the corpse of a conference for a decade.