NBA Equality of Opportunity: We got yer parity right he-ah

[InstaFace]

A line of thought was brought up in the Kawhi thread and then over to the Draft thread, and I thought it deserved a place of its own.

This is what the NBA has become, isn't it? Five or six teams suck out all of the oxygen, plotting mega-deals to create mega-teams, while nobody else has a hope in hell. The NBA is now much more like the English Premier League than the NFL, NHL or MLB. (There is always the possibility in the NBA that your team can become one of those five or six teams, which is different from English soccer...but within any period of several seasons, it's otherwise pretty much identical.)

Besides the 70s it has always been a few teams dominating the league. It's the nature of basketball.

Yes, and it sucks for the majority of fans.

I want to like the NBA, but they don't like me.

(and then in the Draft...)

It bemuses me to see how much the NBA Draft, which is really supposed to be about the worst teams in the league and how they might improve (or occasionally how they screwed themselves by trading great picks to much better teams), has become another exercise in worshiping the super-teams or figuring out how to form more of them. I know that's perfectly natural in a Celtics forum - although really, I want my Hawks to get the best player available in a very good draft (Doncic!) and not Terry Freaking Rozier - but when the top two stories on http://www.espn.com/nba/ right now are "Should Celtics put Jaylen Brown in Kawhi trade?" and "Seven best Kawhi trades we'd like to see", and so much of the chatter is about which good team can steal the Memphis pick at #4, I want to crawl back into my cave and forget the NBA exists.

Who's got the sig quote about history being like a wheel? The NBA, similar to but moreso than most other leagues, is about teams entering and exiting cycles of competition-to-rebuilding. The EPL, meanwhile, is about as static as you get, Leicester excepted, and certainly the UCL likewise, so your despondency surprises me - although maybe passion fans of non-top-10 clubs are more accepting of their lot in life. But the Lakers and Celtics are not Real Madrid and Man United - they just aren't, their fates are too precarious.

Anyway, the NBA's system is of course constructed to facilitate this dynamism: In theory, the teams who are most bereft of today's stars are given the picks that will let them choose tomorrow's stars. And the teams most blessed with stars get absolutely soaked financially if they try to keep them longer than a few years.

The spanners in the works are thus mostly of teams' own designs:

1. Foolishly trading away excess future value in their own future picks, or acquiring poor present value
2. Not knowing how to assemble good-fit rosters around what stars they do have, or being unwilling to spend the amounts to do a credible job of it
3. Furiously spending to remain in mediocrity
4. Massive disparities in teams' revenue opportunities, only partly alleviated by revenue sharing

Mediocrity is a strategic goal in a lot of places, because mediocrity brings in lots of fan attendance and TV dollars that The Process just doesn't, and likewise few teams truly have the ability to work themselves into contention for a title. Getting into contention is a combination of wise GMing, patient ownership, good scouting, and a sprinkling of luck but less than some fans might think.

Ainge's skill didn't arise in a vacuum: he only got the credibility to really build long-term several years into his tenure, certainly not prior to the Garnett acquisition, and arguably didn't truly have carte blanche until after the Billy King trade. Hinkie knew how to avoid #3, and had his runway clear, until he didn't. But the path to get into contention, albeit non-linear, is well understood. And unless you're Memphis or Sacramento, you really can't use #4 as an excuse. The Hawks are not in a #3 situation, so it's really within their own control; if they get their own Tatum/Brown tandem together with a good coach and supporting cast, they'll attract the free agents needed to rise to contention.

 

[DJnVa]

The NBA, compared to other sports, is ridiculously star driven. And they’re not a lot of them. Therefore the teams that get those top guys dominate.

Superstar movement to join others is hopefully a temporary phenomenon.

 

[Conigliaro's Potential]

Good post and summary to start the thread.

Who's got the sig quote about history being like a wheel? The NBA, similar to but moreso than most other leagues, is about teams entering and exiting cycles of competition-to-rebuilding. The EPL, meanwhile, is about as static as you get, Leicester excepted, and certainly the UCL likewise, so your despondency surprises me - although maybe passion fans of non-top-10 clubs are more accepting of their lot in life. But the Lakers and Celtics are not Real Madrid and Man United - they just aren't, their fates are too precarious.

It's true that over the long term, NBA teams can cycle up and down. But as far as American sports are concerned, on a season-to-season basis I think I'd sum everything up this way:

--In baseball, Major League teams connect with their local audiences very well, but more and more people no longer particularly care what's happening in the league as a whole, particularly if your team isn't doing well.

--In basketball, the reverse seems to be true in the NBA: so much of the league is about the big picture and individuals and super-teams, and it almost seems as though local teams in their down cycles - apart from the big city teams like the Knicks and Lakers, etc. - have ceased to really matter except insofar as they exist to let you watch the super-teams (and individual superstars) when they come to town.

--In football, the NFL has the best of both worlds: your local team matters the most to you, but the storylines across the league make every team and almost every game meaningful in some way. (Not always meaningful to the playoffs, of course, but to the soap opera drama of the league, absolutely.)

So the problem for me with the NBA, as a fan of the Hawks, is that unless I care which of the super-teams wins the title (I don't really, although I guess the Celtics are the best outcome for me here), or unless I support individual superstars in addition to my team (I don't), or unless my team has a shot at acquiring one or more superstars somehow (it doesn't, except maybe through the draft), there's not really much to excite me about the NBA until such time as my team can become competitive again, which seems to be the longest cycle with the least variance of these three sports I've mentioned. But rather than try to accent a "hope and faith" approach to the league as Bud Selig did once upon a time, the league makes it more possible for superstars to band together - often in the relatively small number of cities deemed attractive by players in the league - and elongate the cycle for the have-nots even more. It's really frustrating.

(And of course, if Travis Schlenk proves to be Danny Ainge v2, the Hawks could become one of the haves instead of a have-not in the foreseeable future. But that doesn't change the underlying structure of the league as a whole, in its present form.)

 

[Saints Rest]

It seems to me that the cause behind this coalescing of stars into mega-teams is the Max Salary rule in the CBA combined with the Bird Rule. Once a player can only make x% of the cap, and a team can over the cap as much as they want (as long as they are willing to eat luxury tax penalties), it means that the league will continue to tend toward mega-teams.

If there was no max contract, LBJ would likely be positioning himself for some $50M/year contract. It would mean that the league would end up with more teams with one mega-star and a bunch of filler as each star would be seeking out the team with the most $$$ rather than the most other stars.

 

[InstaFace]

So the problem for me with the NBA, as a fan of the Hawks, is that unless I care which of the super-teams wins the title (I don't really, although I guess the Celtics are the best outcome for me here), or unless I support individual superstars in addition to my team (I don't), or unless my team has a shot at acquiring one or more superstars somehow (it doesn't, except maybe through the draft), there's not really much to excite me about the NBA until such time as my team can become competitive again, which seems to be the longest cycle with the least variance of these three sports I've mentioned. But rather than try to accent a "hope and faith" approach to the league as Bud Selig did once upon a time, the league makes it more possible for superstars to band together - often in the relatively small number of cities deemed attractive by players in the league - and elongate the cycle for the have-nots even more. It's really frustrating.

Well, it does help to actually enjoy watching the sport be played by professionals who are really good at it. I say that without snark - for some people, winning or the potential to win is the only thing that makes it worth watching to them, and nobody is emotionally invested in everything.

I'd like to see Tiger dominate a few more golf majors, but I personally just don't have the appreciation for the sport to watch it when that's not happening. That makes me not a fan (or barely a fan) of golf. But you won't see me saying "the PGA sucks" or complaining about how top-heavy the tour is.

Whereas, with baseball, after a few years into my SoSH tenure I'd learned how to appreciate all the subtleties that made a game enjoyable even if my team was losing, or even if my team sucked and the season wasn't going anywhere special. The pitcher's sequencing and set-up, the hitters' adjustments game-to-game, the development of young talent, the quirky personalities, the impressive plays... if you're truly a fan of the game, then I feel like you ought to still be able to appreciate watching it, even if your team isn't currently one of the favorites for the title.

Certainly, the extent to which you enjoy following the league makes a difference (your point about how the league and its player movement and machinations vary across sports is well taken). But without an underlying enjoyment of the sport, if all you're in it for is watching people try to game a system, you might as well take your talents to wall street, I figure. Enjoying watching the sport being played (as opposed to following the sport, or even following your team) sounds so obvious, but I feel like it's an overlooked factor. It's soccer's main problem in this country, because there's an awareness hurdle and several biases to overcome before you get to a point where you enjoy what you're watching.

 

[mauf]

The NBA will always have the least parity of any North American team sport. You can’t* win a title without a top-10 player, which by definition at least two-thirds of the teams won’t have at any given time. A few of the very best players earn nearly as much from endorsements as from salary, so the typical tools that leagues use to channel players’ desire to maximize their earnings to enforce parity (salary caps, luxury taxes, etc.) will always work less well in the NBA than in other leagues.

That doesn’t mean the NBA couldn’t do better. Capping individual player contracts encourages star players to band together to form superteams. The way the game is officiated amplifies the advantages that teams with star players already enjoy. The caps on contract length hinder small-market teams’ ability To hold on to their homegrown stars. All of these problems are fixable, at least in theory.

I’m not sure mismanagement is worse in the NBA than in other sports. I mean, look what the Cleveland Browns and New York Jets have managed to do in a league that’s designed to make it damn near impossible not to qualify for the playoffs at least a couple times per decade. Mismanagement is, however, highlighted in the NBA in a way that it isn’t in other sports, because of the fundamental nature of the game — you can enjoy a second-division baseball team, and following a hapless NFL team can be fun too (the 16-game schedule helps), but unless you’ve got courtside seats, a bad NBA team is pretty much unwatchable. I mean, we rip on “pink hats” and Pats fans who don’t know who Rod Rust was, but lots of C’s fans will freely admit they didn’t watch when Kris Humphries was logging major minutes.


*- The 2004 Pistons are an obvious exception — Ben Wallace might be the most underrated player of my lifetime, but I’m not sure he was ever a top-10 guy.

 

[Infield Infidel]

It seems to me that the cause behind this coalescing of stars into mega-teams is the Max Salary rule in the CBA combined with the Bird Rule. Once a player can only make x% of the cap, and a team can over the cap as much as they want (as long as they are willing to eat luxury tax penalties), it means that the league will continue to tend toward mega-teams.

If there was no max contract, LBJ would likely be positioning himself for some $50M/year contract. It would mean that the league would end up with more teams with one mega-star and a bunch of filler as each star would be seeking out the team with the most $$$ rather than the most other stars.

The union won't give up the max because it spreads out the salaries; Lebron would probably be worth more than $50m. I wouldn't get rid of the max but I'd increase it to somewhere between 40-50% of the soft cap, so that you can't sign more than two max players.This would be up from 35% today for the supermax. For 2017-18 this would increase the highest max from ~$36m to $40.8-$51 million, of the $102m soft cap. If you signed two max players for even 40% ($40.8m) that puts you at $81.6m, leaving only $20.4 under the soft cap and $40.4 under the hard cap for your other 10+ players. With two guys at the 50% max then there;s nothing under the soft cap and ~$20m under the hard cap for the rest of the team. If players want to leave money on the table that's their right, but I think the difference would be large enough that it wouldn't turn down.

 

[finnVT]

It seems to me that the cause behind this coalescing of stars into mega-teams is the Max Salary rule in the CBA combined with the Bird Rule. Once a player can only make x% of the cap, and a team can over the cap as much as they want (as long as they are willing to eat luxury tax penalties), it means that the league will continue to tend toward mega-teams.

If there was no max contract, LBJ would likely be positioning himself for some $50M/year contract. It would mean that the league would end up with more teams with one mega-star and a bunch of filler as each star would be seeking out the team with the most $$$ rather than the most other stars.

I think that's a big factor, but I also think a huge piece comes from the fact that the superstars are WILLING to take less since (1) their max salary is limited, and (2) there's huge potential for endorsement dollars. That is, being an A1 superstar on a winning team can open up so much endorsement money that it's worth taking a slightly lower salary to be in a prime situation.

Per this paper (https://repository.usfca.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=1009&context=sm), NBA athletes as a whole earn 31% of their income from endorsements, vs 13% for MLB players. I'd guess this disparity is even higher among star level players. The less the actual salary matters (due to a combination of max salary limits, and the high level or endorsement dollars available), the more likely you are to have athletes choosing teams for other reasons (e.g., the city, winning, etc), which is very likely going to lead to these sort of super teams.

 

[cheech13]

Maybe this is besides the point, but why, for example, are the Atlanta Hawks cited herein as some sad-sack franchise that fans should have no interest in? They made the playoffs for a decade straight, played in the Eastern Conference Finals once and the semis four other times, and had multiple All-Stars. That cycle is over and now it's rebuilding time. Every team goes through it; the Lakers, arguably the best run franchise historically, is still in the depths of a half-decade long rebuild. This is something every team in every sport has to go through at some point. It's the long-term cost of competing.

The NBA has the least amount of variance because the best players can play the whole game and impact every play. The peaks of those players are longer and less prone to year to year slumps. You can't legislate that out of the game. If your goal is to get more upsets and give the illusion of being more competitive, you have to shorten the games, the season and the length of the playoff rounds (best of three or best of five). You can also get rid of the max contract to lead to a greater distribution of talent across the league, but it won't necessarily make the product better and you run the risk of driving the best players to the biggest markets in the long run. You eliminate super teams without the max, but the trade-off is that high-end talent is more impactful because you remove alternative methods of team building (like teaming up two or three All-Stars to take out a singular talent like Lebron).

 

[Infield Infidel]

I think that's a big factor, but I also think a huge piece comes from the fact that the superstars are WILLING to take less since (1) their max salary is limited, and (2) there's huge potential for endorsement dollars. That is, being an A1 superstar on a winning team can open up so much endorsement money that it's worth taking a slightly lower salary to be in a prime situation.

Per this paper (https://repository.usfca.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=1009&context=sm), NBA athletes as a whole earn 31% of their income from endorsements, vs 13% for MLB players. I'd guess this disparity is even higher among star level players. The less the actual salary matters (due to a combination of max salary limits, and the high level or endorsement dollars available), the more likely you are to have athletes choosing teams for other reasons (e.g., the city, winning, etc), which is very likely going to lead to these sort of super teams.

Exactly, Durant only left like $6m on the table. If someone could offer him $45m instead of $31m, then he's leaving $20m on the table. I mean maybe he does it but that's a much harder choice to make.

 

[TheRooster]

I disagree with the characterization of the NFL as having the best of both worlds. How is a mid-season Jets-Browns or Giants-Skins game compelling? I rarely miss a Patriots game and don't watch many non-Pats games. The biggest single advantage the NFL has is scarcity of the product. You don't have to invest much time to be fan and the majority of their games are on Sunday afternoon, eliminating work conflicts and many conflicts with hobbies/leisure activities.

 

[lexrageorge]

What can be frustrating as a fan of a non glamorous team is that it can take many years to develop a true contender via the draft, which is really the only avenue available for most teams outside of LA. The Warriors missed the playoffs 17 of 18 years, and they where the 8th seed in that one year they did make it. Despite being in California, they weren't exactly on any free agents' list of desired destinations. And they had some horrible drafting luck. The one year they get the #1 pick it turns into Joe Smith. The draft picks they traded away to get Chris Webber turned into Penny Hardaway and Vince Carter. They ended up with the #3 pick in that bucket of hot garbage known as the 2002 draft.

From the time the Warriors drafted Curry, they had to endure 3 more DNQ's and 2 early round playoff exits. Most GM's aren't given that long to build a team, never mind the 18 years it took them to rebuild when their core players from the Run TMC days aged out.

Not sure there's an easy solution, other than perhaps to somehow strengthen Bird rights so that non-LA teams don't feel compelled to trade players such as Paul George and Jimmy Butler all the time.

 

[Strike4]

There's also been an attitude shift in the way we as fans consume sports, and what we demand from them. In olden times there was less "availability" of other teams (meaning, you didn't see out of market games, read anything but local newspapers, listen to local radio coverage, have internet). So you were basically loyal by default and however much your team won, you followed them and found something worthwhile in them even if they didn't win championships. Examples of really good ones: 1996 Patriots, 2003 Red Sox, 2008 Patriots, 2001 Celtics, several of the recent Celtics teams.

Nowadays, the availability of everything has distorted the fan-franchise relationship, and is changing sports. MLB is currently dealing with this in the form of the "baseball is too slow" phenomenon. Baseball isn't any slower, it's that people have changed their consumption habits. The NFL was dealing with this with the "I as a fan deserve to not see the Patriots win another championship". Instead of finding nuance in rebuilding, or taking joy in regular-season upsets, or being satisfied to just have a team you root for in the playoffs, we as consumers demand championships and if it's not our team then we want different and ever more exciting ones every year.

 

[lexrageorge]

There's also been an attitude shift in the way we as fans consume sports, and what we demand from them. In olden times there was less "availability" of other teams (meaning, you didn't see out of market games, read anything but local newspapers, listen to local radio coverage, have internet). So you were basically loyal by default and however much your team won, you followed them and found something worthwhile in them even if they didn't win championships. Examples of really good ones: 1996 Patriots, 2003 Red Sox, 2008 Patriots, 2001 Celtics, several of the recent Celtics teams.

Nowadays, the availability of everything has distorted the fan-franchise relationship, and is changing sports. MLB is currently dealing with this in the form of the "baseball is too slow" phenomenon. Baseball isn't any slower, it's that people have changed their consumption habits. The NFL was dealing with this with the "I as a fan deserve to not see the Patriots win another championship". Instead of finding nuance in rebuilding, or taking joy in regular-season upsets, or being satisfied to just have a team you root for in the playoffs, we as consumers demand championships and if it's not our team then we want different and ever more exciting ones every year.

The bolded is not quite correct; average game length has meaningfully increased over what it was even 10 years ago, never mind 20+ years ago.

 

[InstaFace]

Yeah, baseball is in fact slower. But if you reduced average game time back to 2:30, equal to the average NBA game, I'd say like 80%+ of the people who complain about it would still be complaining. Reduce it to the 2:00 of a soccer game, with pitchers receiving a return throw, standing and delivering in the 12 prescribed seconds, and you'd have a more exciting product but still a lot of people complaining, because pitches don't result in balls-in-play that often. The "hook" of baseball is the tension that arises at a game's key moments, from it being an untimed contest of wills and coordination, as well as the childlike joy in taking a big bat and hitting something really hard and watching it go a long way.

Basically, at a certain point, you either "get it" or you don't. People who didn't grow up in the USA have a really hard time getting over the sheer number of rules they need to understand to appreciate an NFL game (which take well over 3 hours for about 12 minutes of live game action, let's remember). But if you do "get it" for a sport, I'm not sure parity really makes that huge a difference in the level of intensity with which you watch. I dunno, I'm open to arguments, but the sport with the least parity in the world (big-5 Euro soccer leagues) also has fanatically devoted fanbases, even in second and third divisions. Everyone knows Roger Federer is going to crush that fool on the other side of the net, and they watch anyway because they find it beautiful and exciting. Parity don't (usually) enter into it.

 

[snowmanny]

Basketball is a little different for sure. Four teams made The Finals from 1980-1987, and they were the only teams to have MVPs during that span. Two teams made The Finals the past two years.

The Celtics just made the Conference finals two years in a row (edit with home court advantage) and nobody thought they had a realistic shot to win the title either time, which is....weird and I can't imagine that in any other sport. But it was still boatloads of fun.

 

[Conigliaro's Potential]

The Celtics just made the Conference finals two years in a row (edit with home court advantage) and nobody thought they had a realistic shot to win the title either time, which is....weird and I can't imagine that in any other sport. But it was still boatloads of fun.

Yeah, I was going to make a similar point in response to this:

Maybe this is besides the point, but why, for example, are the Atlanta Hawks cited herein as some sad-sack franchise that fans should have no interest in? They made the playoffs for a decade straight, played in the Eastern Conference Finals once and the semis four other times, and had multiple All-Stars. That cycle is over and now it's rebuilding time. Every team goes through it; the Lakers, arguably the best run franchise historically, is still in the depths of a half-decade long rebuild. This is something every team in every sport has to go through at some point. It's the long-term cost of competing.

When all the Hawks' stars aligned for one season and they got the #1 seed and won 60 games, even when they reached the Eastern Conference Finals - for the first time ever - still nobody (least of all me) believed they could reach the Finals, let alone win the title. Making the playoffs for a decade straight is closer to being a symptom of stuck-in-the-middle syndrome than an achievement like it is in baseball and football (and hockey), sports in which anyone who makes the playoffs does have a puncher's chance of winning a title. If that's really what the peak looks like for most teams in the peak/trough cycle, that makes my point almost better than anything else I've said.

 

[Strike4]

Yeah, I was going to make a similar point in response to this:

When all the Hawks' stars aligned for one season and they got the #1 seed and won 60 games, even when they reached the Eastern Conference Finals - for the first time ever - still nobody (least of all me) believed they could reach the Finals, let alone win the title. Making the playoffs for a decade straight is closer to being a symptom of stuck-in-the-middle syndrome than an achievement like it is in baseball and football (and hockey), sports in which anyone who makes the playoffs does have a puncher's chance of winning a title. If that's really what the peak looks like for most teams in the peak/trough cycle, that makes my point almost better than anything else I've said.

I think there is an upside to the way fans consume sports now - on the 24 hours new cycle, in a global rather than local manner. The whole timeline is compressed, so that teams can go very quickly from contenders to tankers, or from buyers to sellers at a trade deadline. This probably has a lot to do with analytics and the technology revolution in sports, sports management and scouting, too. Feedback cycles are more rapid. It's very hard for a franchise to stay in a mediocre position for a long time without getting blowback - as you mention with the Hawks. Whether or not that blowback is enough to alter the course is a different question.

 

[Conigliaro's Potential]

I disagree with the characterization of the NFL as having the best of both worlds. How is a mid-season Jets-Browns or Giants-Skins game compelling? I rarely miss a Patriots game and don't watch many non-Pats games. The biggest single advantage the NFL has is scarcity of the product. You don't have to invest much time to be fan and the majority of their games are on Sunday afternoon, eliminating work conflicts and many conflicts with hobbies/leisure activities.

I think we all bring our own biases and sports-watching preferences to threads like this, but the television ratings would certainly suggest that more fans watch meaningless NFL games than watch meaningless NBA or MLB games by massive margins. And yes, the scarcity of the product is a large part of that - but you can't blame the NFL for having stumbled into a winning formula. (Can you blame MLB for not scrapping the 162-game schedule and having each team play one or two games per week? That might be enough to change the dynamics I've been talking about, and raise the profile of #1 starters to something akin to NFL quarterbacks...but that's not the way MLB works or ever will work.)

The NFL also attracts a disproportionate amount of offseason coverage relative to other sports - not just from super-teams, but from every team. The draft in April was first and foremost about which sad-sack teams might get franchise QBs; it wasn't about which disgruntled star might be involved in trades to super-teams, in no small part because super-teams don't and can't exist in the NFL. (Unless you have Bill Belichick as your coach and Tom Brady as your quarterback, of course.)

 

[Conigliaro's Potential]

Well, it does help to actually enjoy watching the sport be played by professionals who are really good at it. I say that without snark - for some people, winning or the potential to win is the only thing that makes it worth watching to them, and nobody is emotionally invested in everything.

Well, I enjoy watching basketball - and I've been commentating on it a bit as well - but it's a chicken-and-egg thing: there are only so many sports one can follow at once (that's a boundary I'm pushing all the time), and my sports fandom is largely driven by the drama of competition rather than technical excellence or individual personalities. If there were more equality in the NBA, and probably better/fairer refereeing and referee assignments as well, I'd probably follow it more at a general level, rather than my interest rising and falling to a greater or lesser extent with the Hawks' fortunes.

I wonder what the NBA would look like if a GM could franchise one of his players. I know NFL teams have three times as many players as NBA teams, and the impact of any one individual NFL player being retained is far less, but there are ways you could do this within the NBA CBA. For example, suppose you could franchise any given player for only one year, and by franchising the player only means you get to offer the player a contract at 120% of the max salary level (for, say, either 2 or 4 years) with no luxury tax penalties, with the player not being tradeable for the length of the contract - and if the player refuses to sign, he can only sign a contract elsewhere at no more than 80% of the max salary level (for however many years). So if a franchised player really wants to leave, he'll have to turn down a super-supermax contract and accept a big haircut, likely on a one-year deal if he backs himself; that's a meaningful financial choice without forcing a player into indentured servitude. You could tweak the parameters however you want - the point is that as others have noted, someone would have to *really* want to leave his team to turn down an offer like this.

 

[The Social Chair]

You eliminate super teams without the max, but the trade-off is that high-end talent is more impactful because you remove alternative methods of team building (like teaming up two or three All-Stars to take out a singular talent like Lebron).

This. Without super teams Lebron has 6 - 7 titles.

 

[pjheff]

This. Without super teams Lebron has 6 - 7 titles.

Or zero.

 

[amarshal2]

It seems to me that the cause behind this coalescing of stars into mega-teams is the Max Salary rule in the CBA combined with the Bird Rule. Once a player can only make x% of the cap, and a team can over the cap as much as they want (as long as they are willing to eat luxury tax penalties), it means that the league will continue to tend toward mega-teams.

If there was no max contract, LBJ would likely be positioning himself for some $50M/year contract. It would mean that the league would end up with more teams with one mega-star and a bunch of filler as each star would be seeking out the team with the most $$$ rather than the most other stars.

This is exactly right. According to 538 LeBron is worth like $95M/year and he’s paid $35M. The Warriors have like $350M (wild ass guess) of value playing for less than half that. This is THE problem.

The NBA will always have the least parity of any North American team sport. You can’t* win a title without a top-10 player, which by definition at least two-thirds of the teams won’t have at any given time. A few of the very best players earn nearly as much from endorsements as from salary, so the typical tools that leagues use to channel players’ desire to maximize their earnings to enforce parity (salary caps, luxury taxes, etc.) will always work less well in the NBA than in other leagues.

That doesn’t mean the NBA couldn’t do better. Capping individual player contracts encourages star players to band together to form superteams. The way the game is officiated amplifies the advantages that teams with star players already enjoy. The caps on contract length hinder small-market teams’ ability To hold on to their homegrown stars. All of these problems are fixable, at least in theory.

I’m not sure mismanagement is worse in the NBA than in other sports. I mean, look what the Cleveland Browns and New York Jets have managed to do in a league that’s designed to make it damn near impossible not to qualify for the playoffs at least a couple times per decade. Mismanagement is, however, highlighted in the NBA in a way that it isn’t in other sports, because of the fundamental nature of the game — you can enjoy a second-division baseball team, and following a hapless NFL team can be fun too (the 16-game schedule helps), but unless you’ve got courtside seats, a bad NBA team is pretty much unwatchable. I mean, we rip on “pink hats” and Pats fans who don’t know who Rod Rust was, but lots of C’s fans will freely admit they didn’t watch when Kris Humphries was logging major minutes.


*- The 2004 Pistons are an obvious exception — Ben Wallace might be the most underrated player of my lifetime, but I’m not sure he was ever a top-10 guy.

This is mostly a function of the individual salary rules cited above. If you could configure salaries any which way, there would be a lot more possible team designs that could result in a different style of winner. Look at the nhl or nfl where it’s not the same star driven formula over an over again. Basketball is more star driven because there’s only 5 guys in a court and 8 in a playoff rotation but the salary rules greatly exacerbate this problem.

I think that's a big factor, but I also think a huge piece comes from the fact that the superstars are WILLING to take less since (1) their max salary is limited, and (2) there's huge potential for endorsement dollars. That is, being an A1 superstar on a winning team can open up so much endorsement money that it's worth taking a slightly lower salary to be in a prime situation.

Per this paper (https://repository.usfca.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=1009&context=sm), NBA athletes as a whole earn 31% of their income from endorsements, vs 13% for MLB players. I'd guess this disparity is even higher among star level players. The less the actual salary matters (due to a combination of max salary limits, and the high level or endorsement dollars available), the more likely you are to have athletes choosing teams for other reasons (e.g., the city, winning, etc), which is very likely going to lead to these sort of super teams.

Sure. But way less when KD is giving up $60M/year instead of $6M. There aren’t a lot of Tom Brady’s in the NFL willing to take half their value to win. For the most part, money talks.

 

[lovegtm]

Parity = shit. It's completely impossible for me to invest emotionally in the NFL or MLB playoffs, because essentially it's taking 10-12 teams, throwing them in a blender, and seeing what pops out at the end. I get the appeal of novelty and hope, but I just can't get engaged with what feels like watching a series of dice rolls.

In the NBA, on the other hand, it's nearly impossible to win a flukey championship. This, combined with the influence of stars, means that teams have to successfully execute multi-year plans, and the narratives feel much more compelling. If a young team like 2011 OKC or 2018 Boston seems to take a step forward, it's very often real, and correlates strongly with the power structure of the league going forward.

In addition, the way that the postseason game changes completely from the regular season one completely makes up for the lack of parity tradeoff imo. You have to plan your roster not just for how it will win in the regular season, but how it will handle specific game-planning and targeting over a 7-game series. Just as one example, the balancing and the Celtics have to do between being equipped to handle Embiid for 7 games, and the Warriors for 7 games, is fascinating on its own, in a way that doesn't really come up in those other sports.

In terms of league weaknesses, I really think it's just star-focused officiating (closes off some interesting team-building paths) and the length of the regular season (everyone knows it should be 50-65 games, but that's not happening).

TLDR; there will always be a fundamental tradeoff between randomness/parity and crowning deserving champions, and I think the NBA does a better job of balancing this tradeoff (through the possibility of rebuilding cycles) than either NFL/MLB on the one hand, or European soccer at the other extreme.

 

[lexrageorge]

I disagree that the NFL playoffs are random. Most times the 2 Super Bowl participants are one of the top 2 seeds in the conference. Periodically, the 2nd wild card gets in and even wins, but not so often to make that a regular occurrence.

MLB is more random, but that's a feature of baseball, not a bug. And, if you think the MLB and NFL playoffs are random, both appear quite predictable when compared with the NHL playoffs, where truly any team of 16 can win it all.

 

[lovegtm]

I disagree that the NFL playoffs are random. Most times the 2 Super Bowl participants are one of the top 2 seeds in the conference. Periodically, the 2nd wild card gets in and even wins, but not so often to make that a regular occurrence.

MLB is more random, but that's a feature of baseball, not a bug. And, if you think the MLB and NFL playoffs are random, both appear quite predictable when compared with the NHL playoffs, where truly any team of 16 can win it all.

Randomness is on a continuum. The NFL is clearly much further to the "random" end of that continuum than the NBA is. Since 1997, seven teams seeded #3 or lower have won the Super Bowl. "Make the playoffs and get some bounces" is a viable championship strategy in the NFL (hi, Giants!), and it's simply not in the NBA, which dramatically affects team-building.

I totally agree that for some fans, the randomness of MLB, NHL, and to some degree NFL champions is a feature, not a bug. For me personally, it renders the MLB and NHL playoffs almost completely unwatchable, with the NFL being a bit better because of the somewhat less random

I prefer the compelling multi-year narratives that less randomness creates. The Nets deal, for example, simply wouldn't have the same narrative intensity otherwise. This is a personal preference; it's obviously impossible to say one version is "better." But I don't think that I'm alone in that preference, and I don't think it's something that the NBA needs to fix.

 

[InstaFace]

You could probably measure this by comparing standard deviation of win %s within a season, across the different sports. Baseball and hockey would clearly be much lower. NFL and NBA much higher (though I'm not sure which would be the highest, or by how much). And then you're pretty clearly just talking about the difference in certainty of outcomes between one game, vs best-4-of-7.

 

[Sam Ray Not]

Or zero.

Heck, he still has zero with slightly worse luck.

• 2012 Celtics close out a 3-2 at home in the ECF (*this one was due more to LeBron's ridiculous beastliness than to luck)
• 2013 Ray doesn't hit a crazy late three
• 2016 Kyrie doesn't hit a crazy late three

None of his misses were nearly as knife's-edge as his three hits.