RealGM Analysis
There’s one obvious question about the resolution of the lockout: why should fans care about how the players and owners divvy up over $4 billion dollars? For all the breathless coverage the topic has generated, the honest answer is they shouldn’t.
Personally, I’d rather the money I spent on the NBA go to labor and not management. But will my enjoyment of a basketball game be affected by whether the players receive 60% or 40% of the income that game generates? Of course not.
As a fan, how the NBA distributes talent is much more important to me than how it distributes income. I want the lockout to produce a system that allows great teams grow while still allowing smaller markets the chance to compete for championships. In short, I want the status quo.
There’s a reason the 1980’s and 1990’s are considered “the Golden Age of the NBA”, and it’s not because there was a great amount of parity at the time. From 1980-1990, only five teams even made the NBA Finals.
Boston and LA were the class of the NBA. The ‘86 Celtics played five Hall of Famers (Larry Bird, Kevin McHale, Robert Parrish, Dennis Johnson and Bill Walton) while the ‘85 Lakers had four (Magic Johnson, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, James Worthy and Bob McAdoo).
The rest of the NBA had to raise their game or get left behind, and the other three franchises to make the Finals in the ‘80’s were absolutely stacked with talent: the original Twin Towers of Hakeem Olajuwon and Ralph Sampson in Houston, the “fo, fo, fo” 76ers with Julius Erving and Moses Malone and the Bad Boy Pistons.
There’s no comparison between the entertainment value of their games and the 2007 NBA Finals between the Cavaliers and Spurs, which received the lowest prime-time TV ratings in Finals history. Tony Parker, the MVP of the series, has played in only three All-Star games in his ten-year career. Besides LeBron James, the other four starters for Cleveland were Zydrunas Ilgauskas, Drew Gooden, Sasha Pavlovic and Larry Hughes.
The NBA’s popularity has been on the upswing since then, mainly because of the arms race between the league’s top teams. The Celtics acquired Kevin Garnett that summer and the Lakers traded for Pau Gasol at mid-season. The super-teams constructed in Los Angeles and Boston won five of the six conference championships from 2008-2010, culminating in a thrilling Game 7 in 2010 that featured five Hall of Famers (Kobe, Gasol, KG, Paul Pierce and Ray Allen) as well as an All-Star point guard (Rondo), a former Defensive Player of the Year (Ron Artest) and a 6’10 point forward (Lamar Odom).
All that momentum will be ruined if the league institutes a hard salary cap, or a luxury tax so stringent it has the same effect, in the next CBA. In a hard cap system, the Heat couldn’t have constructed their “Big Three”, and there’s certainly no way the Dallas Mavericks could have surrounded Dirk Nowitzki with a roster stuffed with veteran role players who complimented his game.
Does anyone think that the unprecedented amount of attention Miami received this past year was bad for the NBA? That the league would be better off if Dirk, LeBron and Dwyane Wade were stuck on 45-win teams, fighting with one hand tied behind their back and losing in the early rounds of the playoffs?
The structure of the NBA playoffs ensure that rivalries are created between conference foes, creating storylines that stretch out for years. If the Spurs are going to advance past the Mavericks and Lakers, they will need to get bigger upfront. If the Lakers are going to regain their throne in the West, they will need to younger and more athletic on the perimeter. The Bulls need another perimeter scorer to match up with the Heat; the Celtics and the Knicks need another big man.
But if the new CBA eliminates salary-cap exceptions and restricts “Larry Bird” rights, it’s going to be extremely difficult for those teams to retain the talent they have, much less add more. Instead of a race to the top it will be a race to the bottom, as the Mavericks and Heat bleed talent and return to the pack.
For many small market fans, disillusioned by “The Decision” and Carmelo Anthony’s single-minded quest to play for the Knicks, that’s exactly the point. If a hard cap distributes talent more evenly throughout the league, the cost of assembling a title-caliber roster will go down, ensuring that fans from all 30 markets can dream of a championship.
However, the current system isn’t the MLB, with no salary cap or max contract, guaranteeing that franchises like the Tampa Bay Rays and Oakland A’s can’t retain their stars once they reach free agency. San Antonio and Oklahoma City have shown it’s possible to build a title contender in a small-market. Their margin for error is smaller than the Lakers or the Mavericks, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing when you consider they have fewer fans.
As a fan of the game itself, I want to watch the highest-caliber of basketball possible. I want the new CBA to allow good teams to add talent, not force them to subtract it. That’s my rooting interest in the lockout: a CBA designed to be as entertaining, not as fair, as possible.
Personally, I’d rather the money I spent on the NBA go to labor and not management. But will my enjoyment of a basketball game be affected by whether the players receive 60% or 40% of the income that game generates? Of course not.
As a fan, how the NBA distributes talent is much more important to me than how it distributes income. I want the lockout to produce a system that allows great teams grow while still allowing smaller markets the chance to compete for championships. In short, I want the status quo.
There’s a reason the 1980’s and 1990’s are considered “the Golden Age of the NBA”, and it’s not because there was a great amount of parity at the time. From 1980-1990, only five teams even made the NBA Finals.
Boston and LA were the class of the NBA. The ‘86 Celtics played five Hall of Famers (Larry Bird, Kevin McHale, Robert Parrish, Dennis Johnson and Bill Walton) while the ‘85 Lakers had four (Magic Johnson, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, James Worthy and Bob McAdoo).
The rest of the NBA had to raise their game or get left behind, and the other three franchises to make the Finals in the ‘80’s were absolutely stacked with talent: the original Twin Towers of Hakeem Olajuwon and Ralph Sampson in Houston, the “fo, fo, fo” 76ers with Julius Erving and Moses Malone and the Bad Boy Pistons.
There’s no comparison between the entertainment value of their games and the 2007 NBA Finals between the Cavaliers and Spurs, which received the lowest prime-time TV ratings in Finals history. Tony Parker, the MVP of the series, has played in only three All-Star games in his ten-year career. Besides LeBron James, the other four starters for Cleveland were Zydrunas Ilgauskas, Drew Gooden, Sasha Pavlovic and Larry Hughes.
The NBA’s popularity has been on the upswing since then, mainly because of the arms race between the league’s top teams. The Celtics acquired Kevin Garnett that summer and the Lakers traded for Pau Gasol at mid-season. The super-teams constructed in Los Angeles and Boston won five of the six conference championships from 2008-2010, culminating in a thrilling Game 7 in 2010 that featured five Hall of Famers (Kobe, Gasol, KG, Paul Pierce and Ray Allen) as well as an All-Star point guard (Rondo), a former Defensive Player of the Year (Ron Artest) and a 6’10 point forward (Lamar Odom).
All that momentum will be ruined if the league institutes a hard salary cap, or a luxury tax so stringent it has the same effect, in the next CBA. In a hard cap system, the Heat couldn’t have constructed their “Big Three”, and there’s certainly no way the Dallas Mavericks could have surrounded Dirk Nowitzki with a roster stuffed with veteran role players who complimented his game.
Does anyone think that the unprecedented amount of attention Miami received this past year was bad for the NBA? That the league would be better off if Dirk, LeBron and Dwyane Wade were stuck on 45-win teams, fighting with one hand tied behind their back and losing in the early rounds of the playoffs?
The structure of the NBA playoffs ensure that rivalries are created between conference foes, creating storylines that stretch out for years. If the Spurs are going to advance past the Mavericks and Lakers, they will need to get bigger upfront. If the Lakers are going to regain their throne in the West, they will need to younger and more athletic on the perimeter. The Bulls need another perimeter scorer to match up with the Heat; the Celtics and the Knicks need another big man.
But if the new CBA eliminates salary-cap exceptions and restricts “Larry Bird” rights, it’s going to be extremely difficult for those teams to retain the talent they have, much less add more. Instead of a race to the top it will be a race to the bottom, as the Mavericks and Heat bleed talent and return to the pack.
For many small market fans, disillusioned by “The Decision” and Carmelo Anthony’s single-minded quest to play for the Knicks, that’s exactly the point. If a hard cap distributes talent more evenly throughout the league, the cost of assembling a title-caliber roster will go down, ensuring that fans from all 30 markets can dream of a championship.
However, the current system isn’t the MLB, with no salary cap or max contract, guaranteeing that franchises like the Tampa Bay Rays and Oakland A’s can’t retain their stars once they reach free agency. San Antonio and Oklahoma City have shown it’s possible to build a title contender in a small-market. Their margin for error is smaller than the Lakers or the Mavericks, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing when you consider they have fewer fans.
As a fan of the game itself, I want to watch the highest-caliber of basketball possible. I want the new CBA to allow good teams to add talent, not force them to subtract it. That’s my rooting interest in the lockout: a CBA designed to be as entertaining, not as fair, as possible.
