I disagree this wholeheartedly. If I was in charge of the NBA, I would cut the NBA into a 20-team league and force more superstars on 1 team. Give me those old Celtics/LA Showtime basketball over one-man show (e.g. KG's T-Wolves or T-Mac's Magic) anytime. But that's another discussion. Plus uneven talent problem only happened for leagues with no salary cap. Yankees were getting all good players because there were no salary cap and guaranteed contracts over there (or are still they?). NBA have salary cap and luxury tax to prevent such problem. And that's enough. No reason to hinder teams who have ambition and want to improve all the time. Evidence bears this out: For the 01-02 NBA season, the correlation between team payroll and regular season wins was about 0.13. In other words, there as nearly no correlation between salary and wins. By comparison, MLB (with no salary cap) had a much stronger correlation of 0.43 for its 2002 season. The NBA is qute a fair league IMO.
First of all, those Celtics/LA games happened 9 times at most in a year, and for the rest of the year, you knew you were gonna see these two teams in the finals. Is that good? Also, the way teams player back then was just more enjoyable than nowadays. The evidence you quoted was quoted from some website. I read it before and I don't think these people know much about statistics. Using one year observation, whatever correlation you get bears no statistical evidence. For example, if you only look at the financial markets in the past three years, you would conclude that fix income securities, such as treasure bonds, yield higher return than equities, such as common stocks. But if you use the data from past decades, you will see equities on average earn an extra 7-8% annually. The point is looking at any particular year, you tend to make wrong conclusion. If 20 years from now, you still observe this kind of correlations as you quoted, then we may come back and give it a closer look.
<i>What if you get rid of 15% rule and impose strict lux tax, say 2500% lux tax on every dollar you pay over 55 mil? Is Cuban still going to flash his check book? </i> Gater's pretty much covered this one already, but I'll add my two cents. It sounds like what you'd really like is a hard salary cap instead of the soft one that exists in the NBA today. The problem is that you can't really have a hard cap if everybody is going to have guarenteed contracts. Otherwise, a situation like Alonzo Mourning's, where a high priced player is out indefinitely, but not retired, would kill a franchise. If Mourning had been chewing up $20M in salary against a hard cap, then the Heat would have been terrible (more so than they were), with no hope of turning it around. An of course, there's absolutely no way to get rid of the guarenteed contracts, the players association simply won't let it happen. So, like it or not, it isn't going to happen.
The rule is that. And you have to learn to play the rule, play your cards right. The Spurs won the championship this year in the 2nd smallest market and with a 16th highest payroll BTW.
There is room to discuss if the rule is fair and if it can be made better. Spurs weren't a bad team when they drafted Dunkun. It was only because a injury of Robinson that year. When do you see the worst team in NBA went to wing a ring in two years? Also, they scouted some good young players. However, I will say this is anormaly. Just think the champion teams, Lakers, Bulls, Celtics, ... all in big markets with high payrolls. Money is the KEY! I am not saying there are not other factors, but all other factors being same, money determines who win and who loss.
