Dominance of Warriors,rs, Cava Cavaliers points to lack of parity

Assuming that the Golden State Warriors and Cleveland Cavaliers advance to this year’s NBA Finals, they will become the first two teams in league history to meet in that round for three consecutive years. This has caused many fans to wonder whether the NBA has a competitive balance problem.

Dissenters point to the 1980s, a so- called “Golden Era” of NBA history, when eight of 10 titles were won by one of two teams ( the Los Angeles Lakers and Boston Celtics). Championships were even less evenly distributed during the 1990s, when Michael Jordan’s Chicago Bulls won six titles in an eightyear span.

Neither comparison is perfectly analogous to today’s NBA, however. The Lakers and Celtics never played one another in three consecutive Finals, and the Bulls, in addition to playing five different opponents in six Finals appearances, were regularly forced to run a brutal gauntlet of Eastern Conference playoff opponents.

And none of those teams was formed in modern “super team” style, the way the Warriors were when Kevin Durant joined them through free agency and LeBron James’ Miami Heat were when he joined forces with Dwayne Wade and Chris Bosh in 2010. ( No matter what future greatness James achieves, that decision will haunt his legacy forever.)

A related problem is that many teams now feel such a talent disparity is forcing teams to “tank” – essentially, to lose games on purpose to secure a higher draft position. This strategy used to be one of the league’s dirty little secrets, but thanks to comments made by Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban last week, it no longer is.

“Once we were eliminated from the playoffs, we did everything possible to lose games,” he said. Granted, most people realize that Cuban has far more money than self- control. But the fact that a team owner was publicly discussing the issue of tanking in the first place suggests that the NBA’s competitive balance problem is, in fact, quite real.