Warriors help NBA:
If you believe that winning is bad for basketball, you’re missing the point, writes Dan Wolken.
The hyperventilation over DeMarcus Cousins agreeing to sign a one-year contract with the Warriors last week has sparked an interesting conversation about whether the NBA should, or even can, make changes to engineer more competitive balance in an era when it has begun to feel like the championship has been decided before the season begins.
Some of the more extreme things smart NBA people talk about such as a hard salary cap, getting rid of the maximum salary or being able to designate franchise players are likely too unrealistic to implement due to collective bargaining. Some of the more anodyne ideas, such as getting rid of the Eastern and Western Conference construction and seeding playoffs 1 to 16, might improve the league but would likely do little to erode the inevitability of Warriors championships.
But the fundamental question of whether Golden State’s dominance (or that of a future super team) hurts the NBA tends to mischaracterize the point of the league and why people pay money for tickets or turn on the TV to watch.
At its most fundamental level, the NBA is a business that sells an entertainment product in 30 cities across eight months. If the entire point of that enterprise was about a 141⁄2-pound trophy, we could probably contract 20 of the 30 teams now and the list of future champs wouldn’t look much different.
So instead of thinking about the NBA solely within the context of pursuing a title, think about it more like a concert tour or a Broadway show. When you pay hundreds of dollars to go see U2 or “Hamilton,” it’s unlikely anything that happens will surprise you. You’ve heard the songs hundreds of times, you know the plot lines and, for many of you, you’ve seen the same show more than once but keep coming back.
What fundamentally drives people to do that is simple: They want to be entertained, and they’ll pay to watch exceptionally talented people perform.
This is, in essence, the same reason the NBA has only grown in popularity despite the last 38 championships being won by a mere 11 franchises and why even the teams that struggle to sell tickets fill up the building when the Warriors or any team with LeBron James comes to town.
Part of the draw when you watch a sporting event is the allure of an unknown outcome, but that’s secondary to why people are uniquely drawn to the NBA. They want to see stars be stars, and it just so happens that basketball is the sport where the best players have the biggest effect on who wins and loses. It’s also why any discussion of competitive parity in the NBA compared to other pro sports is nonsensical.
In the NBA, the best players are going to be on the court, directly impacting the outcome for about 70 percent of the minutes during the regular season and roughly 80 percent or more in the playoffs. By definition, the best offensive or defensive player in football will be on the field for only half the game and be subject to more variance because every play involves 22 players rather than 10. In hockey, even an all-time great the likes of Sidney Crosby will be on the ice only one-third of the time.
That begins to explain why the history of the NBA has been more prone to dynastic cycles over competitive balance, and it suggests the league would have to institute some kind of artificial restraints to prevent the natural pull of great players wanting to play alongside other great players.
And even at that, the Warriors in present form are largely the product of a historic fluke and a decision made, ironically enough, by an NBA players union that listed Chris Paul as president and LeBron James as its first vice president.
Every year under the current collective bargaining agreement, players get 51 percent of basketball revenue, which is then calculated to come up with the salary cap number for the next season. As the NBA was preparing for a historic influx of cash in 2015 thanks to its new broadcast rights deals with ABC/ESPN and Turner, it proposed phasing in the corresponding cap increase over a few years rather than a massive one-time spike in the summer of 2016.
Though players collectively would have received every dime of their 51 percent of basketball revenue (the NBA proposed distributing the difference evenly among every player), the players association rejected the deal, meaning the salary cap went from $70 million (with an $85 million luxury tax line) to $94 million (with a $113 million tax line) in one summer.
That increase not only led to teams spending wildly, handcuffing some of them to contracts that are still crowding their cap space today, but made it easy for Golden State to sign Kevin Durant, which has had a butterfly effect of other good players taking contracts below their market value to play with the Warriors.
To say this kind of teamstacking is bad for the NBA, however, would be to suggest there should be a level of equity that doesn’t exist in very many places in sports.
Over the last 50 years of college football, 44 of the championships have been won by 13 programs. In 34 NCAA basketball tournaments with the field expanded to 64 teams, eight schools have won 25 of the titles.
In the top Spanish soccer league, two teams — FC Barcelona and Real Madrid — sign most of the stars and thus have average salaries of more than $8 million a player while Atletico Madrid is next at $5 million and 15 teams are below $2 million. It’s no surprise that Barcelona and Real Madrid essentially go back and forth winning championships.
At least in the NBA, the system is set up for the most part to reward teams that draft well and spend wisely rather than the ones with the deepest pockets. Even if that means the Warriors win again, you still get eight months worth of story lines, entertainment and personal drama, which is kind of the whole point.