Is Parity Ruining the NBA?
Why exactly are we supposed to like this? Cui bono?
The NBA Finals will tip off this week between the Indiana Pacers and the Oklahoma City Thunder, which has already led to a lot of discourse about every fan’s favorite subject: Market size and TV ratings! Given that the Pacers and Thunder play in two of the smallest markets in the league, and given that neither is really one of the NBA’s marquee franchises, many people are worried about how many viewers these games will attract.
Honestly, I find it a little weird that fans ever care about this stuff, and a sign of infection by capitalist ideology: Fans get invested in the league’s TV ratings like they are stockholders in the league, with some kind of financial stake in the NBA’s ability to sell ads. And, purely on a basketball level, there is a lot to like about this Finals, which pits two emerging superstars — Tyrese Haliburton and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander — against each other.
Still, I admit to being a little let down by the matchup (and not just because the Knicks fell short in the Conference Finals).
The larger issue is parity. Neither team has been to the NBA Finals in the last decade, and the core of both teams only just emerged as a serious playoff threat last season. In a historic sense, this is pretty unusual for the NBA, which is known as a league of dynasties. But in the last few years, it has become commonplace: This is now the sixth straight season when the defending NBA champion was eliminated before the Conference Finals. In that time, ten different franchises have reached the NBA Finals. Three different times in this six-year stretch, a team seeded fifth or lower made the Finals — which had only happened three prior times in the entire history of the NBA.
In theory, this should be good. Parity is the thing every pro sports league claims to be chasing. Every team has a shot! Fanbases across the country can have hope! Nobody is too dominant! Parity is supposedly key to the success of the NFL, where strict revenue sharing and a hard salary cap keep most teams from becoming perpetually dormant.
But do fans actually want parity? I certainly do not, and the numbers seem to suggest I am not alone. This year’s Super Bowl, when the Kansas City Chiefs were going for a three-peat against a Philadelphia Eagles team it had played in the Super Bowl just two years earlier, set the ratings record. (Before 2024, the record for the most watched Super Bowl was set in 2015… when Tom Brady was going for his fourth ring with the Patriots.) Meanwhile, the NBA Finals ratings have been down in the post-dynasty era, after setting record highs with Jordan’s Bulls, Kobe’s Lakers, and LeBron’s Cavaliers.1
In other words, people seem to like dynasties. Watching a team try to defend its title is fun, and seeing teams over and over again allows fans to develop feelings about them. There is obviously a limit: In the late 2010s, the entire NBA season kind of seemed like a pointless prelude to the inevitable showdown between LeBron’s Cavs and the Kevin Durant/Steph Curry Warriors. But the most memorable NBA moments tend to involve dynasties either being established or dethroned. On the other hand, a lot of the Finals matchups from the last few years already feel like weird trivia. The Suns really made the Finals in 2021? Does that feel right to you?
So why have we been led to believe that parity is good for the NBA? It’s for the same reason fans get so invested in TV ratings: We have all been brainwashed by capitalism into identifying with the owners’ bottom lines. Owners love parity because it makes it easier for them to sell fans on being competitive, and they don’t really have to work on building a sustainably competitive team. In a league with parity, terrible, cheap owners can stumble into deep playoff runs every now and then through sheer dumb luck.
It is no coincidence that the main way that leagues establish parity is by taking power AWAY from players, and limiting the ability of teams to spend money on players. Indeed, while it seems like the current no-dynasty era of the NBA was initially set in motion by Covid, and the weird disruption to the seasons the pandemic caused, what really cemented it was the 2022 collective bargaining agreement, which was a major victory for owners. The severe restrictions put on teams that go over the “second apron” make it difficult, or perhaps impossible, for a great team to keep its star players together over the long term.
As a result, teams that felt like budding dynasties over the last few seasons — the Milwaukee Bucks or the Denver Nuggets or the Boston Celtics — could not sustain their success. When you look at each of those teams individually, it looks like a specific case of bad luck (Jayson Tatum getting hurt) and dumb personnel decisions (the Bucks ditching Jrue Holiday for Damian Lillard2). But when you zoom out, the trend is hard to miss. Great teams are thinner now, because the new CBA makes it harder to add complementary talent around stars like Giannis or Jokic or Tatum. They have shorter benches, making them more vulnerable to injuries and generally giving them less margin for error as they defend their titles.
Which makes it hard to get worked up about the Oklahoma City Thunder, who are the latest supposed budding dynasty, potentially set up to dominate the NBA for the next decade:
The Thunder did have a historically great season, and they are, deservedly, heavy favorites against the Pacers. But they will inevitably face the same challenges that all these formerly dominant teams faced: SGA, their superstar and the new MVP, is eligible for a supermax extension this summer, which he will surely get. But this will make it harder for them to preserve their REAL advantage: depth. The Thunder played a 10-man rotation for most of this season, and have consistently played eight through the playoffs. That works while they have so many young guys on rookie deals, but can they keep paying Luguentz Dort and Cason Wallace and the OTHER Jaylin Williams when they are paying $380 million to SGA? And what happens when they inevitably have to extend Chet Holmgren and the main Jalen Williams too?
Maybe they can keep everyone together, but as of now, I remain skeptical,3 if only because no team in the league has figured it out. The problem isn’t that there are no smart executives out there — it’s structural. The league WANTS it to be harder for teams to keep their stars together because it prefers a situation where players have less power and poorly run teams have an easier shot at being competitive.
The result is not fun for fans. The result is a bunch of mostly anonymous teams making the Finals every year. The result is that by the time a young core wins a ring, the clock is already ticking on when they need to rebuild. The result is a budding superstar getting traded the year after a Finals appearance to preserve roster flexibility.
And, if you really want to be sad, the result is probably bad TV ratings!
This is why it is important for fans to root for players in their struggles against owners. It is not just because socialism and basic principles of justice demand it — it’s because what is good for players is almost always better for the league than what is good for the owners.
I must here note the irony of citing ratings mere paragraphs after saying it was stupid to care about the ratings. I suppose we can’t help but be curious about how many people are interested in the things we’re interested in.
Plus they hired Doc Rivers — always a terrible idea!
And let’s not forget that the Executive of the Year, Sam Presti, was in basically this EXACT situation 12 years ago, and screwed it up under a much more favorable CBA…