Sports
Champions or Financial Windfall?
How the Yearly Cries for Parity in Sports Miss the Point
Sometimes I wonder, if you polled a thousand sports fans and asked them if they’d prefer to spend their lives watching their favorite teams play or talking about their favorite teams during the off-season, how many would choose the latter.
For example, it would be easy to assume that someone who’s obsessed with football would look at the possibility of a life filled with NFL games – every single Sunday without exception, 22 grown men in tight pants barreling into each other with great force and animosity, world without end – as the best of all possible worlds. But I’m not sure that if given the choice most true sports fans wouldn’t rather exist in some eternal, unblemished off-season, where everything is still perfect and possible, where the hopes of favorite teams are still unwritten and un-dashed, where players are being traded and shuffled and moved about and speculated upon and idealized, and where – most importantly – arguing over the potential and fates of teams and leagues moves front and center while those teams and leagues retreat into their caves. The off-season is the time of year when fans feel like their voices can be heard, when they feel important. Which is nonsense, of course, but the world is full of nonsense and who am I to judge?
Right now, the NBA is deep into its long summer’s nap. The season has been over for a month, replaced by a delicate dance of trades, mid-level exceptions, contract buyouts, salary caps, and luxury tax thresholds: a chess game with human pieces. And sports writers are using the lull in the action on the court to theorize about the action off. Because the off-season is when everyone becomes a philosopher, employing the mystic arts of syllogism and logarithm and catechism to best explain how badly, for example, the Cleveland Cavaliers screwed up by trading for Shaquille O’Neal.
In a recent editorial for ESPN.com, basketball writer J.A. Adande broached one of the all-time favorite topics in the history of professional sports: the battle between the haves and the have-nots for the soul of true competition. Fans of almost every sport indulge themselves in this conversation at least once a year. Outside of the NFL (which has a hard salary cap, unlike the NBA, which has a soft salary cap that it allows teams to exceed in return for luxury taxes), the “Are the rich teams trying to buy a championship” argument is one of the eternals, something to depend on, something to believe in. When’s the last time the Yankees or the Red Sox weren’t accused of trying to spend their way to a title? What fan of Leeds or Mallorca doesn’t begrudge the enormous payrolls of Chelsea and Real Madrid? Without these teams around, what would we complain about?
So, in the name of tradition, Adande recently put pen to paper to bemoan the stagnation at the top of the NBA standings and put the blame on the shoulders of the soft salary cap and next season’s low luxury-tax threshold, both of which, he argues, benefit the already wealthy teams of the league who can afford to spend, spend, spend, while forcing poorer teams to shed payroll by shedding well-paid players and, by Euclid’s Associative Law of First and Last Principles, shedding their chance at a title.
“So the NBA elite is a stagnant circle,” he writes, after putting forth the argument that we’re doomed to share another NBA post-season with the Lakers, Celtics, Spurs, Cavs, and Magic, “while the rest of the league has been taxed into timidity. No one’s willing or able to take the bold steps to vault into contention … The tax doesn’t deter the best teams from pursuing more free agents, while teams that fear the tax will have to shed players even more furiously in order to stay tax-free.”
This argument drives me nuts for so many reasons, I’m not even sure where to begin. Perhaps here:
The Siren’s Song of Parity
Adande argues that having elite teams is somehow bad for the quality of play in the NBA, as if parity across the divisions and conferences would raise the bar for the whole league and result in more exciting games throughout the season. “Fans don’t care about the spreadsheets or ledgers of the teams,” he argues. “What they want to see is competitive balance.”
This is ridiculous. Fans are interested in greatness and entertainment, not competitive balance.
Parity sounds nice as an idea, but by nature it spits in the face of the sporting ideal: that one team, using whatever advantages or disadvantages they have – be they financial, spiritual, historical, tragical-comical – bests another fair and square on a free and visible field. In sports as in life, not everyone deserves a trophy; not everyone earns a spot in the history books. And if they did, those honors would be meaningless. No, best that we have disparity, that we have great teams providing us great games in the post-season, where this sort of thing really matters, rather than even and equal teams giving us even and equal games throughout the regular season, when they don’t. Lesser teams should feel free to claw their way out of ignominy if they care so much.
The Myth of the Rich
Contrary to popular belief, the size of a team’s payroll is a lousy predictor of success. The last time I checked, the New York Yankees paid out more to their players last year – a year they didn’t even make the playoffs – than the GDP of several small nations. Take a look at these payroll stats from last year’s NBA season:
- New York Knicks $ 97,085,751
- Toronto Raptors $ 95,358,923
- Dallas Mavericks $ 93,215,017
- Cleveland Cavaliers $ 90,794,387
- Los Angeles Lakers $ 80,745,793
- Boston Celtics $ 78,738,973
- Detroit Pistons $ 77,046,985
- Memphis Grizzlies $ 75,819,691
- Phoenix Suns $ 75,449,279
- Orlando Magic $ 74,863,198
- Philadelphia 76ers $ 74,434,445
- Sacramento Kings $ 71,517,217
- Chicago Bulls $ 71,487,984
- Washington Wizards $ 70,558,149
- Milwaukee Bucks $ 70,220,238
- Indiana Pacers $ 69,623,798
- Houston Rockets $ 68,761,285
- San Antonio Spurs $ 68,403,480
- Atlanta Hawks $ 68,165,839
- Charlotte Bobcats $ 68,004,277
- Denver Nuggets $ 67,068,631
- New Orleans Hornets $ 67,017,804
- Utah Jazz $ 66,266,407
- Minnesota Timberwolves $ 63,527,135
- Golden State Warriors $ 63,287,110
- New Jersey Nets $ 61,983,445
- Los Angeles Clippers $ 61,883,344
- Oklahoma City Thunder $ 61,534,722
- Portland Trail Blazers $ 56,154,803
- Miami Heat $ 50,031,123
Let’s see:
The teams with the top three payrolls in the league combined to do almost nothing last season. Sure, the Mavericks made it to the second round of the playoffs, but they beat an injury-ravaged Spurs team to get there, and, besides, you always sensed they were going to break at any moment. The Knick and the Raptors, meanwhile, were awful all season long.
You’ve got the two teams that played in the finals last year, the Lakers and the Magic, also in the top 10, which would seem to prove Adande’s point about the relationship between financial outlay and success. But then you also have the cosmically detached Pistons, the laughable Grizzlies, and the creaky Suns there as well, which would seem to prove the opposite.
In the middle of the table at 17, sit the Rockets, who very nearly knocked the future champion Lakers out of the playoff despite the fact that their starting lineup consisted of three old men, a Shetland pony, and a bag of marbles. And at 18, you have the Spurs, who are the league’s most successful franchise over the last decade.
And bringing up the rear are two exciting young teams, the Trailblazers and the Heat, who lit up the early rounds of the playoffs before flaming out, destined to return and improve with age and experience.
The point of all this is that payroll isn’t destiny, so what’s the point of instituting a parity system? If the Knicks can’t make the playoffs with a $97-million payroll, who are they going to beat with a $50-million payroll? The Washington Generals? The Bad News Bears? Lokomotiv Rostov? The French Foreign Legion? These guys?
The Spurs have been a great team for 10 full years not because they have the highest-paid players but because they’re well-coached, disciplined, hard-working, decent, smiling, god-fearing, non-smoking, tooth-brushing, vegetable-eating, good, honest Americans. (Who may, now that I think about it, actually be from France or Argentina.) The Los Angeles Clippers, on the other hand, have had a perfectly reasonable roster for years, but you could cover the team in money, lavish its players with fragrances and gifts from the orient, and pump the entire franchise full of gold, and they would still be the Los Angeles Clippers, an unruly band of underachievers led by a man who couldn’t coach his way into a paper bag much less out of one and yet who still, year after year after painful year, keeps his job.
No amount of money could ever make up for that level of incompetence and stubbornness, nor could any salary cap.
Ribbons for Participation
“Last year,” Anande writes “the Boston Celtics, Los Angeles Lakers, San Antonio Spurs, Cleveland Cavaliers and Orlando Magic were considered the top contenders for the NBA championship. Since then, we’ve seen Shaquille O’Neal, Rasheed Wallace, Vince Carter, Richard Jefferson and Hedo Turkoglu have changed teams. We’ve seen the election of a black president, an economic meltdown, civil uprisings in Iran and the death of pop superstar Michael Jackson. And after all those changes and some 275 revolutions of the Earth, who are the top contenders for the NBA championship? The Boston Celtics, Los Angeles Lakers, San Antonio Spurs, Cleveland Cavaliers and Orlando Magic.”
Fine. That’s probably true. From last year to this, the teams considered most likely to compete for a title haven’t really changed. But that’s just one year to another. Five years ago, the Celtics, the Cavaliers, and the Magic weren’t in the championship conversation at all. Meanwhile where are the Suns, the Mavs, and the Pistons today?
Besides, isn’t there something to be said for watching great teams battle it out year after year, for watching a rivalry grow, for watching teams learn each other and suss out the other’s weaknesses? Who was complaining back when Larry Bird and Magic Johnson were going at it every year? Show me any true basketball fan who got tired of the Lakers vs. the Kings in the early 2000s. Don’t we all dream of 10 years of LeBron vs. D-Wade vs. Carmelo vs. Dwight Howard? Wouldn’t that be a pleasant decade for us? Why oh why do we need to shake things up so that the Wizards or the Thunder feel included? This isn’t church camp or elementary school. Not everyone in sports deserves recognition or a spot in the playoffs. Not everyone gets a turn. The reason why great teams form around players like LeBron and Wade and Howard (all in cities, by the way, where there were lousy teams before those players arrived) is because great players attract other great players and great coaches and more fans and more revenue, meaning they can afford more and greater players and coaches, meaning their chances for coming back to compete for a title grow with each passing year.
Why shouldn’t we celebrate that: greatness growing greatness? Why lift up teams who’ve done nothing to merit consideration and try to level off the teams that are capable of truly remarkable things? In the end, all sports fans want is to see magic, to see fireworks, to believe in something. And the best way to ensure that that never happens is to spread the wealth, thin out the herd, and snuff out the flames.
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[...] as I wrote a few weeks ago about the true love of the sports fan waiting until the off-season to truly blossom, so too does [...]
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