NBA Parity is Impossible

The difference between great and average is huge.

There is only one LeBron James. Last offseason every team and their mother made an attempt to get him on their team. The team that got him made the finals. The teams that missed out on him were visibly upset.

In the lockout a lot has been said about parity. In the NBA, a few great teams rule the league with an iron fist. How are small market teams to compete (San Antonio is conviently left out when this point arises)? There will be a lot of talk about hard caps and contract set ups to ensure that the talent in the league is distributed so that one team can’t buy all the best players. I want to reiterate a point though: no matter what changes happen to the salary cap, no matter what changes happen to player contracts, and no matter what happens with revenue sharing…

PARITY IS IMPOSSIBLE IN THE NBA

Here’s a breakdown of the top 30 players according to Wins Produced last season:

Table 1: Top 30 Players in the NBA for the 2010-2011 Season

Player	Team	Pos	G	GS	MP	WP48	WP
Kevin Love	Minnesota	4.2	73	73	2611	0.474	25.8
Dwight Howard	Orlando	5	78	78	2935	0.382	23.4
LeBron James	Miami	3.2	79	79	3063	0.356	22.7
Chris Paul	New Orleans	1	80	80	2865	0.358	21.4
Dwyane Wade	Miami	2	76	76	2824	0.322	18.9
Zach Randolph	Memphis	4.3	75	74	2724	0.291	16.5
Pau Gasol	LA Lakers	5	82	82	3037	0.258	16.3
Blake Griffin	LA Clippers	4.3	82	82	3112	0.248	16.1
Kevin Garnett	Boston	4	71	71	2220	0.323	15
Kris Humphries	New Jersey	4	74	44	2061	0.344	14.8
Steve Nash	Phoenix	1	75	75	2497	0.283	14.7
Landry Fields	New York	2	82	81	2541	0.273	14.4
Lamar Odom	LA Lakers	4	82	35	2639	0.26	14.3
Rajon Rondo	Boston	1	68	68	2527	0.265	14
Kevin Durant	Oklahoma City	4.3	78	78	3038	0.216	13.7
Al Horford	Atlanta	4.8	77	77	2704	0.242	13.6
Jason Kidd	Dallas	1	80	80	2653	0.241	13.3
Paul Pierce	Boston	3.1	80	80	2774	0.221	12.8
Derrick Rose	Chicago	1	81	81	3026	0.197	12.4
Gerald Wallace	Charlotte-Portland	3	71	63	2693	0.217	12.2
Russell Westbrook	Oklahoma City	1	82	82	2847	0.201	11.9
Andre Iguodala	Philadelphia	3	67	67	2469	0.228	11.7
Tim Duncan	San Antonio	5	76	76	2156	0.26	11.7
Kobe Bryant	LA Lakers	2.1	82	82	2779	0.2	11.6
Tyson Chandler	Dallas	5	74	74	2059	0.269	11.6
Manu Ginobili	San Antonio	2.6	80	79	2426	0.225	11.4
Ray Allen	Boston	2	80	80	2890	0.185	11.1
Deron Williams	New Jersey-Utah	1	65	65	2465	0.213	11
Josh Smith	Atlanta	4	77	77	2645	0.196	10.8
Andre Miller	Portland	1	81	81	2650	0.19	10.5

If somehow the top players were redistributed to every team in the NBA there would still be a major rift. The difference between LeBron James and Andre Miller is huge! Even using the dreaded PER or Wins Produced’s less attractive cousin Win Shares we see a similar problem. The difference between the best player in the league and the 30th best is gigantic.

Wins Produced – Kevin Love (1) with 25.8 vs. Andre Miller (30) with 10.5
Win shares – LeBron James (1) with 15.6 vs. Amare Stoudemire (30) with 8.0
PER – LeBron James (1) with 27.3 vs. Paul Pierce (30) with 19.8

It was over five years ago in The Wages of Wins when Dave, Marty and Stacey used the term “Short Supply of Tall People” to explain the problem with parity in the NBA, and this idea is still important. There simply aren’t enough good players to go around in the league. This problem gets worse when some teams have the audacity to get more than one elite player (eg: Boston, Dallas, Los Angeles, Miami).

What’s more, the good players tend to stay good. LeBron James and Dwight Howard have been MVP candidates for years now. Once a team has one or more elite players they can contend; the teams without these players cannot. The truth is that the owners know this; the owners don’t expect parity. Most owners can’t get a LeBron. But if the system is shaken up and a few star players are forced to change teams then there’s a chance, however small, that a star may head their way. So at the end of the lockout we may see some stars on new teams and we may see some new rules. But what we won’t see is parity, because as the NBA currently stands that’s impossible.

-Dre

19 Responses to "NBA Parity is Impossible"

Kram Smith says:

September 23, 2011 at 12:43 am

The closest they could get to parity would be if whoever had the best player also had to have 11 of the worst players, and so on. Fortunately for the league, Minnesota seems to have agreed to this.
wiLQ says:

September 23, 2011 at 5:22 am

IMHO it’s not only possible but very doable [re-draft every year, LeBron + player with 0 WP vs Andre Miller + Gerald Wallace so matching salaries with WP etc]. With such mixing you could create 30 teams with ~41 wins, it just wouldn’t make any sense because goal of individual team is not to be the same quality as other teams but better…
fricktho says:

September 23, 2011 at 7:07 am

I think it depends on how you view parity. Do we really want every team finishing .500? I mean, why even bother playing the games? Most fans of small market teams want a chance I assume. In the NBA there will always be winners and losers. In the NFL there are winners and losers. Some team will go 14-2 and some team will go 2-14. The difference in the NFL is that those teams might be different each season. Heck it could be the same teams to flip-flop records the following season. The NBA is about as predictable as it gets. The good teams are good, and the good teams happen to always be the good teams. In the NFL teams still win and lose, but a different team tends to end up with a chance each season.

As for the NBA the only compelling idea I’ve heard is to alter the draft and give the lottery teams the entire first round while giving the playoff teams the entire second round. I’d support that.
Darrin Thompson says:

September 23, 2011 at 7:08 am

Simple solution: Lower the basket to 8 feet.

You’re welcome.
A.K.S. says:

September 23, 2011 at 7:26 am

These posts about parity never, ever make sense, because people’s definitions of parity differ, and I would argue (and have in the past argued) that the definition of parity that is used in this post – and in Wages of Wins and Prof. Berri’s other writing – is badly mistaken.

Dre seems to believe that the owners want parity in terms of results. That is, Dre seems to be arguing that the owners would love to have a league in which the teams all have players with the same WP. Taken to its logical conclusion, Dre is arguing that the owners want a league in which every team ends every season 41-41. But everyone knows this is false. The owners would hate a league in which every team is 41-41. So I am eternally confused why Dre (and Prof. Berri, and the rest of the WoW crew) continue to be arguing against a false premise.

To my mind, the owners want parity of opportunity, not parity of results. Where Cleveland and Minnesota have the same opportunity as LA and NY to obtain the top players on the list Dre posts above. This ideal is, of course, impossible to reach. But moving toward it by implementing a hard cap and revenue sharing is, to my mind as a fan, well worth the effort.
Dre says:

September 23, 2011 at 10:02 am

AKS,
Thanks for the feedback. We love our anti-fans almost as we love our fans.

Now you’re right every owner doesn’t want 41-41 BUT every owner wants a shot at a winning record. Every team wants to believe that with good management they can construct a winning team. The point is that there aren’t enough players to support that. A team like Los Angeles gets a player like Pau Gasol and they keep him for his prime and that’s one few players to make a team competitive.

So when a new owner says “I want to be able to compete if I just spend my money right” well the truth is even if they do they make not luck into a top player and may not be able to compete. Which means bringing it up in labor negotiations is just a red herring.
brgulker says:

September 23, 2011 at 10:13 am

I would also add to the AKS / Dre conversation that owners seem to think they are entitled to parity in that they seem to think that they should all be guaranteed to make a profit regardless of how they use their resources.

I’m glad that AKS is teasing out the different layers here. There’s wins and losses, equal opportunity for obtaining players (hard cap), equal opportunity for TV contracts (revenue sharing), and so on. But ultimately, this is about money — the owners want to be guaranteed a profit. It seems to me that the WoW writers are pointing out how ridiculous that is, especially when you consider how owners have used their resources.
A.K.S. says:

September 23, 2011 at 10:23 am

Dre – I wouldn’t characterize myself as an anti-fan, but rather a fan who happens to disagree on this issue.

In any case, with a hard cap, LA very likely wouldn’t be able to keep Pau, Lamar and Kobe (three of your top 30 players), which would in fact increase the opportunity of the other owners. Owners should compete based on management’s and players’ ability, not on spending (as we know, spending is positively correlated with wins).
Dre says:

September 23, 2011 at 10:28 am

Ben,
Exactly! I’d actually put it another way. Owners are content to not make good money (or maybe even lose a little) if it means they have a winning team (every owner would love to be Mark Cuban). When owners find out they can’t just win by spending money they go the other route and say “well if I can’t win a bunch of games and be a rockstar then I should be getting paid. . . because!” and the parity argument let’s them say this. By claiming it is not their fault for spending money poorly they can claim they are entitled to more money.
fricktho says:

September 23, 2011 at 10:51 am

As far as AKS goes, which I basically said the same thing above – I’m a fan of a small market team, albeit one that has won championships in the past, but I’m not a fan of a hard cap. I want my team to win yes, but I don’t want them to win once just to have it torn apart by financial restrictions. I want sustained success. I want rules in place that allow my team to stay intact until they run out their useful lifespan or my idiot GM decides that they already have even if they haven’t. The pinnacle of sports is not one championship. One fluke season.

My issue with the soft cap are the exceptions. If a team is good, like the Heat or Lakers who have multiple stars, why do they get to keep getting better each offseason by using the MLE? If they want to keep the players they have fine, but they shouldn’t get to keep adding more.

Are we really supposed to feel sorry when the Hornets and Magic lose their stars? They aren’t losing them because they can’t afford them, they are losing them because their management has failed. Those 2 players alone are going to alter the ‘parity’ of the league. How about the Cavs and Raptors? Look, they tried, I guess. The Lakers found a way to get a star for Kobe. The Celtics found a way to get a star for Pierce. It’s not like their trading partners gave them preferential treatment because they are LA and Boston. It’s not like Gasol and Garnett signed there, or had a choice where they ended up. It just worked out that way. The Cavs had a chance to trade for Amare and they were too scared. That’s their own fault. Instead they got Jamison and Casspi and a boatload of losses, and a ripple effect that is now felt by the whole league. Nope, don’t feel sorry for them.
fricktho says:

September 23, 2011 at 11:07 am

Thanks Ben for the obviousness. Owners want a hard cap and money, players want a soft cap and money. I, as a fan, would also like some money, but that isn’t part of the negotiations unfortunately. I’ll settle for a soft cap without an MLE and some basketball. Oh and while were at it I’d like to do away with the salary match on trades. If one team wants to take back another team’s entire roster let them. You want parity there you go. You want Dwight Howard? Well here you can have him AND Arenas AND Turkoglu I’ll take a 1st rounder and Anthony Morrow thank you very much.
greyv says:

September 23, 2011 at 1:55 pm

I’ve read that a hard cap is no guarantee of parity (or equality of opportunity, or what have you), but is there any evidence that a hard-cap is detrimental to parity? Is there any reason we as fans should care which way the CBA goes?

And why is there salary matching for trades? Is that another example of protecting owners from themselves?
Patrick Minton (@nbageek) says:

September 23, 2011 at 1:57 pm

A.K.S. –

The owners already have as much “parity of opportunity” as economics will allow. An owner who claims that he doesn’t because other teams can outspend him/her is being disingenuous. There aren’t really any NBA owners whose pockets are that small.

While it’s theoretically true that one team can spend more than is profitable to “buy” wins, and another team may complain that it cannot spend that much money *while remaining profitable*, there are a couple of problems with that:

1) this is true in every business and is not “unfair”. For instance, any airline willing to lose a ton of money could offer $20 flights and customers would flock to it, abandoning all other airlines.

2) As we’ve shown on WoW before, the correlation between payroll and winning isn’t that high so this is only theoretically true. As evidence I refer to the Knicks.

NBA Owner, meet Capitalism. Capitalism, meet NBA Owner.
Parity in the NBA? | Sport Skeptic says:

September 23, 2011 at 3:15 pm

[...] at Wages of Wins has a post claiming that parity is impossible in the NBA. I decided to be a little contrary and see if it [...]
pwbrannan says:

September 29, 2011 at 4:21 am

I agree that absolute parity is implausible. Everyone can’t compete – however, anyone can compete.

Look at the list – 11 were acquired through a trade or free agency. Another 5 were drafted outside of the lottery. And while all players want to be a part of a winning team, most won’t turn down a hefty contract even if it means playing for an average one. If a team has the cash and assets, it can get an elite player – there don’t need to be any changes to the CBA for this to be so.
A Bottom Heavy League: Snapshot Of ESPN’s NBA Rank Project | Hickory-High says:

October 5, 2011 at 5:35 pm

[...] opinion of value. Still, they are complex enough to make the point. As Henry Abbott and the Wages of Wins crew have pointed out during all the lockout hullabaloo, the limiting factor for parity is not as [...]
mosiplatt says:

October 6, 2011 at 7:40 am

@AKS:

You need to read Wages of Wins. The positive correlation between spending & wins doesn’t do a good job explaining wins, which was the #1 myth the book sought to de-bunk.
Salary…. Again | Sport Skeptic says:

October 13, 2011 at 9:52 am

[...] to increase parity for some reason (even though it would probably not affect revenue and may be impossible), maybe they could focus on better methods for evaluating free agents and college players. Then [...]
Quora says:

September 24, 2012 at 10:10 pm

How could the NBA Draft Lottery be changed to make it a better system?…

My solution? Copy Europe. Rather than focus on trying to keep things fair (as Sammy suggests) we should instead try and encourage winning. How about we kick out the bottom X teams in the league each year and let in the top leagues from a lower league i…

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