A Win for the Magic is a Win for Parity

The NBA Finals start tonight, and the Los Angeles Lakers will be heavy favorites going into Game One. If everything goes according to the script, we'll see the Lakers win another championship, bringing their total to sixteen, Kobe gets his validation for winning without Shaq, and Phil Jackson becomes the coach with the most rings in history.

How incredibly boring.

A Lakers victory is a victory for basketball's elite. Seven teams have combined to win every championship since 1984, and if you discount Miami's title in 2006, only seven teams have won the championship in 23 years (Boston, San Antonio, Detroit, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Houston). That's a lot of wealth split among not a lot of teams.

The Celtics and Lakers alone have combined for 50 Finals appearances. The rest of the NBA—that's 28 teams—have 76 appearances.

We've seen 17 different teams win the World Series, 14 teams win the Super Bowl, and and 13 teams win the Stanley Cup in that time.

Professional basketball is an exciting product, but it loses some of its luster, in my opinion, when it becomes dynastic. And that's where the Orlando Magic come in.

The Magic are the scrappy, lovable underdogs in this series. The Lakers, by contrast, are the juggernauts. The favorites. The villains.

I don't mean any disrespect to the team. They're extremely talented, and I have a feeling they'll win this series.

But I wish they wouldn't.

A championship for the Magic injects a little fresh blood into the increasingly stagnant royalty of the NBA. If Orlando—a 36-win team as recently as 2006—can win the NBA Finals, teams like Charlotte and Memphis might think, "Hey, we can do that, too!"

Too often, we see small-market teams mailing it in season after season, convinced they can't win. Maybe, instead of seeing the have-nots dump talent on the haves in exchange for cap room, we could see more competitive teams battling throughout the season.

How could this possibly be a bad thing?

If you're from the city of Los Angeles, I completely understand rooting for your Lakers. But if you're from anywhere else, and you're a fan of a competitive product, you need to be an Orlando fan for the next two weeks.

Otherwise, we could be headed for more of the same.