Does Money Buy Championships?
As we all know in the NBA, Championship teams differ from the rest of the league. They tend to emphasize teamwork, cohesiveness, and feature some of the best talents in the NBA, however are they also the most expensive to build?
The chart belows shows the most recent championship teams and how there team salaries compared with the rest of the league.
Year | Team | Salary | Salary Rank |
2008-2009 | LAL | $80,745,793 | 5th |
2007-2008 | BOS | $73,812,248 | 7th |
2006-2007 | SA | $65,645,095 | 6th |
2005-2006 | MIA | $59,651,468 | 10th |
2004-2005 | SA | $47,404,123 | 21st |
2003-2004 | DET | $52,942,639 | 14th |
2002-2003 | SA | $52,817,688 | 17th |
2001-2002 | LAL | $52,985,249 | 13th |
Unfortunately I don't have salary data ( at least not without painstaking manual calculations) past 2001-2002 season (if anyone got resources for that I would to know).
By looking at this 8 year span, the trend seems to tilting towards teams with higher salaries winning championships. Also, this trend doesn't look to stop anytime soon as top contending teams LAL, DAL, BOS, ORL are going to have some of the highest team salaries in the league for the next few years.
Is it time we do something about it? Will the NBA spending spree prevent lower cap teams from competing?
