NBA Contraction: Why Saying Adios to Six Teams Is a Good Thing

Before the All-Star selections are made, most of us who follow the NBA are fairly certain which teams are not going to make the playoffs.  

There are more than a handful of games every week that simply aren't worth watching.

This hasn't always been the case. 

Since the 1980-1981 season, when the Boston Celtics won the Championship, there have been a total of eight different teams to share that distinction.  Only eight. 

If you're counting, that is 29 seasons (not including the strike-shortened 1999 season) worth of championships shared by only 27 percent of the league. 

If you're a fan of the Atlanta Hawks, Washington Wizards, Golden State Warriors, Sacramento Kings, and Los Angeles Clippers, you don't have much chance of celebrating a championship with your team. 

The NFL has had 15 different teams win the Super Bowl since 1981. 

Major League Baseball has had 19 different teams win the World Series since 1981.

The Boston Celtics, Los Angeles Lakers, Philadelphia 76ers, Detroit Pistons, Chicago Bulls, Houston Rockets, San Antonio Spurs, and Miami Heat.  That's it.  

Two of those teams, the Sixers and Heat, have only won the title once in that span. 

That makes this statistic even more ridiculous: take away the Heat and the Sixers from the equation, and we have six teams winning the title in 27 seasons--only 22 percent of the league accounting for championships. 

What happens when we compare this with the eleven years prior to Boston's win in 1981? 

Eight different teams won the championship.  The same amount of teams covering only about one third of the time span.  And what makes this more amazing is that there were far less teams involved.

In 1970, there were 14 teams in the league and the New York Knicks won the title.

The league expanded to 17 teams to end the 1971 season when the Milwaukee Bucks lifted the NBA Championship. 

Any chance the Bucks do that again anytime soon?

The NBA expanded two more times during the '70s, ending the 1980 season with 22 teams and having the Lakers win in the Finals over the Sixers. 

Enter 1981 and 23 teams...

The disparity between the two eras (1969-1980 vs 1981-2010) are quite amazing. 

In 1980, the last time there were only 22 teams in the league, every team averaged over 102 points per game and the league average was 109 points. 

In 2010, 19 teams did not average over 102 points and the league average was 100. 

There are other factors to consider outside of expansion, but expansion does dilute the talent pool.

From '69-'80, there were only 40 teams that reached the 50-win mark, an average of 3.6 teams per season. 

Only twice during those eleven years did the league have more than five teams reach the 50-win mark. 

Compare this to the '81-'10 era, when 226 teams have accomplished this feat, which averages to almost 8 teams per season reaching the 50-win mark.

The NBA has had at least five 50-win teams during a season every year since 1984. 

In fact, there have been six seasons since 1994 that the league has had at least ten 50-win teams, the most being last season when there were twelve. 

The rate of 60-win teams follows the same pattern.

In fact, covering the eleven seasons of '69-'80, there were five seasons in which a team never won 60 games. 

From 1981-2010, there has only been one season in which a team didn't win 60 games; the 2001 season when the Spurs won 58 games. 

With more wins come more teams that fall well under the mediocrity mark.

During the 1969-1980 seasons, a team failed to reach the 20-win mark only once every four seasons.  It only happened three times total. 

Compare this with the past 29 seasons and it happens at least once a season and very often more than that, including 1998 when there were five teams that failed to win 20 games.

And it may be just a coincidence, but when the NBA expanded to 27 teams for the 1989-1990 season, it was the first season in NBA history that three teams did not make the 20-win mark. 

The disparity in competition is very evident.

One way to measure competitiveness is to compare the difference between win totals of the team with the most wins, and the team with the least amount of wins. 

Some praise parity, and what would define parity better than having teams closer together in record, giving more teams the opportunity to make and be successful in the playoffs?

Covering the last 29 seasons, the average difference in win total from the best team to the worst team is 47 games.  During nine of the 29 seasons, the average difference per season was over 50 games.

The average difference in win total from the best team to the worst team from 1969-1980 was 40 games.  This includes the anomaly that is the 1973 season, when the Philadelphia 76ers won only 9 games.

If we take out this season, the average drops to a 37-win difference, a full ten games less than the following 29 seasons. 

Another possible way to measure competitiveness is to compare the number of playoff series that have "gone the distance" or have reached that "sudden death" game 7, game 5, or even game 3. 

From the 1970 playoffs through the playoffs in 1980, 38 percent of all the series went to a final and decisive game.  Compare that with the 1981-2010 era and that number drops to just 26 percent. 

In 1979, in eleven playoff series, six of those series went the distance. 

What happened in 2007?  In 2007, there were 15 series played, just like every playoff since 1984. 

One would think that more series would probably afford an opportunity to view more great playoff action. 

Sure, the Golden State Warriors beat the Dallas Mavericks in the first round, but there was only one series in that entire playoff that went a full seven games—the Utah Jazz over the Houston Rockets.

The Western Conference Finals was a yawner that year, with the Spurs beating the Jazz in five games. 

The NBA Finals was even worse, with the Spurs blanking the Cavs 4-0. 

It has been 16 long years and 240 playoff series played since the playoffs have had more than five series go to a deciding game 5 or 7. 

In those 1994 playoffs, we saw the Knicks lose to the Rockets in seven games after it took the New York based team seven games to defeat the Pacers—still one of the greatest series of all-time. 

Just one season later, the NBA adds two more teams and we never again see a playoff with more than five series get to a decisive game. 

And that's out of 15 series every year.

There is no magic number regarding the number of teams that should be in a league. 

Obviously, the NBA is trying to keep up with the NFL, and it isn't working. 

They are two separate sports and one player on an NBA team can make an enormous difference in wins and losses—just ask the Cavs.

Super star players are hard to come by, and if they are spread among 30 teams, the competitive balance is lost and we end up with a product that is difficult to watch. 

Squeeze the league down to 24 teams and each team improves their talent level dramatically.

I wonder how many people in Charlotte are going to see the Kings come into town tomorrow night.