NBA Lockout: The League Needs To Do More To Increase Parity

The NBA is going in a dangerous direction with the recent concentration of superstars on just a few teams—something that is already evident with the Miami Heat and New York Knicks and that is only going to get worse.

The status quo in terms of NBA salary rules make it quite easy to maneuver around the salary cap, as long as you have an owner that is willing to spend the money, a lucrative city and a front office capable of creating and going through with a plan.

In the next few seasons, Chris Paul, Dwight Howard and Deron Williams are all set to become free agents, and all signs point to two of the three joining up together and the remaining one ending up with another super-team.

This takes superstars away from three teams, which could have a devastating effect on their attendance, TV ratings and merchandise sales.

The league will have around six to eight elite teams who will be the only ones to compete for championships for what seems like the next decade, unless things are changed.

Some people will describe many different teams winning titles as parity, but that may not necessarily be true.

In baseball, in the past decade, nine different teams have won championships under their soft salary cap, but does that mean there is parity in the MLB?

I would argue not.

Parity, to me, has come to mean a good amount of competitiveness throughout the league, where more than four or five teams look capable of competing for a championship.

A good example of parity should be when the majority of teams that make the playoffs all have the ability to go on and win a championship.

It is this way in baseball, but only because they have eight playoff teams—and even then, it doesn't necessarily look as if all the teams are capable of winning a title.

Football, of course, is the best example of this, as all 12 teams usually look as if they could end up winning the Super Bowl (save Seattle in these last playoffs).

As parity in the NBA began to dwindle, league attendance and TV ratings stopped increasing, profits for teams grew thin and attendance dropped for the lesser teams in the league.

For a league whose commissioner claims it lost nearly $400 million in the previous season, all of those things are necessary to keep the league successful.

Take a second to look at the teams at the bottom of the league in attendance: The bottom third includes the Pacers, Kings, Nets, 76ers, Grizzlies, Timberwolves, Hornets, Hawks, Bucks and Bobcats.

Ask yourself, what do all of these teams have in common?

They have become stagnant, either on a slow, constant decline or staying in the same spot in the league for years, going nowhere and with no chance of winning a title.

Indiana, the league's worst team in attendance, have seen their team's winning percentage go from 53 percent to 50, 42, 43, 43 and now 39 percent since the 2004-05 seasons.

Similar things have happened in Sacramento, New Jersey, Philadelphia, Minnesota, Memphis and Milwaukee. Their teams were once good teams, with good attendance numbers to go with their record, but they have been on a slow and steady decline since at least the middle of the 00s.

New Orleans is an interesting case that I go into in more depth here, but the gist is that they've had too turbulent a stint in New Orleans for their fans to become attached to them.

Charlotte has had steady improvement throughout their entire existence, but are now again in the rebuilding process after only one playoff appearance.

Atlanta is the most interesting of the teams, as they have been a very good team over the past three years, but were obviously never capable of competing with the top-tier teams in the league and were never serious championship contenders.

The point is, however, that if teams don't make a serious improvement over a few short seasons—either from being bottom-rung teams to lower-level playoff teams or middle-of-the-pack playoff teams to championship contenders, their fans get fed up and stop coming.

If the trend in the NBA continues, the top handful of teams in the league will stand pat, competing for titles, while the bottom half-to-two-thirds will simply swirl between fifth-seed playoff teams and the bottom of the league.

This will lead to a further decrease in attendance and a decrease in TV ratings as long as one of those top eight teams are not involved, as well as a decrease in merchandise sales.

In other words, the top handful of teams will continue to thrive, while the rest will flounder and the NBA will continue to have money problems as a whole.

I do not believe that the draft alone is enough to bridge the gap between the haves and have-nots, unless the have-nots are extremely skillful and lucky drafters.

In the coming months, the league will take up the issue of the new collective bargaining agreement and, it seems, if the new CBA doesn't have something that will increase parity, the league will struggle.