Is the NBA tipping toward parity, and is that a good thing?

Also, the Greek Freak, the Aprons (1 and 2) and a Jalen Brunson mea culpa

Photo by Edgar Chaparro on Unsplash

For 75 years, basketball has been the one sport about which the following statement has been most true: The better team wins because it’s the better team.

Of the four NBA second-round series currently underway, the lower seed leads two with one of them tied. Two lower seeds, Golden State over Houston and Minnesota over the Lakers, won in round one. Two series went seven games.

We’re not really talking about gigantic upsets here, but maybe that’s part of the point. For what it’s worth, this year will almost certainly be the sixth straight in which a different team has won it all.

In the NBA Finals, upsets are incredibly rare. I would argue that in my lifetime there’s been only two - Dallas over Miami in 2011 and Detroit over the Lakers in 2004. In both cases, the result had more to do with superstars having their heads up their ass (Lebron, Kobe, Shaq) than anything the Mavs and Pistons did.

Is the NBA tipping toward parity? Maybe.

Is that a good thing? Maybe not.

The reason upsets are relatively rare in basketball is the high number of possessions - the bigger the sample size, the more both teams round away from over/underachieving and toward their typical level.

Maybe the ever-more-absurd over-reliance on the three-point shot has become a regular wild-card element. See Celtics, Boston.

Another piece of this is boring: the NBA “Apron” rules, which place restrictions on teams exceeding the league’s salary cap and luxury tax thresholds.

Without getting too deep into the arcana of the apron, because of it it’s now very, very difficult to pay three star players. Think of the best teams of this century: Golden State with Steph Curry, Kevin Durant, Klay Thompson and Draymond Green, Miami with Lebron, Dwayne Wade and Chris Bosh, San Antonio with Tim Duncan, Kawhi Leonard, Manu Ginobli and Tony Parker, etc.

There’s nothing quite like that in the league now.

Within the section of a Venn diagram that includes conspiracy theorists and Lebron-haters, there’s a belief that Lebron runs the NBA, or the NBA runs itself for Lebron, and that’s the only plausible explanation for Dallas making the bizarre Luke Doncic-for-Anthony Davis trade that jazzed up the Lakers in February. It follows, of course, that the league repaid Dallas by rigging Monday’s draft lottery, which the Mavericks won with 1.8% odds.