CHARLOTTE, N.C. _ When NBA Commissioner Adam Silver thinks about parity in professional sports, he sees the NFL as the gold standard. But he can't help but chuckle that the New England Patriots are such a constant presence in the Super Bowl.
For the last four seasons the Golden State Warriors and Cleveland Cavaliers have met in the Finals. That will change this year _ the Cavaliers without LeBron James are one of the NBA's worst teams. But the Warriors seem poised to head back to the Finals for a fifth straight year.
"If you look at the last, I think, 11 years, we've had seven different teams win championships," Silver said Saturday. "But if you look back to the first 60 years of this league, I think three teams _ the Lakers, Celtics, and the Bulls _ won 60 percent of all championships. So, progress."
The conversation about NBA parity has centered on big versus small markets.
Particularly vexing for small-market teams has been the trend of superstar players leaving for bigger markets or other stars with whom they can partner.
Anthony Davis, the most recent, put the Lakers, Clippers and New York Knicks on his original list of preferred destinations, along with one small-market team, Milwaukee.
Silver mentioned Milwaukee, Oklahoma City and Denver to illustrate that the NBA's small-market teams are competitive. Oklahoma City, after all, kept Paul George despite his previous insistence that he planned to sign with the Lakers.
"In our cap system, as you well know, it's a tax-based system, which creates penalties, in essence, for going over the salary cap, but you still end up with fairly large disparities in salaries from one market to another," Silver said. "And often that disparity is not based on the size of the market. In certain cases, it's based on revenue generation, which doesn't always perfectly correlate. In some cases, it's based on a willingness of a team to become unprofitable."
