On the NBA Lockout
In his latest column, “If I Ruled The (NBA) World,” The Sports Guy Bill Simmons returns to one of his favorite topics: how the NBA would be perfect if only he were in charge. His whole “Common Sense GM” thing is mostly tongue-in-cheek, but he goes to this well so often that you have to assume he believes there’s at least some truth in it. And admittedly it’s usually entertaining — parts rational solutions, cockamamie ideas, and willful ignorance of reality. And this latest column on the lockout indulges all of them.
Yet Simmons main problem is not that he has bad ideas, it’s that nearly all of them exist within a current system that is fundamentally flawed. He wants David Stern, the players and the NBA generally to embrace radical ideas but you can’t effectively do that if you’re stuck in the box to begin with. The best you can hope for is incremental improvement. It’s like the tax or healthcare systems in this U.S. Unless you throw the whole thing out and start from scratch, all you’ll get is change at the edges that does nothing to solve structural problems.
Here are a couple of things I know about the NBA (which incidentally are true of the NHL and MLB as well).
- The NBA is nothing like the NFL.
- There are not even close to 25 cities that can reasonably support a professional basketball team.
- The NBA can do nothing to ensure competitive balance or that all of its teams are profitable.
- The NBA Players Union has outlived its usefulness.
Let’s take a look at them one by one (after the break).
