If you want to understand the modern NBA, this is a good place to start: The league doesn’t have a tanking problem. It has a competitive-balance problem.
Entering each season, only a handful of the Association’s 30 teams have any realistic hope of hoisting the Larry O’Brien Trophy in June. This feels true intuitively and appears so empirically. Since the Philadelphia 76ers won the 1983 NBA Finals, only eight franchises have claimed the 30 titles awarded in the interim.
By comparison, eight different NFL teams have won the Super Bowl in the past 10 years. Major League Baseball has to look back only 12 seasons to find its last eight champions.
Economists have developed the Noll-Scully metric for articulating this very thing: the level of competitive balance within sports leagues. By this measure, the NBA comes out as the least balanced of the four major North American sports, well behind the NFL, NHL and MLB. And it’s not even close.
“The NBA, with the highest year-to-year consistency, shows the lowest parity,” Michael Lopez, a PhD candidate in biostatistics at Brown University, wrote on the Sloan Sports and Analytics Conference’s blog after performing an analysis similar to Noll-Scully.
“Moreover,” he added, “NBA teams’ performances from one year to the next appear to be growing more consistent in recent seasons.”
