Who wins with NBA super-teams?

Stefano Toniutti
Contributor
In this fall – this is very tough – in this fall I’m going to take my talents to South Beach and join the Miami Heat.”
When LeBron James spoke those words the NBA landscape took a sudden turn into uncharted waters: players were creating their own “super-teams.” James had all of a sudden joined forces with Dwayne Wade and Chris Bosh to play for the Miami Heat, setting a new trend in the National Basketball Association (NBA).
I don’t want to be misunderstood; the NBA has had elite “super-teams” for decades (e.g. Johnson-Jabbar-Worthy and Bird-Parish-McHale-Ainge in the ’80s; Jordan-Pippen and the Bulls dominated the ’90s). The early 2000s saw the emergence of the Shaq-Kobe Lakers and the Duncan-Ginobili-Parker Spurs.
More recently, the Lakers and Celtics, too, have established their own super-teams, but something is different about the Heat.
The Heat came together not through some savvy trading, barring the dumping of players salaries – they came together through a desire to play together and dominate the league. That’s what irks me: it demonstrated a lack of respect for the league, and began to change the formula used to win.
The current Carmelo Anthony rumour mill has demonstrated exactly how thingsare beginning to change; teams feel they need to wrangle together players to create forces formerly only possible in your copy of NBA2K11.
So what? Who cares if this happens? Won’t it make for duels like we haven’t seen since the Bird and Magic days, the highlights of a recent HBO special? The question is: how should we feel about the trend toward NBA super-teams?
Let’s look at their impact. Again, I will pick on the Heat, but I will focus also on the Celtics, who arguably really started this trend. The Cavaliers, LeBron James’s first team, had an audience attendance average
of 11,496 before James’s arrival, which shot up to an average of 18,287 one year later.
With his departure, numbers haven’t dropped – yet. A lot of the tickets for this year’s season were purchased last year in advance, and those that weren’t had huge ticket price cuts (“flash seats” – these essentially allow people who bought season’s tickets or tickets in advance to sell them to other fans, usually at about 30- to 40-percent discount, according to the Cleveland Fan forum).
The attendance will inevitably drop back down substantially. A quick look at the Toronto Raptors demonstrates this; the Raptors lost seven-and-a-half percent in attendance numbers this year, the post-
Bosh era.
Look at the Seattle Supersonics (now the OKC Thunder) and the Minnesota Timberwolves: both teams experienced a loss of roughly 1,500 fans after their stars, Ray Allen and Kevin Garnett, respectively, left for the Celtics. The loss of these stars in smaller market teams (minus Toronto) hurts, and if this trend continues, the impact could become much more severe.
How much longer will Kevin Love want to hang around in Minnesota, Andre Iguodala in Philly, Danny Granger in Indiana and Chris Paul in New Orleans? Rumours are already circulating that Paul wants to join Carmelo or Stoudemire.
If the aforementioned stars choose to pack their bags in search of championship hardware, what will happen to these small market teams that depend on these stars to put fans in the seats? Instead of expanding, the league may have to shrink. I’m not suggesting this is a horrible situation for fans of the game and good basketball, but for the NBA the consequences of these player-made super-teams could be disastrous.
The NBA may need to introduce franchise tagging as a means to try to curb these super-teams (as suggested at a recent ESPN roundtable talk) but in reality who knows how effective that would ever really be? A disgruntled star player in basketball has a very profound effect on the team, especially if that player is option A, B and C on offence, as James was in Cleveland.
I see this playing out in the future in a way much like the current MLB landscape; sure there will be stars on other teams, and teams may put together great teams through drafting like the Tampa Bay Rays did, but it will always come down to players having a good year or two with their draft team, then defecting to others where they feel they can win like the Yankees and Red Sox.
This doesn’t mean seasons like this past one – where the Giants were the Cinderella story and upset a bunch of teams – can’t happen, but all eyes will always be on those top few teams.
Should the NBA continue on this trend, there should be some great playoff series and interesting battles between teams, with new rivalries sparked; however, the cost may be too great for the NBA’s smaller markets. The question is: Do you care?