Reflecting on the 2013-2014 season as the NBA finals wind down, one cannot feel that the season was anything but a huge disappointment. While LeBron James is unquestionably the league’s best player and attraction, the NBA has failed him by not having a strong league of teams to challenge LeBron and the Miami Heat. The overall talent of the league, especially in the Eastern Conference is simply not good and definitely not sufficiently competitive. The only answer is to contract the league from thirty teams to no more than twenty-eight teams.
The Eastern conference sent eight teams to the 2014 playoffs and only seven teams won more than half of their games. Worse, two teams did not even win twenty games.
The Chicago Bulls earned the fourth seed in the Eastern Conference after losing their best player Derrick Rose eleven games into the season and trading away their second best player Luol Deng to Cleveland Cavaliers shortly thereafter.
In reality, the Miami Heat only had one team that seemed to have anywhere near the talent to challenge them in the Eastern conference, the Indiana Pacers. After the Pacers imploded and limped into the playoffs, the Heat waltzed into the NBA finals. While not their fault, the Heat deserve to not have their credentials challenged by those who say they really only had to beat one team to win the championship. Notably, the Heat recognized the inferior talent in their conference and rested their second best player Dwyane Wade by not playing him a staggering 28 games on route to winning 54 games this season.
For the past decade, it seems as if most teams are in NBA hell. They are not good enough to win and not bad enough to draft the few franchise-changing players that come out each year, if at all. The trade deadline has become a joke where most teams trade “bad expiring contracts” to other teams to provide cap space to sign the few superstar free agents. There just are not enough great players to make the league competitive.
Worse, the dearth of talent in the NBA has made the league vulnerable to “colluding” players like Wade, LeBron and Chris Bosh who “decide” to all go to one team and dramatically alter the delicate balance of teams succeeding with no more than one or two superstar players. Last week, the NBA rumor was that Carmello Anthony was going to sign in the off-season with the Heat colluders to give them a fourth superstar…so much for competitive balance.
Contraction of the teams will restore the strength of the league and make for better regular season games and ultimately result in a true season-tested champion. The players, the teams, the league and most of all, the fans deserve to have a stronger and more competitive NBA. The future of the NBA may depend on it.
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