6/4/2014 Abandon Hope, Almost All Ye Who Enter the N.B.A. Playoffs - NYTimes.

com
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/01/sports/basketball/for-the-nba-no-bracket-busters-in-this-tournament.html?rref=sports/basketball&module=Ribbon&version=co 1/4
http://nyti.ms/1pHoVEf
PRO BASKETBALL
Abandon Hope, Almost All Ye Who Enter the
N.B.A. Playoffs
MAY 31, 2014
On Pro Basketball
By HARVEY ARATON
If only the N.B.A. playoffs could have remained as mercurial as the
loquacious, litigious team owner who obscured them on the way to his own
apparent elimination.
But after an N.C.A.A.-like first round for the ages, Chris Paul and the
Los Angeles Clippers, while still technically in the clutches of the owner
Donald Sterling, self-destructed in the second round as suddenly as
Sterling did in various communication forums.
The leagues other most celebrated pretenders, the Indiana Pacers,
surrendered everything but their uniforms and office furniture while
losing in the Eastern Conference finals to the Heat on Friday in Miami.
The Heat eliminated the Pacers for the third straight season.
To the surprise of few, the two teams left standing are the Heat,
N.B.A. finalists for the fourth consecutive year, and the San Antonio Spurs,
who put away the Oklahoma City Thunder, 112-107, in overtime Saturday
night to win the Western Conference and set up a title series rematch with
Miami.
On television near the end of Miamis brain-numbing cruise to a 117-
92 Game 6 victory, the analysts Mark Jackson and Jeff Van Gundy cited
6/4/2014 Abandon Hope, Almost All Ye Who Enter the N.B.A. Playoffs - NYTimes.com
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/01/sports/basketball/for-the-nba-no-bracket-busters-in-this-tournament.html?rref=sports/basketball&module=Ribbon&version=co 2/4
the Heat, the Spurs and the Thunder as exclusive maintainers of a
championship or bust mentality.
Viewed another way, they were the only teams with a realistic chance
of winning it all once the Chicago Bulls Derrick Rose was injured again,
the Nets were exposed as overhyped and overpaid, and the Pacers
competitive mettle melted away with the notion of Lance Stephensons
behavioral maturity.
Thats a meager three teams out of 30, leaving almost all of the
remaining 27 fan bases to realistically understand at least by spring
that their chances of winning a championship or even reaching the
conference finals fell into the categories of slim, none or, in a couple of
woebegone markets, possibly never.
Basketball has always been the least competitively balanced of the
major sports, said Roger Noll, a professor emeritus at Stanford, who has
studied and written about the way the economics of sports affects their
competitive appeal.
Much of that, he said, has to do with a natural characteristic of a
game that can be dominated by one superstar among five players on a
team. But Noll added that while there have always been one or two teams
able to dominate, that has been made worse especially when compared
with the other major team sports by the leagues insistence on having an
individual salary cap on top of team constraints.
If you didnt have an individual cap, Noll said in a telephone
interview, if LeBron James was in a position to sell himself to the highest
bidder, his salary would be much higher and you wouldnt have a small
number of top teams with more than half the superstars in the league.
Noll went on: Its a big mistake, and the N.B.A. hasnt adjusted. So if
you have as many as 25 teams that know before the first game is played
that they probably wont even be in the conference finals, doesnt that
make the regular season seem almost meaningless, more of an exhibition
than a pathway to a consequential championship?
As with the N.C.A.A. mens basketball tournament, an air of pre-
6/4/2014 Abandon Hope, Almost All Ye Who Enter the N.B.A. Playoffs - NYTimes.com
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/01/sports/basketball/for-the-nba-no-bracket-busters-in-this-tournament.html?rref=sports/basketball&module=Ribbon&version=co 3/4
eminent powers-that-be inevitability settled upon this N.B.A. postseason
once its versions of the midmajors the Washington Wizards, the
Portland Trail Blazers were dispensed with. But given the freewheeling
and democratic nature of the baseball, football and hockey playoffs, is the
N.B.A. actually more like womens college basketball, in which only
Connecticut and one or two others often have a meaningful chance of
winning a title?
Could the N.B.A. ever produce a champion that barely qualified for
the playoffs, as the N.F.L. has done? Or a team like the Rangers, who had
the 12th-most points in the N.H.L. this season before evolving into a
Stanley Cup finalist over the last month and a half?
In a lockout-tortured and watered-down 1998-99 season, the Knicks
made the N.B.A. finals as an eighth-seeded team. Three years ago, Dallas,
as a 57-victory third seed in the West, galvanized during the playoffs and
ruined Miamis Big Three debut with a six-game takedown in the finals.
But the N.B.A., historically riding the coattails of the chosen few, has
been no incubator of late-season reinvention, no place for a miracle on
hardwood. Over the last 30 years, among the four major professional
leagues, it has produced by far the fewest franchises to win a
championship, eight, while Major League Baseball has had 18 of its 30
teams win the World Series, and the N.F.L. and the N.H.L. have each had
14 teams claim a title.
No question, the dominance of the 1980s Celtics-Lakers rivalry,
featuring Larry Bird and Magic Johnson, launched the rocket of Michael
Jordan and the Bulls in the 1990s. No doubt the global business of N.B.A.
basketball is very good in this era of frantic competition for live television
rights that contributed along with a perceived noble rescue mission to
the pinch-me $2 billion Clippers sale price agreed upon by Steve Ballmer
and Rochelle Sterling, if not by her husband.
Maybe the Clippers, with Blake Griffin and Paul, are an ascendant
team, more than a second-round tease, and will eventually go where
Donald Sterlings team has never gone. To many fans, the finals provide
6/4/2014 Abandon Hope, Almost All Ye Who Enter the N.B.A. Playoffs - NYTimes.com
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/01/sports/basketball/for-the-nba-no-bracket-busters-in-this-tournament.html?rref=sports/basketball&module=Ribbon&version=co 4/4
the seasons lasting memory, and the series between the Heat and the
Spurs should be a worthy conclusion, just as it was a year ago.
But beyond that memorable first round, something fell a little flat,
and the playoffs felt a little staged. (No, we dont mean fixed.)
The nature of the sport is what it is, but when an owners end is the
most shocking postseason development for as long as we can recall, that
may be something to be just a little upset about.
A version of this article appears in print on June 1, 2014, on page SP11 of the New York edition
with the headline: Abandon Hope, Almost All Ye Who Enter.
2014 The New York Times Company