The NBA - Fantastic?

One of the big issues in baseball's current labor situation is the concept of competitive balance. According to many, today's game is hurt by the fact that certain markets are predestined to win, and others are dead out the door. More revenue sharing and a salary cap are often posited as solutions to baseball's problems. The NBA is often held up as a league that baseball should emulate. But let's take a look at how competitive the NBA is compared to the National Pastime.

Champions

The recent run of the Yankees has many believing that big city (large market) franchises rule the roost in baseball. But Chicago hasn't been to a World Series since 1959, and Los Angeles hasn't seen the World Series since 1988. Yet in basketball we've seen a trio of threepeats from Chicago and Los Angeles in recent years. Here's a look at the championship matchups since the start of the NBA's Golden Age, the arrival of Bird and Magic, through the Jordan Era to the current day. Teams from the nation's three biggest markets are in bold:

Year	West	East	NL	AL
1980	Los Angeles	Philadelphia	Philadelphia	Kansas City
1981	Houston	Boston	Los Angeles	New York
1982	Los Angeles	Philadelphia	St. Louis	Milwaukee
1983	Los Angeles	Philadelphia	Philadelphia	Baltimore
1984	Los Angeles	Boston	San Diego	Detroit
1985	Los Angeles	Boston	St. Louis	Kansas City
1986	Houston	Boston	New York	Boston
1987	Los Angeles	Boston	St. Louis	Minneapolis
1988	Los Angeles	Detroit	Los Angeles	Oakland
1989	Los Angeles	Detroit	San Francisco	Oakland
1990	Portland	Detroit	Cincinnati	Oakland
1991	Los Angeles	Chicago	Atlanta	Minneapolis
1992	Phoenix	Chicago	Atlanta	Toronto
1993	Portland	Chicago	Philadelphia	Toronto
1994	Houston	New York
1995	Houston	Orlando	Atlanta	Cleveland
1996	Seattle	Chicago	Atlanta	New York
1997	Utah	Chicago	Florida	Cleveland
1998	Utah	Chicago	San Diego	New York
1999	San Antonio	New York	Atlanta	New York
2000	Los Angeles	Indiana	New York	New York
2001	Los Angeles	Philadelphia	Arizona	New York
2002	Los Angeles	New Jersey

Looking at the chart, of the 46 slots possible for the NBA, 21 were occupied by teams from the top three markets in the US. What years did the NBA Finals not have a team from one of the top three markets? Only 1981, 1986, 1990 and 1995. Of the other NBA teams that appeared three or more times, we have Boston (five times, 7th Metro Area by 2000 census), Houston (four times, 10th), Philadelphia (four times, 6th) and Detroit (three times, 8th).

Compare this to baseball. The three largest cities combine for merely 10 of 42 slots, far far fewer than the domination the big cities have in the NBA. Looking at franchises with three or more appearances, we have Atlanta (five times, 11th), Philadelphia (three times, 6th), St. Louis (three times, 18th) and Oakland (three times, 5th). So the other teams that have had success in baseball have come from similar or smaller-sized markets as the successful teams in the NBA. Looks like MLB has a better record for parity by this measure.

Wait 'Til Next Year (Well, the Year After)

Another metric for competitive balance is how stable a team's winning percentage is over time. People complain about baseball because some teams don't have a shot coming out of Spring Training, but these people never talk about the Oakland Warriors. What hopes do fans of a bad team have in MLB and the NBA?

The following chart takes a look at this problem. What we've done here is taken the winning percentage of MLB and NBA teams over the past 20 years, and then plotted their winning percentage two years down the road. There are a few things we can see right away. First, the range in winning percentages is much larger in the NBA than it is in MLB. Very few MLB teams finish above .700 or below .300. Yet there have a decent handful of NBA squads that have finished above .800 or below .200. Secondly, the curve fit on the NBA data has a much steeper slope. This means that the good teams do a better job of staying good, and the bad do a "better" job of staying bad in the NBA.

Finally, the correlation coefficient of the two data sets differs widely. The best way of looking at this variable is to square it. When you do this you get 0.06 for MLB and 0.30 for the NBA. The quick-and-dirty explanation of this is that roughly 6% of the variation in winning percentage two years down the road is explained by this year's winning percentage in baseball, while in the NBA this year's record has a 30% effect on what happens two years down the road.

The Commissioner

I think that most fans of losing MLB teams would be happy knowing a 6% effect extends two years down the road. Yet the NBA has five times that problem. For whatever the reason, the bigger effect of star players, network TV fixes, Martians, competitive balance is a much bigger problem in the NBA than it is in baseball. Then why is it that baseball fans think they have a big competitive balance problem, but it isn't mentioned in the NBA? It comes down to Selig vs. Stern. When the Lakers threepeat, Stern tells the media that he's happy to be alive to see a great team at its peak. Selig complains about how large market teams dominate the game. Stern quietly moves two struggling franchises into more promising markets, Selig announces contraction a few days after one of the most exciting World Series in recent memory. If baseball does suffer from competitive imbalance, it is the imbalance between Selig and the folks who run the other sports in America.