They just did that for the last SEVEN YEARS and their star player still left.

They literally rebuilt the right way like the NBA wants and it still backfired in their face.

But yet the NBA will get mad at the way the Sixers did it. Well the conventional way clearly doesn't work for smaller markets and it's been proven time and time again. Warriors being the complete outlier.

Smaller markets are basically farm teams for the larger markets. When a guy hits 27/28 in his NBA prime he just goes to whatever large market he wants and it's basically thanks for nothing to the smaller market team that drafted him and had his rights for 5-6 years.

I can't wait for Anthony Davis to do it and cause a real shakeup to the NBA landscape and create a new super team that might challenge the Warriors.
[Reply]

Gordon should of stayed with the Jazz. Just think the Jazz only had 2 less wins than the Celtics and they played in the Western conference. Get another player and a team of Hayward, Ingles, Gonert, and Rubio is pretty damn good
[Reply]

Yeah smaller market teams are definitely at a disadvantage. I don't see the big deal with living in Utah. Seems like a nice place to raise kids. If you want to party do it in the offseason these guys got the money to travel.

I know most Packer players don't live in GB.
[Reply]

So do people have any bright ideas of how to fix the talent disparity between conferences besides overall playoff seeding (which isn't going to fix the talent issue).

The East only has 4 of the top 20 NBA players. In the ENTIRE CONFERENCE. There are a lot of decent/goodish players in the conference, but they're all spaced and spread out mostly evenly among the teams. The West has most of the league's best players, and they're all concentrated on the rosters of about 6-8 teams. When West teams play each other more often than they play the East, the worse teams rack up more losses, and that grants them more lottery picks, too. It's so difficult to feed new NBA talent to the East when that happens.

Is it going to take Lebron leaving/retiring for things to right itself? Because I'm just not all that sure that it can. There are ZERO East teams looking to compete with super teams. They're all choosing to wait things out until things get less crazy and they don't get punked by Lebron every playoff run.

It's just getting stupid. We've seen multiple East teams play the tanking game and lose, with only Milwaukee and Philly (maybe) seeming like they have a chance at pulling free. Meanwhile in the last 15 years or so, Portland, Seattle/OKC, Memphis, Clippers, and now presumably Minnesota have won at tanking.

Theoretically a conference can be bad enough such that the power vacuum dramatically sucks up talent and balances the league out, but we're getting pretty shitty now and nothing has happened.
[Reply]

Just wait until LeBron goes to the Lakers and brings a few guys with him. It may be the biggest talent disparity we've ever seen between two conferences in recent sports history.
[Reply]

That will require Adam Silver to intervene.

What TV networks would want to broadcast Eastern conference games? Especially in the playoffs when half the lineup is East teams.

If the NBA is a business like any other sports league, then by letting things continue, they are seriously jeopardizing their profit margin.
[Reply]

they need to do it like baseball and football

some west and east coast teams are in the same conference problem solved.

The East and West bullshit is what is cause this mess. Just put a division of East, Central, Western teams in one conference and division of the same in another.

Like the Southeast division next year is going to be absolutely terrible. Washington who isn't even that good (and paying into the luxury tax for it) is the best of Miami, Atlanta, Charlotte, Orlando.

Charlotte will be better but goodness Orlando, Atlanta and Miami are going to be horrible. Miami just got a bunch of cap space and there is literally nobody good left to sway the needle.

The league completely lacks actual talent. It's a small percentage of superstars then stars (getting way overpaid) and good to average guys (also getting way overpaid) then filler.

The guys in that 2nd tier are getting all the money. The Lowrys, Mike Conleys, Bradley Beal and Gordon Haywards. These guys aren't good enough to win you anything but you have to pay them 25+ million.

Don't get me started on the Otto Porter's of the world either. What a joke.

There is 1 guy in the NFL making 25+ million and there is about 20 in the NBA. And of those 20 probably 5 of them move the needle.
[Reply]

So your answer is a franchise tag?

Because what's causing these super-teams is the salary cap. The Warriors couldn't afford Durant and Curry if a cap wasn't in place. Oh sure, Kevin Durant will pass on $9 million to stay in GS, but he wouldn't have passed on $50 million. And some team would've given him the Jordan treatment and paid him as much as some small market teams spend on their total payroll.

But the problem is that it wouldn't have been a small market in all likelihood. And ultimately, there's little that can be done about day to day presence in Salt Lake City (as opposed to a sunny locale or NY).

Apart from a straight up franchise tag, what can you do to keep stars in small markets? And the only way that franchise tag will even begin to get traction is if it offers to pay someone under the tag something like a 20% premium over the 'max' that any other team can give in addition to being a year longer. Something like Bird Rights on steriods. Maybe then you'd convince the players association to agree with it.
[Reply]

The only thing I take issue with here is the idea of competing with "Super Teams", which have seemingly been defined (not necessarily by you) as built through free agency and/or lop-sided trades. Boston was a super team. Miami was a super team. GS clearly is not, as they (did it the right way, IMO, and) drafted their star nucleus and only replaced a max-level guy with a max-level-like guy. San Antonio isn't a super team either, even though they signed Aldridge. I wouldn't consider Cleveland a super team, as they used their high picks to get players and as trade chips to bring in others.

The super team model hasn't beaten out the draft and develop strategy for a few years, IMO.
[Reply]

Why fix it? The talent disparity is going to put Embiid in the playoffs and everybody wins with Embiid in the playoffs.
[Reply]

I think Bird Rights on steroids is an outstanding idea. I've always thought resigning one's own players should circumvent the cap a bit more than it currently does.
[Reply]

The distinction between Bird Rights and that suggestion is that Bird Rights are a 'carrot' approach. The NFL franchise tag is a 'stick'. If you gave the Bird Rights the super high premium salary AND made it compulsory, you'd have the carrot and the stick in a single approach.

The players get the massive money that's so much more that they can make on the market that it might be more palatable for them to consider. The small-market teams can keep their stars. But you'd probably need a lockout to get it to happen. Can you imagine a lockout the year after a billion dollar television deal kicked in?

In the NBA, fans are likely to side with players anyway. With that kind of timing, you've all but assured it. I just don't know that there's a way to effectuate it.
[Reply]

By super teams I mean teams with 2-3-4 superstars, regardless of how those players wound up on that team.

I'm probably misusing the conventional understanding of that term. Whatever. What I mean are really really really good teams. The West has them all. The East has one. Maybe two with Boston, but Boston still has no chance at winning a title in the next years as they're currently assembled.
[Reply]

I simply think it's great that teams are still building through the draft. As I previously noted, it's not been that long ago that teams were dumping top 10 picks for cash, so that they could sign free agents. Free agency is still huge, but teams are built through the draft.
[Reply]

The Bay Area is the 6th largest TV market in the US. They're not a small market team.

Also, they move across the Bay to San Fran in 2019.
[Reply]