So, it looks like the Lakers traded Pau Gasol and Lamar Odom for Chris Paul in a trade that also involved Houston. Oh, yeah, and it looks like the Knicks are getting Tyson Chandler. And Twitter is ablaze with people bitching about how the new CBA was supposed to bring competitive balance.
Hey, you know, here on the Wages of Wins network we've been telling y'all for months that all this rhetoric about competitive balance was a huge, stinking, steaming pile of bullshit, and that the owners know this. Did you think we were just ****ing around?
Hey, we ****ing TOLD YOU.
This article might take me longer than usual because it's going to take me a while to track down all the times we brought this up.
- I brought it up on my first podcast with FillingTheLanes
- I mentioned in my article about revenue sharing that it wasn't about small markets competing, it was about small markets making more money (yes, there is a big difference, ask the very profitable Pittsburgh Pirates).
- David Berri brought it up twice on Freakonomics.com (here and here -- although the latter is about baseball).
- Speaking of David, he's noted, oh, about a billion times, that salary restrictions do not lead to more competition in sports leagues.
- I wrote on that same blog that the NBA owners probably don't actually want parity.
- Thanks to the short supply of tall people, parity isn't really possible (and based on thier All-NBA voting, sportswriters agree).
- Even ESPN knows this, and Henry Abbot has been talking a lot about it lately.
I could seriously go on forever. But the reason is very obvious: salaries barely correlate with team wins. To the tune of like 8%. Therefore, more money does not buy you more wins. Even if you disaggree with every damn thing we say about players, you think we overvalue rebounds, whatever, this is a very simple fact that is indesputable. Again, at the Wages of Wins we have been saying this for ****ing years. Why does no one get this very simple fact through their heads? If more money cannot buy you more wins, than restricting big market spending isn't going to increase parity.
From day one, we made it obvious that the lockout was about one thing, ONE ****ing THING: increasing the owners' share of BRI. They did this to the tune of $3 billion dollars over ten years. All that "competitive balance" rhetoric has been a load of bullshit from the beginning. And we said so, from day one. Please, please, please, for the LOVE OF NAISMITH, spare us from all the moronic "But...but....I thought this was all about competitive balance!?!?" tweets.