Miami's Vice

I, like many of you, have lately been subjected to a lot of analysis about why everyone hates the Miami Heat. Most of those critiques have focused on LeBron James and his self-aggrandizing ways last Summer: "The Decision," the months of speculation leading up to that farce, and the dog and pony show that followed his joining the Heat. Many sports pundits have described this "hate the Heat" phenomenon in sports' usual terms: everyone, except for the hometown fans, hates the dominant team. It's a NY Yankees situation, they say; everyone boos when the just-a-bit-too-dominant Bronx Bombers show up in your town.

Unfortunately, I think most of this analysis is wrong. I believe that fans across the country--perhaps even around the world--have developed a strong distaste for the Heat for another, far more perceptive reason. To my eyes, Miami has become a team people love to hate because James, Dwyane Wade, and Chris Bosh--three of the top players in the game--colluded to upset the competitive balance of the league. 

Certainly, they were free agents and had the right to sign with whichever team met their asking prices. But the fact that the three of them--all members of the last USA Olympic team, all ranked among the top 10 to 15 players in the game--got together and decided to play together, with the goal of winning "not two, not three, not four, not five, not six, not seven..." championships (as James himself stated during the aforementioned dog and pony show show), is itself indicative of why they rub fans the wrong way.

For what we must remember is this: the lifeblood of professional sports is competitive balance. As I have argued in my essay "The Champs/Chumps Ratio" (updated version coming soon to Malchats Media on Scribd), competitive balance--the characteristic quality of a league that lets fans of any team believe they have a shot at seeing their team win a championship--is crucial to the welfare of any pro sports enterprise. In sports, hopelessness is death. Folks may scoff at the NFL's "parity," but the fact that any team in the league has a chance to win the Super Bowl--if not now, then within a few years--has been among the strongest forces propelling the NFL to the top of America's pro sports pyramid. Conversely, the NBA is far and away the worst of the pro sports leagues at guaranteeing that all of its teams have a shot at the crown.

So here you have an already imbalanced league, where few teams go into the season with a fighting chance at a title, and along comes a triad of major players who decide to try to sink the league's competitive balance even further by ganging up on the rest of the teams. Is it any wonder that basketball fans would hold a grudge against these guys?

We must note that pro sports owners are incentivized to create competitive balance. Owners reap profits from having a team that wins championships. If one team tries to dominate competition--a la the Yankees--other owners will suffer, and they'll have a strong incentive to step up and spend themselves up to that same level (a la the Red Sox, Philllies, etc.).

Players also profit from winning championships, but their incentive runs in the opposite direction:  they can guarantee themselves championships--and bigger playing and endorsement contracts--if they control team rosters through collusive free agency moves; that is, through destroying competitive balance. James was not off base when he predicted winning multiple championships; the NBA's history is replete with teams that won multiple crowns because they had the lion's share of the best players. When that situation arose through the accidents of player development or shrewd club management, such a run of multiple championships could be palatable to the general mass of fans. But if the best players try to gang up on one team against the rest of the league, competitive balance becomes a joke. And this is especially true in the NBA, with its small active rosters, where one or two great players in a starting five can make a team unbeatable.

That, then, is the crux of the matter. The fans know what is being done to their favorite league, and they're not happy about it.

And what's the saddest part of this spectacle? Perhaps it's the fact that I need to point this out--that so many allegedly seasoned reporters of the game, and sports in general, seem so lost in covering this story. Can they not see what is right in front of them? Are sports journalists so blinded by the glitz and star worship of the modern NBA that they can't decipher the most fundamental facts about the state of the game? Apparently so. Politics, it seems, isn't the only journalistic arena where analytical reporting has gone right into the toilet.

If the Mavericks win tonight, the Heat and their collusive ways will have been thwarted, at least for one season. But if Miami take the next two games and wins the first of its predicted multiple titles, the fans will walk away with a sour taste in their mouths, and the damage to the game will be done. And perhaps worst of all, few will really understand why.