This is another way to say SAN ANTONIO WAS AS STACKED AS THE LAKERS. They didn’t win through grittiness or having better role players. They won because Tim Duncan was absurdly good at basketball and he had a couple of hall of famers with him bookending his career. People say they want parity like the NFL, but this isn’t the NFL. The top 5 players in the league will always be extraordinarily underpaid because of the cap on max contracts. Tim Duncan, KG, kobe bryant, shaquille o’neill, etc. in their primes were sometimes 1.5 times more valuable than the 30th best player in the league.

Value rotation players are a mirage. You take your teams of DeJuan Blairs and Jeff Green’s (or if your a stathead carl landry and kyle lowry) and I’ll take LeBron and Dwight Howard and scrubs and we’ll see who wins.

If your “Superstar” wants more elite talent with him, he has to sacrifice some cash for championships and non-salary money (endorsements, etc.) on the back end. The problem is finding the “Superstar” willing to make that sacrifice, and building your team around him.

The real way to be successful is to find more value rotation players and then take the savings and push it up to your stars. San Antonio consistently finds players that fit in their system as castoffs from other teams or through the draft (non-lottery). Their problem now is that their “Superstar” has finally fallen off.

Everyone (fans and owners alike) has this hard-on for parity, but there aren’t 30 players in the NBA good enough to lead a team to a championship. Lowering the salary cap doesn’t create more parity. It stops Pau Gasol from leaving Memphis to go to LA, Kevin Garnett from going to Boston from Minnesota. That doesn’t make Memphis and Minnesota compete for the championship, it makes them make the playoffs. You’re trying to turn the Lakers into the Atlanta Hawks, except the Lakers will always be better because they got lucky (or smart, or whatever you think it is) and their Kobe is the ACTUAL Kobe and ATL’s Kobe is Joe Johnson, and Kobe’s going to beat Joe Johnson in a playoff series, 9 times out of 10, if their supporting cases are equal.

All this proposal means is that instead of the Jordan-Pippen bulls, you have Jordan’s Bulls beating Pippen’s team on the way to a championship. And the NBA spins that as parity everyone wants. And the fans pretend it’s true, for some reason. Let the thumbs down begin.

God forbid GMs use their own creativity to construct their team within the existing parameters, for the betterment of their constituency (i.e. the fan base of the team).

Stern, Goodell, Selig. Are these the best that these Leagues can come up with? C’mon people!