http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/01/sports/basketball/for-the-nba-no-bracket-busters-in-this-tournament.html?_r=0

If only the N.B.A. playoffs could have remained as mercurial as the loquacious, litigious team owner who obscured them on the way to his own apparent elimination.

But after an N.C.A.A.-like first round for the ages, Chris Paul and the Los Angeles Clippers, while still technically in the clutches of the owner Donald Sterling, self-destructed in the second round as suddenly as Sterling did in various communication forums.

The league’s other most celebrated pretenders, the Indiana Pacers, surrendered everything but their uniforms and office furniture while losing in the Eastern Conference finals to the Heat on Friday in Miami. The Heat eliminated the Pacers for the third straight season.

To the surprise of few, the two teams left standing are the Heat, N.B.A. finalists for the fourth consecutive year, and the San Antonio Spurs, who put away the Oklahoma City Thunder, 112-107, in overtime Saturday night to win the Western Conference and set up a title series rematch with Miami.

On television near the end of Miami’s brain-numbing cruise to a 117-92 Game 6 victory, the analysts Mark Jackson and Jeff Van Gundy cited the Heat, the Spurs and the Thunder as exclusive maintainers of a “championship or bust” mentality.
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The finals seemed certain to be between the Heat and the Spurs or the Thunder. Credit Larry W. Smith/European Pressphoto Agency

Viewed another way, they were the only teams with a realistic chance of winning it all once the Chicago Bulls’ Derrick Rose was injured again, the Nets were exposed as overhyped and overpaid, and the Pacers’ competitive mettle melted away with the notion of Lance Stephenson’s behavioral maturity.

That’s a meager three teams out of 30, leaving almost all of the remaining 27 fan bases to realistically understand — at least by spring — that their chances of winning a championship or even reaching the conference finals fell into the categories of slim, none or, in a couple of woebegone markets, possibly never.

“Basketball has always been the least competitively balanced of the major sports,” said Roger Noll, a professor emeritus at Stanford, who has studied and written about the way the economics of sports affects their competitive appeal.

Much of that, he said, has to do with a “natural characteristic” of a game that can be dominated by one superstar among five players on a team. But Noll added that “while there have always been one or two teams able to dominate, that has been made worse” — especially when compared with the other major team sports — by the league’s insistence on having an individual salary cap on top of team constraints.

“If you didn’t have an individual cap,” Noll said in a telephone interview, “if LeBron James was in a position to sell himself to the highest bidder, his salary would be much higher and you wouldn’t have a small number of top teams with more than half the superstars in the league.”

Noll went on: “It’s a big mistake, and the N.B.A. hasn’t adjusted. So if you have as many as 25 teams that know before the first game is played that they probably won’t even be in the conference finals, doesn’t that make the regular season seem almost meaningless, more of an exhibition than a pathway to a consequential championship?”

As with the N.C.A.A. men’s basketball tournament, an air of pre-eminent powers-that-be inevitability settled upon this N.B.A. postseason once its versions of the midmajors — the Washington Wizards, the Portland Trail Blazers — were dispensed with. But given the freewheeling and democratic nature of the baseball, football and hockey playoffs, is the N.B.A. actually more like women’s college basketball, in which only Connecticut and one or two others often have a meaningful chance of winning a title?

Could the N.B.A. ever produce a champion that barely qualified for the playoffs, as the N.F.L. has done? Or a team like the Rangers, who had the 12th-most points in the N.H.L. this season before evolving into a Stanley Cup finalist over the last month and a half?

In a lockout-tortured and watered-down 1998-99 season, the Knicks made the N.B.A. finals as an eighth-seeded team. Three years ago, Dallas, as a 57-victory third seed in the West, galvanized during the playoffs and ruined Miami’s Big Three debut with a six-game takedown in the finals.

But the N.B.A., historically riding the coattails of the chosen few, has been no incubator of late-season reinvention, no place for a miracle on hardwood. Over the last 30 years, among the four major professional leagues, it has produced by far the fewest franchises to win a championship, eight, while Major League Baseball has had 18 of its 30 teams win the World Series, and the N.F.L. and the N.H.L. have each had 14 teams claim a title.

No question, the dominance of the 1980s Celtics-Lakers rivalry, featuring Larry Bird and Magic Johnson, launched the rocket of Michael Jordan and the Bulls in the 1990s. No doubt the global business of N.B.A. basketball is very good in this era of frantic competition for live television rights that contributed — along with a perceived noble rescue mission — to the pinch-me $2 billion Clippers sale price agreed upon by Steve Ballmer and Rochelle Sterling, if not by her husband.

Maybe the Clippers, with Blake Griffin and Paul, are an ascendant team, more than a second-round tease, and will eventually go where Donald Sterling’s team has never gone. To many fans, the finals provide the season’s lasting memory, and the series between the Heat and the Spurs should be a worthy conclusion, just as it was a year ago.

But beyond that memorable first round, something fell a little flat, and the playoffs felt a little staged. (No, we don’t mean fixed.)

The nature of the sport is what it is, but when an owner’s end is the most shocking postseason development for as long as we can recall, that may be something to be just a little upset about.

Maybe with a new commish they might revisit this issue. On the other hand, the owners are making money, they might feel that they are spending enough as it is. They always seem at odds with the players over their slice of the pie, might not want to give them anymore.

Miami and SAS are the last of the pre CBA teams to remain in tact. The Pacers got tinkered too much by Bird and he ruined the chemistry to some extent. What we are also seeing is Lebron carry the Heat in superstar fashion. Its not spectacular but its 4 finals in a row. SAS has the core who choose to take less money and have been together a very long time.

After those two you have some parity. Pacers and Portland made good showings. Pacers 3 straight trip to the "final four". Small market team.

Whose next? Brooklyn spent but fell short. Wiz? Backcourt got major potential. Cleveland? Got another pick, maybe Bennett reaches some potential and Irving matures? I don't know, but seems like the CBA will take hold. Celtics and Lakers are at least not in the picture.

guaranteed money and too many teams is the problem. this money tree needs some major pruning.