All-$tar Games

In honor of Tuesday night's MLB All-Star game, which has the exciting distinction of not being the Pro Bowl, I'm thinking about what this NBA offseason means for the League's relationship to those two inferior sports.

We all know that the NFL is supposedly the ultimate model of sports parity, with its rigid salary cap and careful scheduling. The MLB, on the other hand, is the place where owners can build dynasties by picking up the top free agents and adding them to already strong lineups, leaving teams like the Orioles to be all but forgotten.

For years, the NBA has existed as some sort of middle ground. There are salary caps that, though not as strict as the NFL's, prevent teams from building Yankees-like star magnets. But with powerful GMs and a long season that gives fewer opportunities for upset playoff teams, it has also been given to the kinds of dynasties that we think of when we think about baseball.

After this summer, we may need an entirely new category for the kind of polarity we will see in the NBA. What the Heat--as well as the Lakers, Celtics, Magic, and several other teams--have done is figure out how to overload on talent while staying within the salary cap. These teams have done so by promising incoming players the chance to win, thereby cementing their reputations and increasing their future market value. This is all well and good, I suppose. A combination of free market gluttony and individual sacrifice. Fine.

But what the hell is it all going to look like?



If I had to guess, I'd say that, at least for the next five years, we're going to see a league without much of a middle. I'm expecting four to five teams in each conference to be very, very good, with the rest of the playoffs made up of Thunderesque young squads who are doing everything right managerially and have a very legitimate shot at beating whoever they play. There will be a few teams hovering around .500, and then a bunch more who are quite bad.

If this all sounds a bit like the MLB, it should. The way that free agency changed this year means that some teams will end up in very long rebuilding stages, spurred on by the fact that they were almost wholly ignored by big names and couldn't pull their shit together in the draft or throughout the season. You know, the Orioles.

But the NFL game will also still have a presence in the fact that, within the top and middle-top tiers, there will be a whole lot of postseason shakeups and, I believe, a lot of variety in year-to-year champions. This may all sound crazy, based on what the Heat and Lakers have managed to do, but don't forget: the Spurs, Celtics, Mavericks, Thunder, Magic, Knicks, Bulls and several other teams have also had very good offseasons in their own ways. And things are only going to get more interesting for those teams in the next few seasons, with a big free agency market next year and some wily moves that could potentially land a few of them lottery picks.

I think this will all be a hell of a lot of fun, and it will reaffirm the fact that this is the most entertaining sport in the whole darn world.