State of the NBA: A New Age

The National Basketball Association has been one of the most famous professional sports leagues in the United States. Before the 21st century players like Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, David Robinson, John Stockton, Reggie Miller, and Isiah Thomas stayed on one team their whole careers. With today's basketball its all about three things in free agency/trades-money, chance to win a championship, and where they want to live the rest of their lives. The extremely sad thing about all of this is that the loyalty a player has to a town has certainly decreased since the times of Bird, Magic, and Stockton. With this being the case, since around the year 2005 we are seeing teams build and become "mega teams". The biggest example of a "mega team" is the Miami Heat. The Heat signed Lebron James and Chris Bosh in the 2010 NBA free agency. This set up a "big three". But Miami wasn't the first "big three", in 2007 the Boston Celtics acquired Ray Allen and Kevin Garnett adding to Paul Pierce making a team of three all-star players. Ever since then teams have now been forming "mega teams". Usually this wouldn't be a problem, but I've noticed all of these mega teams are in big market and nice cities. For example the cities such as Miami, Boston, Brooklyn, New York, and Los Angeles have acquired big name players thru trade or free agency. With "mega teams" up and coming the level of competition will decrease and you will see small market teams such as Charlotte, Cleveland, New Orleans, Orlando, Sacramento, etc. start to shrink. But someone might say that the small market teams can rebuild with the high draft picks they would receive. That is true but once their first round pick's first contract with the team that drafted him is up and the team is not winning he will most likely want to leave the city because the things that are most important are winning a championship and the city the would want to live in. This most likely would be a cycle and the same teams will struggle and the same big market giants will flourish. Over the past years the NBA has been becoming too predictable. Now I feel like the only 4-7 games that are going to be interesting next season are the 2013 NBA Finals between the Heat and Thunder. That's why I believe the NBA season in around five years will be a joke.