It is no question today whether or not the sport of basketball is one of the most dominant forces surrounding not only our entertainment but our society as a whole. With our continually shortening attention spans, many fans have decided that America’s favorite pastime is ironically, not worth the time. With the number of concussions, broken bones, and muscle tears that the sport of football entails, parents are beginning to restrict their children from playing the sport. But basketball has encompassed our minds, our culture, and ultimately, what we think is “cool”. However, despite the sheer amount of fans professional basketball has, due to the actions of the NBA, the trajectory of fanship and the league itself is on the downhill.
Compared to other sports, the NBA possesses an unusually large salary cap, a number that represents the amount of money each organization can pay its team in salary. This large number means that teams can spend money on grabbing 2,3 or even 4 superstars for their team. This means, if superstars want to team up, they will not have to take that much of a pay cut to do so.
However, this would not be as much of an issue, if the NBA was not entirely a superstar league. Basketball legends such as Lebron James and Michael Jordan have shown that even just one extremely talented player can take over the league, making playoff finals over and over again. Any team in the eastern conference will attest to the fact that one player can make the difference between being a legitimate team or not. This means that the ability of the superstars to congregate within the same teams suddenly becomes extremely relevant.
With players all of sudden being willing to team up for the sake of grabbing a ring, “superteams” like the Golden State Warriors, can dominate the league for years and years. And for fans of teams that all of a sudden see their homegrown superstars leaving for bigger and better things, they might often find themselves asking, “What’s the point?”
