Parity in the NBA

Written by: Aditya Joshi

​Parity in NBA terms is when every single team in the league has the talent to compete for a championship. For most people this makes the game more fun, but for others it’s different. Currently, there is mostly parity in the NBA, so any team in the league can win on any given night. According to Action Sports, NBA basketball is the most predictable sport. A good measure of parity is preseason odds and in preseason odds the average eventual team that wins the championship has a +320, to put that into perspective the teams with the worst odds have a +50000 odds, and the best teams have a +230 odds. But without statistics and odds, the bottom line is parity.

The least parity that the NBA ever had was easily the 2016-2019 Golden State Warriors. It was to the point that their entire starting five was in serious all star talks every season. For the NBA as a business, this was not a good thing because viewership went down because fans did not want to see one team dominate as much as the Warriors did. Records were broken and so many amazing things were happening in-game but nobody really cared, fans were hating on the team. The odds of the warriors -195 odds to win the championship which was a record in itself. The Warriors were a historically non-parity team, but the NBA without parity is the opposite.

When parity is alive in the NBA, you never know what team will win a game. Suddenly a last seed team can have a nail-biting game with a top 5 team in the league. The lowest odds that an eventual championship was the Toronto Raptors in 2019. They had at +5500 in championships and with everything right happening in favor of their team, they won with Kawhi Leonard winning the championship MVP trophy. This was the start of what the parity in the NBA we still see today.

As a business, not having parity in the league is a bad thing, like when the Golden State Warriors were dominating the entire league and easily made it to the final four years straight, the viewership started to go down drastically through the years. For the past two years the views have bounced back with the NBA finals matchups not being one sided on paper. In 2022, the NBA is worth about 75 Billion dollars with all of the teams values combined. They are a business, and without parity is bad for business because of the obvious lack of competition for the team causing the non-parity. With it, every fan, team, and player can feel that they are still going out on the court with the will to win against whatever team they are playing regardless of their seed/record (wins and losses).

Most of the players, teams, and fans not having parity is a bad thing. Fans normally like seeing all teams (including their favorite team) having a chance to compete. Teams want to never lose hope so they always would always want parity. Players are the same way because they want their teams to never give up.Overall I think parity is always going to be a good thing for the NBA as a business but also as a player association.