I may be a little late getting into it but  a few weeks ago Bill James, the first stats-related pragmatist writer in baseball (and the inspiration for countless other baseball and sportswriters in print and on the Web today), made some interesting observations with respect to the NBA in a baseball-related interview at SheaFaithful.com about the NBA that drew some interest.  In discussing the ramifications of an ostensibly .500 St. Louis Cardinals team winning the World Series in 2006, James stated:  "I'm not a great fan of the Wild Card. But it is tremendously important, for the health of the sport [baseball], that the best team doesn't always win. That's the real problem with the NBA. . .the best team is going to win in the long run, and everybody knows it. The season becomes a long, crushing battle in which, ultimately, you have no chance to escape justice. . .as opposed to college basketball, which is vastly more exciting, simply because you never know who will win, and therefore have to do everything you can do to maximize your chance. In the NBA you don't really HAVE a chance to win, if you're not one of the two or three best teams, and everybody knows this on some level. . .therefore, why play hard, why dive for the ball on the floor, why fight for the rebound, why sacrifice your body to score a point, when you ultimately can't win. No sport can survive if the best team always wins."
  

Henry Abbott over at True Hoop, examined the remarks and while conceding that the NBA has been dynastic for much of its existence did not necessarily buy the premise that the NBA presents an inexorable coronation of the top regular season team each year.  Abbott wrote: "[i]s Bill James really right? Just to make sure, I'd like him to prove it. I'd like him to identify those two or three teams at the beginning of every NBA season for us. Did he really pick Larry Brown's starless 2004 Pistons? Last year's Miami Heat?"

 

I may be a bit untimely on this subject but I thought I'd throw in my two cents.  Before I do so, I think we should acknowledge that James' remarks were somewhat off-the-cuff and it really isn't fair to dissect them to the highest level of scrutiny.  Still, our particular place exists for no other reason but to delve into the minutia of sport, so let's take a closer look at the statement anyway.  In a nutshell, here are James' premises:

 

-The best team (or one of the top three teams) always wins in the NBA

-You need variety and surprise to draw fans and to have a health league/sport

-College basketball is more entertaining than the NBA because it is much more unpredictable

-Because the ultimate outcome is a foregone conclusion, NBA players don't play as hard as they might otherwise or as hard as NCAA players

 

With the proviso that James' clearly wasn't intending to state divine law, let's examine each premise and see if they hold up to scrutiny...

 

-The best team (or one of the top three teams) always wins in the NBA

 

Without really checking, this seems to me to be pretty true.  How many times have one of the top three teams NOT won title?  Putting aside Pythagorean records and all that, let's see take a look:

 

-2005-06 Miami Heat

-2003-04 Detroit Pistons

-1994-95 Houston Rockets

-1977-78 Washington Bullets

-1974-75 Golden State Warriors

-1968-69 Boston Celtics

 

Yup.  In 51 years, a non-top three team has only won six times and even some of these teams weren't a huge surprise.  By contrast, here are all the non-top three MLB teams that have won the World Series since the Wild Card was adopted in 1995:

 

-2006 St. Louis Cardinals

-2003 Florida Marlins

-2001 Arizona Diamondbacks

-2000 New York Yankees

-1997 Florida Marlins

 

A bit more frequent than the NBA to be sure.  This is particularly true since only eight teams make the playoffs in baseball versus 16 teams in the NBA.  Of course, very few of these teams were actually considered big upset stories, with the exception of the 2003 Marlins and the 2006 Cardinals. 

 

-You need variety and surprise to draw fans and to have a health league/sport

 

This is a bit of an open-ended premise.  How do you define variety or surprise?  Clearly the same team shouldn't win every year, yet baseball has a history of repeat contenders and pretenders almost as often as the NBA.  In addition, success is also hard to define.  The conventional wisdom was that the NBA succeeded when it had uberstars and successful major market teams.  Ratings don't mean everything about popularity but they do represent something of a snapshot of fan interest.   In that vein, here's a look at the the NBA Finals and World Series as far back as I could find them:

 

Year	WS Teams	WS Ratings		NBA Teams	Finals Ratings
1968	Detroit/St. Louis	22.8		N/A	N/A
1969	Baltimore/N.Y. Mets	22.4		N/A	N/A
1970	Baltimore/Cincinnati	19.4		N/A	N/A
1971	Baltimore/Pittsburgh	24.2		N/A	N/A
1972	Oakland/Cincinnati	27.5		N/A	N/A
1973	Oakland/N.Y. Mets	30.7		N/A	N/A
1974	Oakland/Los Angeles	25.6		N/A	N/A
1975	Boston/Cincinnati	29.0		N/A	N/A
1976	N.Y. Yankees/Cincinnati	27.7		Phoenix/Boston	11.5
1977	N.Y. Yankees/Los Angeles	29.9		Portland/Philadelphia	12.7
1978	N.Y. Yankees/Los Angeles	32.7		Seattle/Washington	9.9
1979	Baltimore/Pittsburgh	28.0		Seattle/Washington	7.2
1980	Kansas City/Philadelphia	32.8		L.A. Lakers/Philadelphia	8.0
1981	N.Y. Yankees/Los Angeles	30.0		Houston/Boston	6.7
1982	Milwaukee/St. Louis	28.0		L.A. Lakers/Philadelphia	13.0
1983	Baltimore/Philadelphia	23.3		L.A. Lakers/Philadelphia	12.3
1984	Detroit/San Diego	22.9		L.A. Lakers/Boston	12.3
1985	Kansas City/St. Louis	25.3		L.A. Lakers/Boston	13.7
1986	Boston/N.Y. Mets	28.6		Houston/Boston	14.1
1987	Minnesota/St. Louis	24.0		L.A. Lakers/Boston	15.9
1988	Oakland/Los Angeles	23.9		L.A. Lakers/Detroit	15.4
1989	Oakland/San Francisco	16.4		L.A. Lakers/Detroit	15.1
1990	Oakland/Cincinnati	20.8		Portland/Detroit	12.3
1991	Minnesota/Atlanta	24.0		L.A. Lakers/Chicago	15.8
1992	Toronto/Atlanta	20.2		Portland/Chicago	14.2
1993	Toronto/Philadelphia	17.3		Phoenix/Chicago	17.9
1994	N/A	N/A		Houston/New York	12.4
1995	Cleveland/Atlanta	19.5		Houston/Orlando	13.9
1996	N.Y. Yankees/Atlanta	17.4		Seattle/Chicago	16.7
1997	Cleveland/Florida	16.8		Utah/Chicago	16.8
1998	N.Y. Yankees/San Diego	14.1		Utah/Chicago	18.7
1999	N.Y. Yankees/Atlanta	16.0		San Antonio/New York	11.3
2000	N.Y. Yankees/N.Y. Mets	12.4		L.A. Lakers/Indiana	11.6
2001	N.Y. Yankees/Arizona	15.7		L.A. Lakers/Philadelphia	12.1
2002	Anaheim/San Francisco	11.9		L.A. Lakers/New Jersey	10.2
2003	N.Y. Yankees/Florida	13.9		San Antonio/New Jersey	6.5
2004	Boston/St. Louis	15.8		L.A. Lakers/Detroit	11.5
2005	Chicago W./Houston	11.1		San Antonio/Detroit	8.2
2006	Detroit/St. Louis	10.1		Dallas/Miami	8.6

 

Obviously, it's hard to say what you can learn from ratings because so many factors can go into any single rating draw.  Do these championship ratings reflect overall popularity of the sports or just the popularity in the cities that made the title round?  Also, how do we account for the general downward trend toward in network television viewership?  We do know, at the very least, that the variety of teams in the title series hasn't actually helped ratings.  In the NBA, viewers seemed to follow Michael Jordan around, and Magic and Bird to a lesser extent.  In MLB, the Cardinals surprising win brought the worst ratings of of any World Series since 1968.  Again, we don't really know how to weigh cause-and-effect here but we certainly can't call St. Louis' win a boon for baseball's popularity.

 

-College basketball is more entertaining than the NBA because it is much more unpredictable

 

This is a legitimate school of thought but it is entirely subjective in its origin.  I won't run through all the NCAA tournament results but it's fair to say that we have seen a shocker or two more than in the NBA Playoffs.  On the other hand, you don't always get the sense that the best team won reached the Final Four or won the tournament.  There is a balance between the best team always winning and the best rarely winning.  If upsets happen too often, the legitimacy of the title is undermined.

 

I personally enjoy both the NBA Playoffs and the NCAA tournament.  My preference, however, is towards the NBA Playoffs, though it can't match the frenetic nature of a large single-elimination tournament.  This choice is not necessarily based upon the format as much as it is on the fact that the NBA game is played at a much higher level and the game is not dictated as much by the a very close high school/college three-point line.  It's theoretically possible that if the NBA had a 30-team single-elimination tournament that I'd might prefer such a format to the present 16-team, multiple seven-game series format.  Still, my gut does tell me that there is a sense of satisfaction to the results of the NBA Playoffs because the sample size is fair and results are, more often than not, rational.

 

-Because the ultimate outcome is a foregone conclusion, NBA players don't play as hard as they might otherwise or as hard as NCAA players

 

This is the only part of his statement where James loses me.  Talking generally, I can't really think of much evidence that NBA players play less hard than NCAA players.  In watching NBA versus NCAA game you can 'tassume that NCAA players are playing harder because they have a better shot of winning a title.  There are a myriad of factors that motivate players and professionals (money, legacy, sticking in the NBA) and winning title, while important, is only one of them.  Indeed there are plenty of players on the Memphis Grizzlies who need to play well to ensure that they have an NBA career in 2007-08, even if the team's ownership might not mind a swoon for the next couple of weeks.

 

I can understand liking the college atmosphere, which has a certain zealous charm that the NBA game usually does not.  The NBA is a business and its players are playing hard too.  Tim Duncan wasn't any less stolid in college than he is as a pro.  Likewise, Rasheed Wallace was as much a screaming nut at North Carolina as he is as a pro 11 years later. 

 

But let's assume, for the sake of argument, that college players are screaming and diving more than their NBA counterparts.  Does that mean they are playing harder?  James, himself, might admit that perceptions and assumptions about who is playing harder can be illusory.  In his 1982 Baseball Abstract, he addressed this very question when he juxtaposed popular spastic Red Sox third baseman Butch Hobson with the Royals' smooth center fielder Amos Otis:

 

"Nobody will ever convince me that Butch Hobson has gotten out of his talent anything like what he had the potential to be.  Everything about him--his batting style, his defense, his baserunning--is gung ho.  And ill considered.  The only thing he knows about defense is run hard toward the ball and throw it as hard as you can throw it.  That kind of play just does not provide a fertile ground for the development of refined skills.  Two years ago I saw a game in Kansas City in which the fans lustily booed Amos Otis, who had only given them about ten good years, because in one inning he pulled away from two balls that he might have caught....The Kansas City fans will never forgive Amos for being a percentage player, but the Yankees would score only one run in that inning, and Otis would drive in two runs before the night was over and the Royals had won.  And some people will always admire Butch Hobson because, come hell or high water, he always tried for everything.  But I'm not among them.  My favorite player is Amos Otis."

 

Obviously, James' point in the Hobson essay was somewhat different than the one we are discussing.  But there is a common notion about playing hard and its worth to the game that pervades both situations.  In both cases, the knee jerk assumptions miss the big picture about who is actually imparting a more nuanced (and valuable) game.  Again, you can reasonably prefer the college game and the nature of whacky regional rivalries but to assume NBA players aren't playing with as much intensity as college players just doesn't hold water. 

 

Finally, as for the question of what is good for the NBA, the league's growth comes from finding great players and great teams and not from free-for-all formats.  Fans will watch the Magic Johnson Lakers play the Larry Bird Celtics every year or Michael Jordan Bulls go for a title just as they will watch the Yankees or Red Sox every year, provided the teams play good entertaining games.  Sure an occasional upset spices things up but the core of any good playoff is excellent teams.  Any concerns about the inevitable nature of the NBA affecting popularity or integrity of the players efforts are unfounded.