NBA is where the rich get richer, and the poor lose interest

Dominant sporting teams can be what define eras and make sport great but that’s not what is happening in America’s NBA.

DeMarcus Cousins has joined the Golden State Warriors’ team of superstars

I wasn’t around when St George won 11 straight premierships from 1956. Three years later the Boston Celtics started an eight-year streak of NBA titles that has never been repeated.

Since then I have seen three-peating Brisbane Lions and Hawthorn sides. A bloke call ‘MJ’ twice went thrice for the Chicago Bulls either side of a strange little stint in baseball.

And there’s almost no need to point out the State of Origin success of the Maroons since 2006. There’s no end of Queenslanders happy to do that for me.

Dominant sporting teams are what define eras, fill the pages of history books, create Immortals and Hall of Famers. They are often what makes sport great.

But that is not the sort of story developing in American basketball’s rapidly accelerating NBA arms race. As an Aussie band called Cranky shouted to us all in 1995: “Australia, don’t become America.”

It was LeBron James who fired the first shot this week when he decided to quit his hometown team of Cleveland to join the LA Lakers. It was the biggest sports story on the planet but it took about 24 hours for the purple and gold balloons to be popped.

A day later the Lakers’ Californian rivals, the Golden State Warriors, replied: “Hold my beer”.

DeMarcus Cousins — a four-time NBA All Star and Olympic gold medallist — decided to join a Warriors team that has won three of the past four NBA titles, and was already the heavy favourite to add another next year.

That’s not how we like our sport to play out in Australia. Imagine an AFL or NRL competition that starts with everyone pretty much knowing who’ll win in February. Sure, that sounds a lot like Super Rugby but at least there’s five New Zealand teams who share it between themselves.

Salary caps, player drafts and luxury taxes are the weapons sports administrators use to defend themselves against one-sided leagues. Believe it or not, the NBA has all of those things.

The NBA’s salary cap is $US101.869 million ($139m) a season, which makes the AFL’s ($12.45m) and NRL’s ($9.4m) caps look like Manute Bol standing next to Muggsy Bogues. (Google those names together for instant hilarity, if you don’t know them).

The AFL introduced a salary cap in 1987 to help their new clubs Brisbane and West Coast compete. The NRL did likewise three years later. Since then there have been dominant teams — the Broncos, the Lions, the Hawks, the Melbourne Storm — all filled with players developed by those clubs under coaches of extraordinary ability.

Again, that is not what is happening in the NBA. Big names team up with bigger names with a host of little names cast aside in the pursuit of instant glory. Why wait for your rookie to develop when you can buy in a ready-made star who wants to say he played in a championship team before he retires?

Free agency has created great stories that keep the NBA in front of a baseball season struggling for attention. But it has not created much goodwill outside of LA or Oakland.

If you follow the Bulldogs in the NRL you are without hope in 2018. Likewise for Carlton fans. But at least you can lay the blame for their failings at the feet of those clubs, not a super team that can’t be beaten.

The AFL’s father-son rule, Robbie Farah returning to his beloved Wests Tigers, blokes taking less money so they can say they were one-team players — that’s what I like about sport.

Next NBA season, I’ll be cheering for Aussie star Ben Simmons, who, thanks to LeBron’s departure to the NBA Western Conference, gets a saloon passage through to the latter reaches of the playoffs where his Philadelphia 76ers are surely no hope against a team such as Golden State. But don’t be surprised if Simmons is himself lured to LA or Oakland some day. That’s the way things work now Stateside.

Australia, please don’t become America. And certainly never, ever become The Philippines.