Patrick Minton is the mastermind over at The NBA Geek. He’s also one of the few Timberwolves fans left in existence. He’s a software developer by day and a number crunching basketball expert by night.
Parity Sucks
Remember the good old days when the league was more fair?
You hear the talk every time any sports league sits down to negotiate a new CBA with its players (or, if you are an MLB fan, every time Bud Selig opens his mouth): the owners want more parity. Small market teams have no chance. Quite a bit of research has actually gone into the various measures that each league has put in place to encourage more parity, but as it happens I’m not going to debate the merits of any of them. Instead, I’d like to posit this: parity sucks. The only people that want parity are perennial losers. And even they won’t like it once they get it.
Editor Arturo's note: I really liked Patrick's piece that follows. So much so that I decided to make and add a nice infograph inspired by it. Let's get back to the regularly scheduled broadcast.
Games with Parity
Parity is fun right?
To see why, let’s take a look at some games with perfect (or near-perfect) parity. There are a few reasons that a game may have perfect parity. Perhaps the optimal strategy is so easy that it becomes impossible for either player to win (Tic Tac Toe, Rock-Paper-Scissors). Or perhaps the game is so dominated by luck that strategy is nearly impossible (the card game War, Monopoly [unless you are using the original rules with an auction], coin flipping). And of course, some combine both — there is certainly strategy to Monopoly, and it’s slightly more complex than Tic Tac Toe, but it isn’t rocket science.
What unifies nearly all games with perfect parity, however, is that most participants become bored with them very quickly. And spectators even more so. Even most people that purport to like playing games like Monopoly usually enjoy it for the social interactions with other players, rather than on the merits of the game itself.
Games without Parity
It takes skill to win.
Contrast this with games that lack parity, where luck is either not a factor or it can be mitigated through a strategy (one that is challenging to master): chess, backgammon, poker, Scrabble, Go, etc. In each of these games, “luck” or “variance” may play short-term roles but over the long run, to win more than one loses, one must simply be better at the game than the opponents. If you never win at chess, you can rant and rave all you want, but the only explanation is that you aren’t good at chess. If you lose consistently at Scrabble, it is probably not always because “my opponent keeps pulling the X, the J, and the Q!”
A Simple Solution
Randomly put LeBron on a new team each season.
If the NBA wanted perfect parity, this would be easy to achieve. Simply put all the players’ names in a hat, and randomly dole out players to all teams at the beginning of the season. The beauty of this is that none of us stat-heads have to sit around and argue about what metric to use to divide the players “fairly” — randomly is, by definition, fair. I guess you can make an argument that coaching determines success as well, so let’s divide them up randomly also. Sure, this would put a lot of stress on the players and coaches, but the NBA owners seem to believe that there are plenty of players willing to play basketball for money, so forcing this kind of agreement down the players’ throats shouldn’t be a problem. Bingo, parity guaranteed!
However, I doubt the owners would want this (except, as mentioned, if you lose perennially). The owners of NBA teams are generally the types of people that have made lots of money by executing smartly in their businesses — by recognizing emerging markets before others saw them, or by out-performing their competitors in an existing market. In short, they strike me as the type of men and women that have earned their money and are proud of it. They wouldn’t enjoy being in a market where they could not outperform the competition, and indeed, they wouldn’t see a business opportunity involved in entering a perfectly efficient marketplace. And fans, I suspect, are the same — they’d much rather watch a game where they believe the outcome is driven by how well their team is put together, and how well their coach manages the team, and not, well, randomly.
-Patrick
Wages of Wins Journal 
A.K.S.
August 12, 2011
Odd post. Parity =/ fairness. Poker, chess, etc. are perfectly fair. Games that are decided by the skill of the players, or the luck of the draw, are fair. Unfairness occurs when games are decided by forces that are neither skill nor luck. For example, no one would call a game “fair” if the referee consistently officiated in a biased manner. This is the reason (among others) that sports leagues are so fearful of a Tim Donaghy-type situation. And, similarly, a game isn’t fair if a team can purchase wins merely by spending money (as opposed to spending money *smartly*).
fricktho
August 12, 2011
Well I think in terms of fairness in a sport’s league it’s about redistributing talent, or trying to level the playing field. In a one-on-one match of chess the game itself is fair, but the skill of a player wins out. In a team event an NBA team playing a high school team is hardly fair, even though the rules and construct of the game are equal on both sides.
I for one couldn’t care less about parity. If I’m a fan of a good team I want my team’s chances to be better than other team’s chances. I want my team to remain good for as long as possible. I don’t want rules in place that break down my team and make it difficult for them to sustain success. If I’m a fan of a bad team should I hope that they get better and reach that pinnacle of having both immediate and sustained success, or do I hope that they put rules in place that bring the rest of the competition down to my team’s level giving my team a better chance at getting ‘lucky’?
The idea that teams purchase wins is shaky at best. Teams have to put themselves in a position to purchase wins in the first place. They have to plan and strategize and evaluate talent. The Miami Heat went for it all. They could have came away with nothing. They weren’t guaranteed to land Lebron with all that cap space, heck, they weren’t even guaranteed to keep Wade. They could have been left with a completely empty roster. Team’s that do spend happen to have drafted well to begin with creating the necessity to have to pay to keep their talent.
Tim Crockett (@TimCrockett)
August 12, 2011
Wow, what a terrible article. Last time I played chess, the pieces you start with at the beginning of the game was not determined by how much money you brought to the table. You can’t pull money out of your wallet to buy better tiles when you play Scrabble. Even in poker – in a tournament setting, everyone starts with the same amount of chips.
Do you play fantasy sports? In my fantasy leagues, everyone has the same amount of money at the beginning of the season (or we just take turns drafting). It’s up to each player to strategize about how best to spend that money. We consider that parity.
There are some good arguments to be made against parity-inducing measures like salary caps, but the author of this post just sets up a ridiculous strawman argument. Of course, taken to a crazy illogical extreme, parity is bad. But that doesn’t mean increasing parity wouldn’t make sports better.
Nicholas Bentley
August 12, 2011
My feeling is not that teams purchase wins (I agree they seem not to), but rather that certain teams get wins for free in virtue of their city or reputation in the NBA pantheon. Players want to go to LA and Boston, and they do, and those teams get free wins as a result. Can you imagine KG going to…Milwaukee? Or Dwayne and Bron deciding to go with the Cavs instead of Miami? I don’t know how to fix that, but I’ll bet it’s a real problem.
Dre
August 12, 2011
Tim,
Wow, what a terrible article. – It’s clear you didn’t enjoy it. Your three paragraph comment verifies this.
Your argument is interesting. In chess both players start with the same tools. I would argue the same is true in basketball. The points are worth the same, the specs of the court are the same, the number of players allowed on the court are the same. The difference is skill in the players. In chess your money argument doesn’t hold up. Players have different skill levels, different amounts of training. If we wanted chess to be fair we’d force all players to have the same level of training and if one player won too much we’d switch them out.
It’s interesting that you state Patrick is attacking a “straw man” argument. Parity is thrown up as a reason for many things. Yet, when we get down to it many people don’t want parity. Until this is accepted as “fact” I wouldn’t say this argument is straw man in the slightest.
Shawn Ryan
August 13, 2011
-Tim C.
“Last time I played chess, the pieces you start with at the beginning of the game was not determined by how much money you brought to the table.”
You did see that the the Knicks were number 8 in Championship percentage right? And they have achieved only 12% of the championship wins that Boston, a market less than 8% New York’s size, have achieved.
At least in the NBA, depth of team coffers seems to be much less important than team prestige.
There are two prestigious teams in the NBA, and those teams seem to have perennial advantages, especially when top 30 players decide to go into free agency.
Patrick Minton (@nbageek)
August 13, 2011
ASK: I don’t think you and I agree on what “fair” means, because I do not consider poker, chess, or basketball fair. To provide an extreme example, would you consider a one-on-one game between yourself and your 5-year old son fair? What about a chess match between a grandmaster and a very smart man who has never played chess?
There’s nothing really fair about these things.
You’re other point, which seems unrelated to the first, actually goes to my argument. Consider how efficient markets work, and assume that the NBA has a market for wins. Let’s assume that it’s possible to purchase wins. There are two possibilities:
1) Everyone knows exactly what factors produce wins, so the market price on those factors will stabilize at a certain price-per-win. No one will be able to buy wins at a discount, because any discount that arose in the market would quickly be adjusted for by all the buyers. This is an efficient market.
2) The factors that determine wins are not universally known (or accepted), so only the “smart” owners know how to purchase wins. The price of a win will fluctuate a lot, since some market players will be able to buy cheap (by knowing the important factors), while others will overpay (by paying attention to the wrong factors). This is an inefficient market. Think of the buyers who understand the factors of wins as the insider traders.
I stipulate that #2 is currently the case. Furthermore, I stipulate that nearly every owner wants #2 to be the case, because if it isn’t, there is, by definition, no way to “beat the market” for wins. And this might be “fair”, but if I were an NBA owner, why do I give a rat’s ass about fairness? I doubt that I would be the type of person that got my wealth by living through life with a philosophy of dividing up the pieces of the pie equally.
Lastly, you must concede that simply moving the salary cap slider up or down isn’t going to magically transform the marketplace from the #2 scenario to the #1 scenario. If you believe that is the case, you are simply buying in to owner’s propaganda; they want to lower the cap for entirely different reasons (keeping total labor costs down == more profit, regardless of whether the market is inefficient or not).
The only owners that want the market to be like the scenario in #1 are the ones who don’t know what factors determine wins, and are AWARE that they do not know this, and are not confident that they can learn this. I submit that that is a very small minority of owners.
Patrick Minton (@nbageek)
August 13, 2011
Tim:
Parity is bad but only in extremes? A little bit of parity is good?
I guess we disagree. And, again with the analogies, I don’t think poker is fair. Even when we all start with the same number of chips. If it were, I would never play. When I play poker, I have an unfair advantage over most people at the table, because I’ve played poker professionally and have a vast reservoir of experience and knowledge to draw on that the other players do not have. This is made even more unfair when the other players drink.
Yes, I know the other players had the same opportunities to learn poker and chose not to. I know it’s their own fault for drinking at the table. This is irrelevant. We aren’t talking about WHY the current game is unfair.
To put it another way, if poker were as easy as tic-tac-toe, every game would be fair, and I’d never play.
Tim Crockett (@TimCrockett)
August 18, 2011
You can define “parity” in a million different ways. There are some ridiculous ways to define it, like saying parity means all the players have to be the same height, or parity means every team gets LeBron for three games a season. Or you could define it the way most people who talk about parity in sports define it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parity_(sports)
When advocates of salary-controls argue for parity, none of them are suggesting that every team should be the same and the ideal outcome would be for every team to finish 41-41. They are saying that every team should start with the same payroll (like pieces on a chessboard, or starting chips in poker), and should build a team according to their skill in drafting and assessing the quality of free agents and trades.
No one I’ve ever read in the basketball blogosphere thinks that we should randomly draw players at the beginning of the season, which is why I call it a strawman argument. Plenty of people think that teams shouldn’t be disadvantaged because their owner can’t pay the luxury tax. So if you think that’s a bad idea, then argue against it, but don’t say “parity is bad” and then define it in a completely different way than everyone else.
Patrick Minton (@nbageek)
October 11, 2011
Tim —
I realize this is a late reply, I am just revisiting this article thanks to an article at http://blogs.thescore.com/tbj/2011/10/11/the-nba-lockout-and-the-irrelevance-of-fairness.
I’ll revisit what I said 2 posts above yours. Not many people (especially the owners) really want a game in which everyone starts with the same dollar amount AND (a very important AND here, please don’t ignore it in a rebuttal) all of the factors of wins are perfectly understood such that the market for basketball talent is perfect (as in case #2 in the post I am referencing).
What would happen in that scenario is that some other arbitrary, non-basketball and non-monetary related factors will determine where players play (if your salary is well-established at a given market price, you’ll likely opt for Los Angeles over Milwaukee because “Holy shit it’s cold there”, or maybe you’ll take your hometown team, or maybe you’ll play with your best friend). And since there are only so many LeBrons, Wades, Howards, and Pauls, there would be a huge number of factors that we will bundle into a lump and call “luck” that would determine if you get a few of them and have a championship team.
At that point, you are basically playing monopoly. Roll the dice and hope you land on Boardwalk. Hope your team plays in sunny weather. Hope the superstar’s best friend plays on your team. But hey, at least you’re in the same boat as James Dolan, despite his deep pockets. Perfect parity. Booooooooooooooorrrring.
Imagine you are one of the owners right now that believes he has insider information on “purchasing wins” (*cough* Peter Holt *cough*). Do you want parity? Oh, hell no.
Again, this is with the stipulation that evaluating basketball talent as it relates to wins is a perfect market scenario. As long as the market remains in-efficient (i.e. most actors in the market don’t really know how to buy wins accurately), parity through payroll equality is just an illusion anyway.