The 2012 NBA championship was obtained by Miami Heat, which was a team of three super stars Captain Wade, LeBron James, and Chris Bosh as well as some experienced and young players. Will next NBA championship be obtained by another NBA team with several super stars like Miami Heat? The NBA player market is a relatively free market. The rich clubs could buy some top players from other teams as long as both players and their original teams agreed exchanges with considerable exchange fees. However, a team like Miami Heat would destory the skill balance among different teams in NBA league. For instance, suppose such a super team could always win the chamipon, then other teams would lose interests to compete with the team. Eventually, NBA would lose more fans in the future, because only fans of the super team would like to watch its team beating other teams easily and there would have no uncertainty in the prediction of NBA champions.

You guys are welcome to continue the discussion of game theory implied in NBA player movement under the main thread.


Player movement in basketballBlame the cap

Jun 23rd 2012, 0:37 by D.R.

THE coronation of King James—as LeBron James (pictured, centre) calls himself on Twitter—was delayed, but in the end not denied. By common consent the world’s best basketball player, Mr James was drafted with the first overall pick by his hometown Cleveland Cavaliers—he grew up in nearby Akron, Ohio—shortly after he graduated from high school in June 2003. He has been a star since his very first game in the National Basketball Association (NBA) as an 18-year-old, and won three Most Valuable Player awards. But just like Michael Jordan before him, who did not win a title until his seventh season in the NBA, the sport’s ultimate achievement long eluded him.

Mr Jordan’s Chicago Bulls struggled early in his career. After three losing seasons, they advanced deep into the playoffs in 1987-88 and 1988-89, but lost in both years to the tough and balanced Detroit Pistons. Mr Jordan could not win a championship on his own. Fortunately for Chicago fans, the club eventually acquired a Robin to his Batman in Scottie Pippen. In 1990-91 Mr Pippen emerged as a star in his own right, and the duo eventually won six titles together.

In contrast, the Cavaliers were never able to offer Mr James much of a supporting cast. They made the finals once in 2006-07, but lost. Rather than wait to see whom the team might eventually pair with him, Mr James took matters into his own hands. When his contract expired in 2010, he reached an agreement with two other free-agent stars, Dwyane Wade (left) and Chris Bosh (right), that the three would all sign with the Miami Heat. He announced his choice by declaring he was “going to take my talents to South Beach” on a special programme broadcast on ESPN called “The Decision”.

Mr James’s handling of his free agency was widely panned, both as a betrayal of his Ohio roots and as an admission that he could not be the leader of a championship team. In an open letter to fans, the Cavaliers’ owner, Dan Gilbert, called Mr James “narcissistic”, “selfish”, “cowardly”, “disloyal” and “heartless”. Mr Gilbert’s sports memorabilia company even reduced the price of some memorabilia featuring Mr James to $17.41, the birth year of Benedict Arnold, a notorious American traitor. But many of the sport’s eminences also criticised Mr James, even though they had no reason to feel personally jilted by him. Mr Jordan himself said there was “no way, with hindsight, I would’ve ever called up Larry [Bird], called up Magic [Johnson] and said, ‘Hey, look, let’s get together and play on one team’…I was trying to beat those guys.”

The Heat instantly became the favourites for the 2010-11 championship, and the bête noire of virtually all basketball fans outside of southern Florida. They cruised through the regular season and the first three rounds of the playoffs. But in the finals they ran into a veteran Dallas Mavericks team, and Mr James all but disappeared. In the series’ final four games he averaged just 15.8 points (compared with 27 during the regular season). He was particularly absent during the final quarters of close contests. In the tight fourth quarters of the third, fourth and fifth games, he made just two of eight shots—neither with the game on the line—while missing one that would have put Miami ahead with five seconds left on the clock. He also committed six turnovers, repeatedly handing the ball over to Dallas in the games’ critical moments. The Mavericks won, four games to two.

Mr James’s vanishing act seemed to satisfy NBA fans’ desire for schadenfreude. This season the Heat were seen as just one of many strong contenders for the title. They finished with the league’s fourth-best record, and needed the full seven games to dispatch a creaky Boston Celtics squad in order to reach the finals. Their rivals in that series, the Oklahoma City Thunder, were a young, dynamic, athletic team with nearly as much star power as the Heat. After the Thunder had, well, thundered past the San Antonio Spurs, winning four straight games against the club with the league’s best record, most analysts thought Oklahoma City had the edge.

This time, however, Mr James had other plans. He dominated in all five contests, averaging 28.6 points per game, and showcased his versatility with impressive averages of 10.2 rebounds and 7.4 assists, earning him the finals’ Most Valuable Player award. After losing the first game, the Heat romped to four straight wins, giving Mr James his first title—at the same an even younger age, 27, that than Mr Jordan was when he secured his first championship. “It’s about damn time”, Mr James proclaimed following the victory.

Mr James still has a long way to go to catch up to Mr Jordan’s six titles, not to mention the 11 attained by Bill Russell, who embraced Mr James after the game. But the oldest of the Heat’s trio of stars, Mr Wade, is only 30, meaning that the three should have plenty of time to fill up their trophy case. Once the euphoria of Miami’s title wears off, the grumbling about its perceived inauthenticity due to the 2010 pact between Mr Bosh, Mr Wade and Mr James is sure to resume.

On the surface, the widespread resentment of the three stars seems inconsistent. Few such complaints were heard in 2007 when the Celtics traded for Kevin Garnett and Ray Allen to play alongside Paul Pierce, and promptly won a championship. The implicit double standard is that team owners can freely determine who plays where at their whim, whereas players who choose their own place of employment are criticised. In a league fraught with tension between mostly white owners and mostly black players, it was inevitable that race would be invoked in the reaction to Mr James’s decision. Responding to Mr Gilbert’s letter attacking Mr James, Jesse Jackson, a former presidential candidate and influential black leader, accused Mr Gilbert of seeing “LeBron as a runaway slave”.

A more charitable interpretation of the outrage over the Heat’s signings is concern over competitive balance. A league in which there is little doubt over who will win—as many fans presumed, incorrectly, about the 2010-11 season once Miami acquired Mr Bosh and Mr James—is a league destined for irrelevance. Moreover, teams have little incentive to invest in savvy management or analytics if the outcome of the league is likely to be determined by where free agents happen to want to play.

Due to word limit of the thread, the whole article was not posted here, but the forwarded article was taken from The Economist at
http://www.economist.com/blogs/gametheory/2012/06/player-movement-basketball