Herb Simon and Bob Kravitz Cry Foul Over NBA's "Super Teams"

As the Indiana Pacers try to find a way into the playoffs under interim head coach Frank Vogel, their owner took to the local media wire to bemoan his team's small market status in the context of today's NBA. In an interview with Bob Kravitz of the Indianapolis Star, Herb Simon intoned that, "We need to even the playing field and do something about the disparity in revenues." Kravitz chimed right in and virtually demanded that the next CBA squash all of the recent player-orchestrated movement and make sure that the smaller-market teams are subsidized by the monsters of the league. In other words, let us all worship at the altar of the vaunted parity.

Look, the Pacers haven't stunk on ice for the last six years because LeBron James took his talents out of Cleveland, and their eventual ouster from the festivities this year was inevitable even before Carmelo Anthony landed in New York. The Pacers brass has pulled bonehead move after bonehead move since the brawl in Detroit and are just starting to show signs of pulling out of the abyss. The Blue and Gold could have contended sooner, of course, if they had unlimited money to spend on free agents, but they could have done the same with smarter moves. And really, if a free agent has the choice between going to Indy or, say Los Angeles, the choice is almost always going to be for sunnier climes, especially when the money is just about the same.

This same, tired argument has been made for decades across all the major sports. In baseball, we're regularly treated to the news that half of the league will soon be complete subsumed by the Yankees and Red Sox because they just can't compete. Having the superpowers in that sport subsidize the weaklings sure has helped the parity in the Major Leagues. I mean, just look at the big strides that the Pittsburgh Pirates have made by using large chunks of the Steinbrenner money. Awesome.

The big markets will always bring more money to their sports, and they will thus always have more to spend than their smaller counterparts. Not coincidentally, these are also the places that most people want to live, often based on geography and climate, among other things. Why do you think that they're the big markets in the first place?

Smaller market teams can compete, but they have to work harder than the richer teams. This may not seem fair, but it really is. Without the big teams, there would be zero interest in these sports, and, thus, no small market teams at all. The Pacers may not be contenders every year, but they should be able to build a program that can turn out consistently strong teams and occasionally make a big run. That's how local support and excitement are built, not with high-rolling handouts.