The Myth of the Small Market NBA Team’s Struggle
What is a small market anyway?
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By Alex Lange (@alexlange3)
There remains a persistent, insidious complaint among sports fans that “small market teams just can’t compete” in the NBA. This complaint is a myth. While it is true that NBA championship success has been overwhelmingly concentrated among just a few teams, this myth that the “small market” team can’t compete is an invented excuse for mediocrity. Small market teams “fail” due to lack of vision by cheapskate owners and poor management groups. They also sometimes have very successful seasons but don’t win championships sometimes because it’s frankly just hard to do that unless you have one of the 10 best players in NBA history. This should not be construed as a failure, but in the RINGZ era it often gets chalked up that way.
You can find opinions from the breadth of the NBA media world opining and complaining about this structural problem that make it impossible for “small market teams.” John Hollinger, Chris Burkhardt, The Indianapolis Star, Matt Moore aka Hardwood Paroxysm have recently provided just a selection of the discourse. If you are on NBA twitter you are well aware of this phenomenon and it is a common refrain whenever a team loses to the eventual champion: “Small market teams just don’t have a chance in this league.”
First, we need to consider what the hell people are referring to when they complain about the misfortunes of a “small market team.” No one can seem to figure out what precisely a small market is. A small market team, in the discourse, seems to be a team from a mid-sized American city that hasn’t won a championship. It seems more like the lack of championship might be the result of suboptimal organizational decision-making rather than anything to do with market size? But that line of thinking would require acknowledging failure, which is hard. Far easier to blame the system!
Apparently, Detroit, Cleveland and San Antonio, teams that have won one or multiple titles in the last 20 years, don’t count as small markets? This is quite interesting to me because they are the 14th, 19th, and 31st respectively in major pro sports market sizes according to Nielsen’s ranking of market sizes.
For that matter, why exactly is Miami considered a large market? They have the 16th largest media market among NBA cities, by definition in the bottom half of the league. Is it because of the glitz and glamor of “South Beach?”
South Beach is not even technically in the city of Miami by the way, it’s in a separate city called Miami Beach which is across a body of water from Miami. Seriously, here’s a map of Miami and South Beach.
While it may seem trivial to everyone outside of Miami, the fact that people think all of Miami is South Beach is indicative of the issue with this small market discourse. I think a large part of the problem here is that no one has ever been to half of the places they have opinions about, certainly not for long enough to have educated opinions about them. How many of you know that Columbus, Ohio is a larger city than Boston, Massachusetts? It’s not intuitive, but it’s true. Basic knowledge about our country could help people so much and I urge people just to try learn basic facts before deciding that some monolithic group of powerful organizations are somehow so much more advantaged than they really are.
Let’s look at some teams at the top in market size. The New York Knicks and Brooklyn Nets (1st), Chicago Bulls (3rd), Washington Wizards (7th), or Atlanta Hawks (10th) don’t seem to have drawn any particular advantage in team building over the last 20 years from their comparatively large market size. Admittedly the Nets have recently lured a variety of free agents and aging stars via trade after moving to Brooklyn but so far that has yielded exactly one playoff series victory. Meanwhile the Wizards best free agent signing ever is probably… Gilbert Arenas? Remember when we all pretended for years that the Wizards had a shot at Kevin Durant? Simpler times.
The Knicks have every market-size based advantage you could theoretically create and the best free agent they have signed in my lifetime was a 28 year old Amar’e Stoudemire whose knees were held together with marshmallows and toothpicks to the point that they couldn’t even get insurance on his contract. Golden State (6th) was the laughingstock of the NBA for all periods in which they didn’t have either Rick Barry or Stephen Curry on their team, just an insignificant 40 years of their history. (Yes, this is Run TMC and We Believe erasure but those teams lost in the second round of the playoffs. I doubt you got as concerned about me not mentioning the success of the Joe Johnson-era Hawks). The Los Angeles Clippers (2nd) have never won anything of note and have never even made it to the Western Conference Finals. The Lakers were bad from the last days of Kobe up until they could convince Lebron James that he could come build his own team in LA.
Most people would take onus with my Lebron James point. They would argue that Lebron only went to the Lakers because they are the team in Los Angeles and this is why their team from a small market can’t compete. Perhaps they missed the last decade where Lebron brought a team from Cleveland to the finals 4 straight times. Or maybe they missed the 4 years before that when Lebron teamed up with two other stars in the 16th largest media market under an incredibly respected organization led by Pat Riley and brought them to 4 finals and 2 championships. (Miami’s opponents in those finals were from Dallas, Oklahoma City, and San Antonio by the way. Not exactly a marketing executive’s dream.)
Oh, and that Miami organization is well run enough to be back in the Finals this year! After making a move for a coveted free agent, Jimmy Butler, who was interested in them precisely because of their organizational culture and experience. Maybe Jimmy also likes the beach, I don’t know, but I know why he said he wanted to go to Miami.
Did the Lakers benefit from their history and status as being “The Lakers” in their pitch meeting with Lebron? Almost definitely. They also drafted well enough to be able to trade their assets (Brandon Ingram, Lonzo Ball, and Josh Hart) for Anthony Davis. They also hired Magic Johnson specifically to make a pitch to Lebron and then empowered Lebron and his agency to consolidate precisely the team he wanted in LA. Other front offices may not have gotten the opportunity to make those choices but the Lakers also had to make conscious good choices to enable assembling the team that they have right now. There are plenty of owners who would not be willing to cede that level of control of their franchise, the Lakers understood it as the price of getting Lebron.
By the way, I bet you breezed right by Dallas two paragraphs ago as a small market team that has won a title. Well that’s a problem because Dallas is the 7th largest market in the country. This has netted them exactly one title due primarily to their homegrown superstar Dirk Nowitzki. Their best free agent signing in the last 20 years is either DeAndre Jordan (who backed out) or… Harrison Barnes? Oh wait Deandre Jordan the second time… that worked out great! Despite this consistent free agency failure, the Mavericks capitalized in the draft when teams inexplicably wanted players instead of Luka Doncic and traded for a talented disgruntled star in Kristaps Porzingis from the NBA’s largest market.
Whether you are in a small or large market doesn’t correlate particularly well to success in the NBA. The Portland Trailblazers have the longest consecutive playoff appearances streak in NBA history. The San Antonio Spurs have been the model for how a team should try to structure their franchise for the last 20-25 years while also winning 5 championships. The Denver Nuggets just made it to the Western Conference finals (over a team from LA) with a collection of drafted players locked up under contract for the long term. The Milwaukee Bucks were the number 1 team in the NBA before they got completely run out the building by the Miami Heat while not adapting their game-plan in the slightest.
While we’re here, Bucks ownership, you know you are allowed to spend over the salary cap right? You could even use some of the money you saved from your publicly funded arena to re-sign Malcolm Brogdon who would probably have helped you against the Heat. I just saw him play really well against them in the first round. But nope. Couldn’t keep him around though because the billionaires who own the team can’t afford to pay the luxury tax except for the “right deal.” Also Denver, you can spend into the tax too. The Kroenke’s have a lot of money from both the Los Angeles Rams and Arsenal coming in. Spending isn’t exactly their M.O. however…. (RIP Gunnersaurus). Now how much money should you re-sign Mason Plumlee for this offseason?
Memphis (51st in market size among cities with major pro sports teams), Oklahoma City (43rd), and the Utah Jazz (30th) have all been deep in the playoffs nearly every year over the last decade. Its hard for me to see how market size prevented them from getting over the top? Maybe it was because their market is small or maybe it is because OKC made the bad mistake of trading James Harden. Maybe they messed up by thinking that Kendrick Perkins was the missing piece. Maybe John Hollinger during his time in the Memphis front office didn’t realize that Jeff Green just isn’t the guy you trade first round picks for. Maybe Utah shouldn’t have low-balled Gordon Hayward’s contract extension and made him frustrated enough that he left in free-agency.
Despite those mistakes, all of these teams have made it back to the playoffs after only a short period of aggressive rebuild. This is because they are generally well-run and know how to build a team. Meanwhile, the Knicks are currently busy trying to figure out how to trade for players on the OKC roster and they will surely have plenty of room for them in their large market.
The NBA will always be defined by its very best stars. You are most likely to win a title by having an absolute all-time great player at the top of their game. The Bulls are relevant organization only because of Michael Jordan, the Cavaliers only because of Lebron James, the Warriors only because of Steph Curry. Every team can’t have those transcendent players and remember, Portland and Minnesota explicitly passed on drafting two of those three players, the other went to a small market. Sometimes those players will want to play in large cities. Sometimes they will want to play in small cities. Where they will almost always want to play is in a well run franchise that supports their competitive efforts no matter the size of the market. Don’t blame the Lakers for existing in Los Angeles, ask what your team could have done to field a better team.
I’ll wrap up by pointing out that Washington and Atlanta have larger media markets than Boston. Therefore, I look forward to them luring away Jaylen Brown and Jayson Tatum because as we all know, larger media markets always succeed in doing that to the smaller ones. Small markets like Boston with their 17 titles just can’t be expected to compete in today’s NBA.
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