Column: An uneven playing field

Many people talk about whether there is a competitive balance in Major League Baseball, and whether a salary cap is needed to prevent the New York Yankees from dwarfing everyone else’s payroll and being the World Series favorite virtually every year.

I’m not qualified to make a comprehensive argument, so how about one that isn’t comprehensive? Instead, let’s remember that while MLB has no salary cap, the NBA does.

What would today’s NBA look like if it had no salary cap and a less-strict luxury tax?

First of all, there would be much greater variance in salaries. The average team payroll in the NBA this year is around $71 million, with a standard deviation of about $9.5 million. Only one team — the Los Angeles Lakers — has a payroll more than two standard deviations away from the mean.

MLB payrolls for 2009, on the other hand, averaged $88 million with an incredible standard deviation of $33.2 million — more than three-and-a-half times the NBA standard deviation.

Even without the Yankees, the standard deviation is still $25.9 million.

Just for fun, let’s pretend that the NBA has a standard deviation on the same order as MLB (since $71 million is about three-quarters of $88 million, we’ll pretend that the standard deviation of NBA salaries is three-quarters of $33.2 million, or about $25 million).

Using the same mean and same number of standard deviations away gives us a very rough estimate of what types of payrolls we’d be looking at.

So what’s the damage? The Lakers, Dallas Mavericks, Boston Celtics, New York Knicks and Cleveland Cavaliers all get an extra $20 million to work with, and we could really give the Lakers and Knicks even more for having huge markets. The payrolls for the Portland Trail Blazers, Memphis Grizzlies and Oklahoma City Thunder become even lower, and other small-market teams (Indiana, Minnesota, Milwaukee, etc.) will have an incredibly difficult time staying competitive.

The summer of 2010 becomes the summer of ridiculous overpaying. The salary structure gets blown up (otherwise the Knicks, with all their expiring contracts, could conceivably afford LeBron James, Dwyane Wade, and Chris Bosh — and still have money to spare).

The Knicks offer James in the range of $35 million to $40 million a year, and the Lakers probably match just because they can.

Devoid of the cap structure that allows Cleveland to offer an objectively better deal to LeBron than any other team can, the Cavs are unable to keep pace with the offers, and their only chance to keep their signature star is to hope that he’s willing to play for several million dollars less.

Get the best of the ‘Prince’ delivered straight to your inbox. Subscribe now »

How’s that 2010 title race looking? Suppose that the Knicks now have a roster of Dwyane Wade, LeBron James, Chris Bosh and nine random dudes chilling in Times Square (if this seems farfetched, think about Alex Rodriguez, Derek Jeter, Mark Teixeira, CC Sabathia and the other top free agents who go to the Yankees year after year).

And, suppose that the Lakers have traded for Chris Paul because: The New Orleans Hornets wouldn’t be able to afford him under the new system; the Lakers can take on all the Hornets’ bad contracts and offer them higher salaries; and it’s my column and I said so.

Now, doesn’t that sound like a Knicks-Lakers finals, barring unforeseen catastrophe or a ridiculously random playoff run?

And it gets worse. Remember, the Yankees, New York Mets and Boston Red Sox have first crack at top free agents every year, and recall the premise of this column that I’m forcing you to go along with.

In 2011, guess who the Lakers and Knicks can offer the most money to: Carmelo Anthony, the suddenly good Marc Gasol and Kevin Durant.

As exciting as this young Thunder team is, it would take a lot of excitement and victories over stacked Lakers teams to get Durant to turn down an extra $10 million.

And it happens again and again, with the top few teams having the most realistic shots at the top few free agents every single year.

Does this sound fun? It doesn’t to me. No matter how many teams theoretically have a shot at the playoffs, a world in which the Yankees have a payroll above $200 million (that could easily go higher) and the San Diego Padres and Florida Marlins spend a fifth of that can’t possibly be considered reasonable, especially when viable options exist.

If the MLB standard deviation were scaled back toward the NBA one, and the Yankees’ payroll scaled back to be comparable to the Lakers’, payrolls would run from about $65 million to $120 million rather than $36 million to $200 million. Now that’s a little better competitive balance.