I hear you - but that's not a
sustainable business model for
the league as a whole.
I don't think the league is EVER going to get people to come out for every game. There will always be cherry-picking for prime teams and games. While it would be nice to have everyone equally excited about every game I suspect that is unrealistic in today's market.
It's obvious, btw, that the easiest revenue sharing solution is to split (at some ratio, maybe 70/30 or 60/40) home and road team revenues for every game rather than having the home team take the gate receipts in total (which I believe is the system the NYT described). Suddenly every team is financially rewarded even if they are in a weaker market for putting together a good team that draws fans in on the road. Everyone gets a piece of sweet big market revenues when they play there. Playoff games are great for everyone etc etc.
You have the Miami games. But currently you also have the Charlotte VS Detroit games. The Golden States VS Minnesota games. The Kings VS Bucks games. I'd rather see an NBA that virtually all teams can compete for the Championships, rather than where only 5 teams can compete.
To be fair here one of the teams you just mention DID win a championship recently. Three others have been conference finalists in the last 10 years. Charlotte is just horribly run and would continue to be so under any cap system. Ditto Golden State. We're really not as far away from competitive balance as everyone seems to believe in these conversations. I think you want to create a cap system that allows home-grown teams (like SA, OKC, and the old Jazz teams) to stay together. It is possible that creating teams on the fly is ok too if they are good for league revenues. Some minor fixes (such as eliminating the ability to trade bird rights) might go a long way here.
OK, but we want to create a cap model that makes Dallas, LA, Miami, Boston, etc, etc impossible also.
I don't know that this is true.
In that Spurs model - they'd have to decide whether Parker & Ginobili are really All Stars caliber players. They may decide that Ginobili is no longer an All Star player for them. In which case they may let him walk & try to train and/or draft other players instead.
I think it will make teams look at their roster much more carefully and not just throw money around - which to me is a good thing. It puts more pressure on training & drafting which are skills that I'd be more comfortable for teams to compete on.
Those are the exact ways that the Spurs were built, but they're still punished by the same model.