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Over the last four years, the Golden State Warriors have won three rings. And this season, it seems that they are headed for another NBA Finals appearance, and possibly another championship. Critics have pointed out the seeming disruption of balance brought on by the Warriors’ dominance. But NBA commissioner Adam Silver believes that this is not a bad thing.
Per Mark Medina of the Mercury News, Silver said:
“I don’t think it’s necessarily per se bad that the Warriors are so dominant. I’m not trying to create some sort of forced parity. What we’re really focusing on is parity of opportunity.”
In fact, this is not the first time that Silver used the phrase “parity of opportunity.” Two years ago, per Michael Long of Sports Pro, Silver explained what parity means to the game.
“The word ‘parity’ – it’s interesting. I’ve thought a lot about it lately…rather than parity being our goal, it should be equality of opportunity.
By definition if there were such thing as true parity, and every team had the same chance of winning every year, statistically you would win once out of 30 years. That would be an odd result as well.
I think what fans around the league, what the communities want, is teams to compete.”
He also pointed out that players are attracted to teams with a culture of winning:
“Players are attracted to strong cultures and players are attracted to situations where they see an opportunity to win. And [they] also recognise that all the economic benefits follow from that as well, rather than the economic benefits coming from a particular market or the fact that a market might be larger than another one.”