Gary Sutton

They were, year in and year out, one of the top teams in the league, and they won several titles under him.

So again, there are exceptions to every rule.

Those are the exceptions here, but I'll go back to what I said a moment ago.

Teams that do spend more on player salaries do win more.

Okay, so overall there's a trend.

Oh, absolutely.

And I think it's becoming even more pronounced in more recent years than it was maybe 10 years ago.

Yeah, okay, so fair question.

So the NBA instituted a salary cap just before the 84-85 season.

So it's been in play for, what, 40 years now, right?

And so the league had to go to the Players Association to get their agreement to put a cap on players' salaries.

And the argument that the league made back then was, yeah, we're going to suppress wages to some extent, of course, but we think that by capping salaries, it will produce parity across the league, and that's better for the long-term benefit of the league.

So take a hit here, but longer term, the league will be much better off.

And so, of course, the Players Association agreed to that.

The problem is that that's complete bullshit.

So when you look at the data, there really wasn't a parity problem to begin with.

So in my first book, I demonstrate different ways to go about measuring dispersion in data.

So think of it, Sean, think of a data set as the number of regular season wins for each NBA team by season.

Got it.

And if you have a lot of teams that are, let's say, right around 41 wins, right, so they're at 500 or just above or below 500, you have very low variance in your data, and that equates to high parity, at least from an intra-season parity perspective.