The article mentions competitive parity in the NBA, but that's not true at all. There is no competitive parity now, and has never been. You merely have the same teams passing the title around. In the last 30 years, only eight teams have won a title. Seven teams combined for 29/30 of those. The same teams are winning over and over and over. So examining the last ten years is meaningless when that is what's happening,…
Because the Miami heat and the San Antonio Spurs were such great teams back in the 80's and 90's? From Wikipedia: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_NBA_franchise_post-se... "Of the 30 current NBA franchises, 13 have never won the NBA championship. The oldest such franchise is the Suns (46 seasons), while the Royals/Kings and the Hawks have even longer championship droughts (63 and 56 seasons, respectively). Only…
15 seasons not in the playoffs is bad, though, (14/30)^15 is about 1:100,000.
A model that introduces some correlation between the performance in year X and that in year X+1 without the need of a cartel could easily increase that probability, though.
For example, one could postulate that a team's quality increases with the qualities of its players and with the time they have been playing together ("you cannot buy a winning team")