Big Markets, Big Problems for the NBA?

Free agency kicked off on Wednesday and it was busy as expected. Most of the notable players have resigned with their teams, with LaMarcus Aldridge and Greg Monroe still undecided. There’s also that Lebron James guy that hasn’t signed yet, but everyone expects him to stay in Cleveland.

Then you have Boston, Los Angeles, and New York; the biggest markets in basketball, but none of those teams landed a single star. The Celtics did sign Amir Johnson and Jonas Jerebko to two year deals, which were kind of low risk signings. The Lakers and Knicks have been awfully quiet. LaMarcus Aldridge has pretty much dismissed the Lakers, and the Knicks are still trying to lure him in but they might not be successful. So what’s next for these three teams?

Deandre Jordan and Greg Monroe are a couple players on these teams radar. We have to think that one of these players ends up on one of those teams simply because the NBA needs these three teams to be decent in order to further more revenue. It’s a business of course, and NBA is all about revenue.

The problem is that the Lakers and Knicks are bad at the moment, and each team has a superstar that is ball hungry, so there isn’t anything much appealing about both those places besides the lights and cameras of course. Both teams are ran by pretty confident and arrogant executives that think the city itself will bring the free agents. So far its been crickets and both fan bases are getting impatient.

As for the Celtics, who made the playoffs last year, they are a relatively young team and still have much to prove. For someone to sign with them, they have to be patient and let the dominoes fall into place. With a good amount of cap space and tons of draft picks for the next couple of years, they can be a team to be reckoned with in the near future, but who has time for that? Most players want to get paid, but eventually they want to win and most want to win now. All these teams have a ways to go so it will be interesting to see what happens within the next few days.

Are we seeing the end of big market teams taking over the free agency landscape? By the events on Wednesday, it looks like it. There’s still plenty of time with a lot of good players left, but these teams need to start making some moves or their fan bases will let them hear about it.