In sports, parity is participating teams having roughly equivalent levels of talent. In such a league, the "best" team is not significantly better than the "worst" team. This leads to more competitive contests in which the winner cannot be easily predicted. The opposite condition, which could be considered "disparity" between teams, is a condition in which the elite teams are so much more talented that the lesser teams are hopelessly outmatched.
Different major governing organizations attempt to achieve financial and/or competitive parity in different ways. For example, the National Football League (NFL) in the US has established the shared revenue plan in which all teams equally benefit from television revenue and sales of NFL franchised goods. All major leagues of North America use a draft system to ensure that the best prospects are allocated to the teams that are the most in need of them.
In much of the world outside North America, parity is enforced through promotion and relegation: the weakest teams in a league are forcibly expelled from the league and switch places with the best teams in a lower league. An example of this is the B.League in Japan, which has two divisions, B1 and B2. [1]
Many[ who? ] consider the NFL to be the most "fair" or competitive league, with many different teams having a chance to win each year. In the NFL, complete parity would be a state in which on any given game, any given team can win any given game. The appearance of parity in the NFL over the course of the entire season may be something of an illusion; the New England Patriots, in particular, were noted for a prolonged dynasty in the 21st century under starting quarterback Tom Brady and head coach Bill Belichick, which league policies failed to break up, while their division rivals, the Buffalo Bills, simultaneously suffered through a 17-season playoff drought but may also have been harmed by Buffalo's small market, high taxes, and poor reputation as a destination city. A franchise may struggle because of ineptitude in talent evaluation, coaching, player development, organizational structure, or overall team and player operations. A league with parity would, in theory, allow such struggling teams to identify and fix those issues and ensure that a dynasty cannot take hold.
Expansion teams are among the most difficult to bring to parity. Especially in sports for which team chemistry is an important factor in success, expansion team players, who consist mostly of cast-offs from other teams, must learn to work as a team before success happens, a process that can take years. Other times, expansion teams trade their best players to stronger teams while getting weaker players in return, as is the case with the Terrafirma Dyip and the Blackwater Bossing in the PBA. [2] Two notable exceptions were the Baltimore Stallions, which reached the Grey Cup in both their seasons in the Canadian Football League and won in their latter appearance, and the Vegas Golden Knights, which reached the Stanley Cup Finals in their inaugural season in the National Hockey League.
Examples of disparity in club football include the Portuguese Liga, the top-flight professional football (soccer) league in Portugal, in which three clubs have accounted for 75 of the 77 championships in league history, and the Scottish Premiership, where either Rangers F.C. and Celtic F.C. (described as the Old Firm) have won the championship for forty straight seasons, with either team taking the Premiership 86% of the time since its first season; only nineteen years have been won by another team, with Celtic dominating even in several recent seasons where Rangers were out of the league and relegated due to financial issues.
Salary cap limits set a maximum amount of money that may be spent on athletes' contracts. These limits exist to different extents in several other leagues as well. For example, Major League Baseball (MLB) in the U.S. does not have a cap but charges a luxury tax beyond a certain level.
Another example of disparity would be demonstrated by the NBA from the 2014–15 NBA season to the 2017–18 NBA season in which the Golden State Warriors and the Cleveland Cavaliers were the only franchises to reach the NBA Finals during that specific time span and, during the 2017 NBA Finals and the 2018 NBA Finals, the Warriors won 8 out of the possible 9 finals games.
Prolonged disparity can be severely detrimental to a sports league. The All-America Football Conference collapsed in part because one of its teams, the Cleveland Browns, dominated the league throughout its four-year existence.
The National Basketball Association (NBA) is a professional basketball league in North America composed of 30 teams. It is one of the major professional sports leagues in the United States and Canada and is considered the premier professional basketball league in the world.
In team sports, a most valuable player award is an honor typically bestowed upon an individual whose individual performance is the greatest in an entire league, for a particular competition, or on a specific team. The purpose of the award is to recognize the contribution of the individual's efforts amongst a group effort, and to highlight the excellence, exemplariness, and/or outstandingness of a player's performance amidst the performance of their peers in question.
In sports, a division is a group of teams who compete against each other for a championship.
The Philippine Basketball Association (PBA) is a men's professional basketball league in the Philippines composed of twelve company-branded franchised teams. Founded in 1975, it is the first professional basketball league in Asia and is the second-oldest continuously operating professional basketball league in the world after North America's NBA.
In professional sports, a salary cap is an agreement or rule that places a limit on the amount of money that a team can spend on players' salaries. It exists as a per-player limit or a total limit for the team's roster, or both. Several sports leagues have implemented salary caps, using them to keep overall costs down, and also to maintain a competitive balance by restricting richer clubs from entrenching dominance by signing many more top players than their rivals. Salary caps can be a major issue in negotiations between league management and players' unions because they limit players' and teams' ability to negotiate higher salaries even if a team is operating at significant profits, and have been the focal point of several strikes by players and lockouts by owners and administrators.
A draft is a process used in some countries and sports to allocate certain players to teams. In a draft, teams take turns selecting from a pool of eligible players. When a team selects a player, the team receives exclusive rights to sign that player to a contract, and no other team in the league may sign the player. The process is similar to round-robin item allocation.
An expansion draft, in professional sports, occurs when a sports league decides to create one or more new expansion teams or franchises. This occurs mainly in North American sports and closed leagues. One of the ways of stocking the new team or teams is an expansion draft. Although how each league conducts them varies, and they vary from occasion to occasion, the system is usually something similar to the following:
An exhibition game is a sporting event whose prize money and impact on the player's or the team's rankings is either zero or otherwise greatly reduced. Exhibition games often serve as "warm-up matches", particularly in many team sports where these games help coaches and managers select and condition players, before the competitive matches of a league season or tournament. If the players usually play in different teams in other leagues, exhibition games offer an opportunity for the players to learn to work with each other. The games can be held between separate teams or between parts of the same team.
An expansion team is a new team in a sports league, usually from a city that has not hosted a team in that league before, formed with the intention of satisfying the demand for a local team from a population in a new area. Sporting leagues also hope that the expansion of their competition will grow the popularity of the sport generally. The term is most commonly used in reference to the North American major professional sports leagues but is applied to sports leagues in other countries with a closed franchise system of league membership. The term refers to the expansion of the sport into new areas. The addition of an expansion team sometimes results in the payment of an expansion fee to the league by the new team and an expansion draft to populate the new roster.
An athletic conference is a collection of sports teams which play competitively against each other in a sports league. In many cases conferences are subdivided into smaller divisions, with the best teams competing at successively higher levels. Conferences often, but not always, include teams from a common geographic region.
The 1988–89 NBA season was the 43rd season of the National Basketball Association. The season ended with the Detroit Pistons winning the NBA Championship, sweeping the Los Angeles Lakers. This was the first season of the Miami Heat and Charlotte Hornets.
A wild card is a tournament or playoff berth awarded to a team or individual that does not directly qualify. In some events, wildcards are chosen freely by the organizers. Other events have fixed rules. Some North American professional sports leagues compare the records of teams which did not qualify directly by winning a division or conference.
Professional sports leagues are organized in numerous ways. The two most significant types are one that developed in Europe, characterized by a tiered structure using promotion and relegation in order to determine participation in a hierarchy of leagues or divisions, and a North American originated model characterized by its use of franchises, closed memberships, and minor leagues. Both these systems remain most common in their area of origin, although both systems are used worldwide.
Boston, Massachusetts, is home to several major professional sports franchises. They include the Red Sox (baseball), the Celtics, and the Bruins. The New England Patriots and the New England Revolution play at Gillette Stadium in nearby Foxborough, Massachusetts. Boston is one of eleven U.S. cities to have teams from the five major American professional team sports.
Major professional sports leagues in the United States and Canada traditionally include four leagues: Major League Baseball (MLB), the National Basketball Association (NBA), the National Football League (NFL), and the National Hockey League (NHL). Other prominent leagues include Major League Soccer (MLS) and the Canadian Football League (CFL).
Washington, D.C., has major league sports teams, popular college sports teams, and a variety of other team and individual sports. The Washington metropolitan area is also home to several major sports venues including Capital One Arena, RFK Stadium, Commanders Field, Audi Field, and Nationals Park.
The Cleveland sports curse was a sports superstition involving the city of Cleveland, Ohio, and its major league professional sports teams, centered on the failure to win a championship in any major league sport for 52 years, from 1964 to 2016. Three major league teams based in Cleveland contributed to belief in the curse: the Browns of the National Football League (NFL); the Cavaliers of the National Basketball Association (NBA); and the then-Indians of Major League Baseball (MLB).
The Basketball Association of America (BAA) was a professional basketball league in North America, founded in 1946. Following its third season, 1948–49, the BAA merged with the National Basketball League (NBL) to form the National Basketball Association (NBA).