The NBA’s player empowerment era has its benefits and its drawbacks. On the one hand, shouldn’t players, as the most important people involved in the league, be empowered? After all, as far-fetched as Kyrie Irving’s players-only league proposition sounded, it’s far more feasible than the league’s owners and general managers taking the floor to produce a product.
On the other hand, the current trend of player independence threatens the viability of small-market teams. That means it also threatens the working people who support those teams. Players are typically drawn to larger markets. The more decision-making power they harness, the more likely the Lakers, Clippers, Heat, Nets, and (in theory) Knicks are to find themselves stacked with the league’s best players.