Why the NBA Would be Better for KC than Baseball

Bill Simmons has an article at espn.com that talks about how the NBA's business model is broken and what could be done about it. It's a good piece, but I'm most interested in one small aspect of it:

This is how the NBA differs from any other professional sport. In a league with 12-man rosters, in which only five guys can play at once, you're really only as good as your franchise guy. If you don't have one, you're screwed.

This is something a buddy and I talk about regularly. NBA teams are built around a guy. Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, Tim Duncan, Shaquille O'Neal, Kobe Bryant, Dwayne Wade, Lebron James.

This should interest anyone who would like to see a playoff win from a Kansas City team in their lifetime. It should interest them because a professional basketball team has a wildly better chance of contending for a championship than do the Kansas City Royals (or perhaps the Chiefs, but that isn't because of the structure of the sport). Baseball is the most difficult sport for a team with small resources to field a winner. That is because it takes so many players to put together a team that can compete.

Last year, the Royals had a pitcher who posted one of the 10 best seasons in baseball history... and they finished 32 games under .500. There is 0 chance of that happening on an NBA team. A nice example is Kevin Durant. This season, he has become one of the league's top 5 players and the Oklahoma City Thunder are sixth in a tough race for the Western Conference playoffs.

Let's say the Charlotte Bobcats (who have had some attendance woes) decided to move to KC. They have some pretty decent pieces in place already, and they are currently sitting about .500. Now let's say they win the lottery. You add a guy like John Wall to that team and within a couple of years you have a top half of the east playoff team.

I don't care how much Kansas Citians tell sports talk radio stations they don't want an NBA team. They'd be ecstatic to have a winner.