Some people on here will never understand this, such is their misconception about what drives fan interest, but super teams are vital to the growth of sports.
The most popular sports leagues around the world - the Euro soccer leagues and NBA - are dominated by super teams. People dont follow them because of parity. They want to see the best of the best play with and against one another. They follow their favorite players more than teams. Look at the NBA media this season. 60% of the stories and dialogue was about getting another star to play with Lebron. This is what millions of LBJ fans around the world tune into the nba for, not for the pelicans to be competitive.
If anything, NBAs popularity was built on dominant teams, even if they didnt classify as super teams. Lakers/Celtics...Bulls...Lakers/Spurs...GSW. Nothing new under the sun.
People taking a moral high ground about NHL or NFL having more parity simply dont realize how irrelevant this is to the future of sports.
Again, the most popular sports league around the world dont prioritize parity, so why is it so important?
Barkley may be a legend, but he’s also pretty thick.
I can't speak for the average person, but I used to be a bigger basketball fan a few years ago and my interest eventually waned simply because I thought "well, these teams play an 82-game season, and what does it accomplish?".
Lemme explain - Lebron's team has gone to the Finals eight straight years. If his team, whether it was Miami or Cleveland, lost a regular season game, who cares? Meant nothing. Indicated nothing. Would have zero bearing on how their season eventually turned out. The regular season basically means nothing which, well, you could argue "NHL regular season doesn't mean anything either", and I kinda agree with that - as a Lightning fan, nobody cares about what we do this season, and nobody should - but the NHL regular season still has a bit more inherent chaos, which can affect playoff positioning, which can affect matchups, which can affect potential upsets. How many genuine upsets do you ever see in the NBA postseason, honestly? I think there's been maybe 3-4 #1/#8 upsets in the entire history of the NBA playoffs, and at least one of those was thanks to Derrick Rose blowing out his ACL in Game 1 when he was at his very peak. We see #1/#8 upsets in the NHL all the time. If the Lightning face the Penguins, g-d forbid, we may well see another one this year.
It's not the biggest reason my interest in basketball died out. NHL and NBA compete directly and I only have time to really follow one of them. I like hockey better, and so that won out. But it didn't help, either; if I feel like there's nothing useful I'm going to get out of watching a given sporting event, then why am I watching it? And that's not even touching on the media attention that the NBA gets on a national level which I would describas nothing more than useless, reactionary nonsense. The #HotTaek phenomenom is one of the worst diseases that has plagued sporting conversation in a long time, and since hockey doesn't get as much attention, thankfully, it's not as big a problem in this sport as it is in basketball and football; goodness is it awful in those sports.