Euro League

There has been much talk over the past few years about expanding the NBA overseas. Kenny Smith at Yahoo! Sports recently wrote an article about it, writing in favour of the expansion for the near future. He suggests adding six teams at once, putting them all in a new Euro division, having NBA teams head to Europe for a few weeks during the season, and shortening the season to 70 games to accomodate the extra travel. I, for one, am far from sold on this topic. I would like to wait until the league displays more parity before expanding the league by 6 teams and, subsequently, 90 more players. In the past nine seasons, only once has a team not with a Shaq or Duncan on their team won the title. In the past 28 seasons, there has only been 8 winners, with just two of those 8 [Philly and Miami] winning only once. Will expansion increase the parity in the league? More teams means more chances for an upset right? In the long run that may be true, but how often do you see expansion teams winning right out of the gate? What may very well happen is that you suddenly have 6 more bad teams in a league that already has a lot of them. The last thing I would do in any of the major sports is add another team, let alone 6. Besides, how do you think players will feel about being traded to a Euro team? Some players don't even want to come to Toronto, let alone Madrid or Rome. Sure, great sights and food, but how easy will it be to get home to see the kids when you get a few days off? Is it worth it even for the all star break? While I am all for a shorter season, I hope it doesn't take a European expansion to make that happen. And I'm also not sold on the whole, 'sending NBA teams to Europe for a few weeks' part. Does that mean that teams in the Euro division never have to come to North America? It probably doesn't, and yes, I'm basing most of this argument on what Smith wrote, but he hardly convinced me that it would be a great idea to expand the NBA to Europe. If anyone can, I'd be glad to hear your case.