The idea that the NBA needs to implement revenue sharing in order to help small market teams and thereby maintain, restore, or create competitive balance is, I think, obviously absurd. The NBA really is one of the least-balanced major sports leagues around. But small market disadvantages have nothing to do with it. Neither the post-Ewing Knicks, the post-Jordan Bulls, nor post-Shaq Lakers have been able to leverage large markets into NBA success. The Spurs in tiny San Antonio (37 on the Nielson media markets list) are the most consistently successful team of recent years. Detroit is a modest-sized market at 11, as are the current champs in Miami at 17.

I think the main thing about competitiveness in the NBA is that as these dudes note there are very, very few people in the world with the appropriate physique to be NBA-quality big men. As a result the variance in big man quality is gigantic and this is semi-intrinsic to the sport. At the same time, the max salary rule ensures that the very best players in the league are underpaid, as are the very youngest stars. So there’s a lot of essentially luck-based imbalance (i.e., Dwayne Wade is worth max money, but LeBron is worth even more money, but they both make the same, so Cleveland gets a better player but has the same cap room to find a supporting cast) playing out. Then, the combination of guaranteed contracts and the salary cap means that it’s hard to undue the consequences of management fuckups so that even a great hoops genius probably couldn’t turn, say, the Knicks around.

I’ve been having a hard time coming up with what to say about Wire 47 since the episode was basically so fantastic that I have nothing to grouse about. The signature moment, on reflection, has to be Chris’ savage beating-to-death of Bug’s dad. The distinctive thing about the Marlo-Chris-Snoop troika from the beginning is that they’ve presented themselves, from the beginning (i.e., Marlo’s hilarious “what’s you name again?” query in the back seat of his car after meeting the girl who was supposed to seduce him and lead him to his demise) as essentially inhuman characters. Chris’ breakdown, monstrous as it was, was also human. Killing that dude was more than a job to him — it was vengeance for some demons in his own past; a murder that, perversely, makes Chris seem more normal and less like the ultimate drug soldier.

It was, however, just that inhuman quality that had made the Stanfield crew so effective. Chris not only lost his head, but violated the corpse-hiding procedure that’s been integral to keeping the heat off.

West Baltimore, as we see, is trapped in a spiral. Weak, soft kids like Namond are too week, too human to avoid the game. The strong ones (Michael) resist its temptations better but are also much better prospects who get more attractive offers and wind up signing up at the end. But even the best, most professional among them (Chris) have their moments of humanity and trip up. Meanwhile, the descent of Major Crimes into ineptitude is frustrating, but having seen Marlo rise from the ashes of the Barskdale crew we know perfectly well that Colonel Daniels and a revivified CID will only open up space for a new player if they ever do bear down. Everyone is, in essence, doomed. Which is, it seems, the general POV of the show as we see as well in the Hall plotline.

From the beginning, though, there’s been a counternarrative: Prop Joe always wins. He tricks Avon, brings in a ringer, and wins his basketball game. He has an out-of-town “product” hookup facilitated by a smuggler who enjoys protection from the FBI. The Baltimore PD never focuses on him no matter how central he becomes to the Charm City drug trade — indeed, it’s not clear they even know who he is. Marlo comes to him for help as to those fleeing from Marlo. Is Joe just lucky, or has he figured something out nobody else on either side of the thin blue line knows?