Not only are there far too many teams that aren't even trying to compete (Baseball has this problem, too.), but the recent concept of "load management," which has star players sitting out games just to rest the body parts that, for players in years past, were good to go for every game on the schedule, hurts the sport as well. It's the basketball equivalent of the pitch count in baseball, except in basketball's case, the perfectly healthy player doesn't come out of the game early; he doesn't play at all. Often, those games are highly anticipated matchups for which fans have paid top ticket prices to attend. That's not the way to juice up competition, attendance, ratings or anything else.
Of course, I'm in the group that believes that games are being manipulated and fixed routinely just to provide exciting entertainment for television, so it's not like I'm an impartial observer.
