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The Miami Heat will collect their championship rings on Tuesday night at American Airlines Arena, then immediately take the floor and begin defense of their NBA title with a season-opening game against the Chicago Bulls.

But as Dwyane Wade, Shaquille O'Neal and company admire their new hardware, many experts question whether the Heat have what it takes to add a second ring to their collection. In fact, a league-wide survey of general managers showed that the Heat are a distant third – behind the San Antonio Spurs and Dallas Mavericks – as the favorites to win the 2006-07 championship.

The somewhat surprising results of the survey bring this question to mind: When was the last time a defending NBA champion was so lowly regarded by the league's own talent evaluators? And that question brings an even bigger one to mind:

When was the last time the NBA has seen so much parity?

Never have so many teams entered the season with a legitimate shot at winning the Larry O'Brien Championship Trophy. In the Eastern Conference, as many as four clubs (Cleveland Cavaliers, Chicago Bulls, Detroit Pistons and New Jersey Nets) are good enough to challenge Miami for the conference championship. The Mavericks will try to defend their Western Conference crown, but they face major obstacles in the Spurs, Los Angeles Clippers and Phoenix Suns. And it's not unrealistic to envision the Houston Rockets challenging for the West title if they can stay healthy.

So it's conceivable that as many as 10 teams in the NBA can be considered legitimate Finals contenders. And once they get there, anything can happen, as the Heat showed last June. In other words, one third of the league's teams believe they can win it all, and with good reason.

The NBA, in some ways, has become the NFL – plenty of parity and very difficult to predict. And the fans in the respective cities of the 10 or so hopeful NBA champions are certainly thrilled by the prospect of their team winning it all. But is so much parity good for the league in general?

A balanced ledger actually creates a sort of dull sports landscape that lacks real drama. I believe, as a fan, that competition is most interesting when a few teams dominate and the rest of the league desperately vies to knock them off. Juggernaut teams become either adored or vilified, depending on the individual fan's perspectives, but in both cases, there is intense passion. The best example of this is the New York Yankees. Most baseball fans either love them or hate them, and almost all fans watch them when they're on television.

While growing up in Los Angeles as a UCLA fan, I saw both sides of the equation. The basketball team won championship after championship, and I was filled with joy knowing that the Bruins were the best team in the country. But across town, USC dominated college football, and I viewed the Trojans as the Darth Vader of the sport. The thought of UCLA beating USC in football consumed me, probably because I knew it was so unlikely, but the fact was that I was hooked on college sports – in large part due to the drama that the commanding teams provided.

The equivalent in the NBA was the dominance of the Boston Celtics, Los Angeles Lakers and Bulls at various times in the league's history. Since Michael Jordan retired, though, only the Lakers have provided a commanding, "villainous" team when they won three titles in a row behind Shaq and Kobe Bryant. The Spurs have won three titles in the last eight years, but they've done it methodically. The reality is that once O'Neal left the Lakers for Miami, the league lost its "villain" and opened a window of opportunity for just about every franchise.

There are several reasons why the current NBA lacks dominant teams:

1. The big man is almost extinct. Only Shaq, Tim Duncan and Yao Ming have the ability to control games in the paint. With so many teams playing an up-tempo, perimeter-oriented style, each game's outcome is becoming more dependent on outside shots. And every team has shooters.

2. The salary cap. With a penalizing luxury tax, 29 of the 30 teams in the NBA are playing on basically an even level. Only the New York Knicks have the financial means to disregard the tax and outspend their opponents, but obviously, it hasn't gotten them very far.

3. The superstars aren't teaming up. You can make a case that Wade and Shaq qualify, but O'Neal is nowhere near the player he was a few years ago. Look at the other contenders and their combos: Duncan and Tony Parker, Dirk Nowitzki and Jason Terry, LeBron James and … who? Due to the cap and the fact that there are 30 teams in the league, it's become almost impossible to put together a Magic/Kareem, Bird/McHale, Jordan/Pippen type of combination.

The result is the most wide-open field of title contenders the NBA has possibly ever seen.

But is that a good thing?