The winners of the NBA are far easier to predict than the MLB champions. Do we need to find a way of sustaining interest through the regular season?

The NBA season is all but decided by the All-Star break. Does it need a revamp?

The biggest story in the NBA last season, of course, was the Cleveland Cavaliers’ spectacular upset win for the championship. Very nearly as big a story was that the Golden State Warriors didn’t win.

Golden State went into the playoffs with the highest regular season won-lost percentage (73-9, .890) in NBA history. At this All-Star break, the Warriors again lead the NBA in W-L (47-9, .839); they easily have the best record, a whopping 71 points ahead of the No2 San Antonio Spurs (43-13, .768).

Do you think Golden State are going all the way? Las Vegas does. On Monday morning, the day after the All-Star game, the Warriors are odds-on favorites – you have to bet $7 on them to win $4. The defending champion Cavs are second on the spread sheets at 2-1. (If you’re looking for a betting bargain, try the Brooklyn Nets: a $1 investment could win you $9,999.)

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In professional basketball there’s usually no mystery about who’s going to walk off with the Larry O’Brien Trophy – you pretty much know before the playoffs start. In fact, you usually know by the All-Star break. The formula for figuring NBA champions is easy: start by looking for the team with the highest won-lost percentage.

Of the first 10 teams with the best W-L% in NBA history, seven went on to win the title – and all seven were leading in W-L% by the All-Star game: 1995-96 Chicago Bulls (72-10, .878), 1971-72 LA Lakers (69-13, .841), 1996-7 Bulls (69-13, .841), 1966-67 Philadelphia 76ers (68-13, .840), 1985-86 Boston Celtics (67-15, .817), 1991-92 Bulls (67-15, .817), 1999-2000 Lakers (67-15, .817).

Of the top 22 teams with the best W-L%, 15 won it all.

Often the only suspense after the All-Star break is whether or not your team will actually make the playoffs. Sometimes the suspense isn’t all that great since more than half the league’s teams (16 of 30) do so, and sometimes, like the Houston Rockets last year, you can be the very definition of mediocre – 41-41, .500 – and still make it to the postseason. Realistically, what chance does an NBA team at .500 or even .600 have of going all the way? History says none at all.

Basketball has no real equivalent of baseball’s pennant races.

With pitchers and catchers already reported and all regulars due in by Tuesday, it might be interesting to compare competitive balance in pro basketball and baseball.

In 2012, when he became part owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers, I asked Magic Johnson which game was more competitive. “On the pro level,” he responded, “no question, it’s baseball. In basketball at the highest level, you can dominate. In baseball, no matter how good you are, you’re just not that much better than several other teams. There’s always somebody that can beat you.”

Johnson should know. In 2014, his Dodgers had baseball’s best W-L% at .605. Their western division rivals, the San Francisco Giants, had just the ninth-highest success rate, .543. But the Dodgers lost to the Cardinals in the NL Division Series, and the Giants went on to beat Kansas City in the World Series.

The late Steve Hamilton, who pitched 12 seasons in MLB and played in the NBA for two years, echoed Magic’s sentiments. “Basketball is a game of domination. Baseball’s a game of balance,” he told me. “In pro basketball, you put two or three great guys on the court at one time and give them the ball as much as you want. In major league baseball, it’s a different game with each starting pitcher. You can have the best rotation or the best bullpen or the most speed on the bases or in the field or the most power, but nobody has them all at the same time.”

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“In basketball, Michael Jordan can shoot as much as you want him to, but even if you have Babe Ruth or Hank Aaron, they can only come up to bat every ninth time.”

When you think of the most dominant baseball team of the last 50 years, you probably think of the 1998 New York Yankees. They won 114 games and lost 48 for a .704% W-L. (In the postseason they won an amazing 11 of 13, sweeping the San Diego Padres to win the World Series.) But the 2001 Seattle Mariners (116-46, .716%) won more games in the regular season than the ’98 Yankees. Yet the Mariners lost to the Yankees, who won 21 fewer games 95 games, in the American League Championship Series.

Overall, the ‘98 Yankees (.704 W-L) are considered the dominant team of the era. This season in the NBA there are two teams, the Warriors and the San Antonio Spurs, who are topping that, and in the last 10 seasons the NBA has finished with two teams over .704 every year – except 2008-09, when it had four.

The relative levels of competition in the two sports vastly differ, which is the reason fans enjoy them in radically different ways. Bob Costas finds that “Pro basketball is a game with a relatively dull regular season that suddenly comes alive in the playoffs. With baseball, it’s the opposite. It’s a game that thrives during the regular season but sees interest fade with many fans at playoff time when the teams they followed all year don’t make it to the postseason.”

Statistics bear Costas out. Regular season NBA ratings for the 2015-16 season (on ABC, TNT and ESPN) averaged a tepid 1.9 million viewers – actually up 8%. Viewership skyrocketed during the postseason. Ratings for the first six games between the Warriors and Cavaliers in the finals averaged 20.8 million viewers and Game 7 pulled in 30.8 million.

Similar figures for MLB are difficult to determine and often deceptive because many baseball fans follows their team locally during the regular season as opposed to national broadcasts. Stated another way, if the Yankees and Dodgers are playing in an interleague game, most fans in New York and Los Angeles, the two biggest TV markets, will tune in to their local stations rather than ESPN. But with 40 million viewers, ratings were way up for last year’s Game 7 between the Chicago Cubs and Cleveland Indians; it was the highest rated World Series and the highest rated Game 7 since the Yankees and Arizona Diamondbacks in 2001.

Baseball maintains interest during the regular season because of the intense competition for the divisional and wild card playoff spots. In most seasons less than .200 points separate the best from the worst. Last year, the Cubs had the best record (.640) and were the only team to finish over .600. Only one team finished under .400, the Minnesota Twins (.364).

Last season in the NBA, six teams finished over .600 and seven under .400. In other words, 93% of MLB teams won between 40-60% of their games. In the NBA, that number falls to just 43%.

Is there any way to fix the relative lack of interest in the NBA’s regular season? To most observers, it’s not a problem – there’s no need to fix what isn’t broken. The NBA is doing fine, thinks Costas. “Attendance is good” – there have been 11 straight years of 90% capacity (though it should be remembered that basketball arenas only average around 18,000 – “and thanks largely to the postseason, the TV contracts keep getting fatter.” (This season a mammoth national deal kicks which increases the NBA’s national television revenues from $0.9bn to $2.6bn a year, and that extends through 2024.)

And so, to most NBA fans, it doesn’t matter so much if their team doesn’t win. They’re fine with watching Steph Curry and LeBron James duke it out for the title.