Much of that, he said, has to do with a “natural characteristic” of a game that can be dominated by one superstar among five players on a team. But Noll added that “while there have always been one or two teams able to dominate, that has been made worse” — especially when compared with the other major team sports — by the league’s insistence on having an individual salary cap on top of team constraints.

Image The finals seemed certain to be between the Heat and the Spurs or the Thunder. Credit... Larry W. Smith/European Pressphoto Agency

“If you didn’t have an individual cap,” Noll said in a telephone interview, “if LeBron James was in a position to sell himself to the highest bidder, his salary would be much higher and you wouldn’t have a small number of top teams with more than half the superstars in the league.”

Noll went on: “It’s a big mistake, and the N.B.A. hasn’t adjusted. So if you have as many as 25 teams that know before the first game is played that they probably won’t even be in the conference finals, doesn’t that make the regular season seem almost meaningless, more of an exhibition than a pathway to a consequential championship?”

As with the N.C.A.A. men’s basketball tournament, an air of pre-eminent powers-that-be inevitability settled upon this N.B.A. postseason once its versions of the midmajors — the Washington Wizards, the Portland Trail Blazers — were dispensed with. But given the freewheeling and democratic nature of the baseball, football and hockey playoffs, is the N.B.A. actually more like women’s college basketball, in which only Connecticut and one or two others often have a meaningful chance of winning a title?

Could the N.B.A. ever produce a champion that barely qualified for the playoffs, as the N.F.L. has done? Or a team like the Rangers, who had the 12th-most points in the N.H.L. this season before evolving into a Stanley Cup finalist over the last month and a half?

In a lockout-tortured and watered-down 1998-99 season, the Knicks made the N.B.A. finals as an eighth-seeded team. Three years ago, Dallas, as a 57-victory third seed in the West, galvanized during the playoffs and ruined Miami’s Big Three debut with a six-game takedown in the finals.

But the N.B.A., historically riding the coattails of the chosen few, has been no incubator of late-season reinvention, no place for a miracle on hardwood. Over the last 30 years, among the four major professional leagues, it has produced by far the fewest franchises to win a championship, eight, while Major League Baseball has had 18 of its 30 teams win the World Series, and the N.F.L. and the N.H.L. have each had 14 teams claim a title.