Parity

 There are two types of parity though.

Type A is: every team is kinda good from a coaching, personnel and game-planning standpoint and there's no room for error so when humans are humans and make an error, the small margins make it so that any team can win on any given night.

Type B (the type that the league mostly has is): the league is full of fundamentally fragile, one-dimensional teams and led by boatloads of one-dimensional stars that can only really play one way all of whom are deliberately hamstrung by a CBA that doesn't really allow teams to acquire the talent needed to make a balanced roster leading to the reality that a) if one team is faster to exploit the other team's fragility that team will win regardless of what the betting odds has and b) any single team less fragile/more versatile than the others will win regardless of the individual consistency or excellence of their actual players.  They'll just have more room for error.

The first is likely to lead to exciting basketball.  The second is likely to produce some of the awful series and blowout losses that these playoffs offered.  Boston won but there's nothing memorable about the win.  They were just the least fragile team, in terms of what could go wrong vs what they were capable of.  I guess some people like the idea of the last team standing not having any of the top players, but basketball is both a team sport and a sport of individual brilliance.  No one on Boston had a moment that made your mouth drop.  That's part of why we watch.