People have the remember that the leagues as a whole are a business. I cannot imagine why anyone would want to own a team in a small market if their destiny is only to be a whipping boy for big market teams. The fans in the those markets aren’t really big on it either.
The league as a whole (as in the owners in all regions) are better off when everyone has a shot at being competitive. That is the current state, and it is an improvement over the Yankees owning baseball for stretches at a time.
A salary cap was instituted in Hockey about a decade ago, and I believe it has done a lot for the league. Now if they could get rid of the awful officiating and sharp change in rules between regular season and playoffs, they might get somewhere.
Honestly I don’t understand why people actually think this is some kind of lefty plot to ruin the purity of competition or dumb down the sport. It is a way to make each franchise into a profitable business. Again, the league as a whole is a business, and each team is merely a franchise. Things have to be structured so that each franchise can be profitable or it hurts the business as a whole.
Do people object to McDonalds having restrictions on how their franchisees operate and in what density?
Sports teams must be competitive on the field, but at the same time they have to accept limits on their freedom to do business off the field.
Once a fan understands this, a lot of the complaints you hear should diminish. My single biggest complaint is that parity has become so ingrained in the operations of major sports leagues that the sports themselves have become completely watered down. The competition becomes fabricated to a large degree, and these sports get way too close to that fine line that separates a competitive game from a staged event.
The NFL is the epitome of parity, which in my mind also makes it the worst offender in terms of diluting the product to make it more attractive to people who are far from serious fans.