It’s long been a story told, one that lodges straight into the heart of the Jazz’s matter, that so-called small-market teams are disadvantaged in the pursuit of an NBA championship. Even worse is the accompanying tale that that’s exactly the way league managers and manipulators want it. Players don’t want to play under supposedly dimmer lights in less-populated cities, so the thinking goes, and the NBA wants the higher ratings that are said to come with matchups featuring marquee teams.

And then, along comes an NBA Finals that features the Oklahoma City Thunder and the Indiana Pacers, teams whose metro areas combined amount, at least by some measures, to an estimated 3.5 million, fewer than half the residents estimated to live in, say, the Dallas-Fort Worth area or the San Francisco Bay a

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