LeBron James’ hour-long television special announcing his decision to forsake his hometown Cleveland Cavaliers to join fellow All-Stars Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh as a player for the Miami Heat — in addition to revealing his cowardice and callous narcissism — also highlights a persistent problem with the structure of the National Basketball Association. Namely, it is far too easy to form dominant super-teams that skew basketball’s balance of power for years at a time.

Miami’s new terrific troika, which employs two of the three best players in the NBA, is almost certain to join a long line of predecessors in hogging the NBA championship for several seasons. This structure has left the NBA financially unstable, as the legions of losing teams have found it difficult in tough economic times to sustain fan interest. Thus, with the NBA’s current collective bargaining agreement between its owners and the player’s union set to expire after next season, Commissioner David Stern and NBA team owners should take this opportunity to institute a series of dramatic changes to the league’s financial structure in order to create competitive parity.

The NBA has very rarely enjoyed season-to-season shifts in its balance of power. More often than not, one team acquires a critical mass of the top 20 players and goes on protracted runs of dominance that reduce other teams to pathetic second fiddles. This system has resulted in two particularly blessed and wealthy franchises, the Lakers and the Celtics, combining to more than half of the total NBA championships, as well as dominant duos like Magic Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen and Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O’Neal being able to sustain prolonged periods of dominance.

This system has proved to be completely unworkable in this past decade’s economic climate. Twelve of the NBA’s 30 teams are losing money, and the league as a whole lost $400 million last year alone. With so few legitimate contenders, fans have had little incentive to follow or invest in their local teams. Many teams even stoop to continuously stripping down their rosters hoping to clear enough financial flexibility under the league’s salary cap structure to get lucky and land a couple of franchise-saving free agents. As a result, only a handful of teams are even trying to compete in a given year.

Clearly, the NBA’s current financial rules are a financial loser and fail to maximize fan interest in this sport. Therefore, the NBA should adopt new policies to discourage dynasties.

First and foremost, the NBA should institute a “hard” salary cap, or a total salary number that teams cannot exceed for any reason. The current “soft” cap allows teams to exceed the maximum salary number, eventually imposing a “luxury tax” (a dollar-for-dollar fine paid to the other owners) on exorbitant salaries. This restricts teams from building super-teams through free agency, but allows them to violate the cap with impunity for players acquired in trades. With a hard cap, teams would be forced to break up their superstar cores regularly as young players become more expensive, assuring constant turnover and taking an important step towards parity.

Second, the NBA should eliminate all salary loopholes that allow teams that exceed the current cap to sign quality players. Without these loopholes, situations like the James-Wade-Bosh trio could not occur because teams would then be forced to fill out the roster around their stars with lower-salaried players, blunting the team’s ability to dominate the league. The current loopholes allow teams to stockpile good players, which skews the competitive balance.

Finally, the NBA should eliminate the cap on individual player salaries and allow them to achieve their true market values. If great players were not artificially pigeonholed into the same pay scale, it would be impossible to locate more than one of them on any given team because the market value of a player like James or Bryant is so enormous that it would take up at least half of a team’s salary cap space.

These improvements are vital both to the financial health and the watchability of the NBA. There are only so many times fans can take seeing the same outcomes repeated before growing bored or disillusioned with the sport. Parity is golden, and hope is money, which is why the NBA should embrace massive financial reforms next year.