It's hard not to get fired up when a lot is at stake.

Let’s get this straight: I want to see the Pistons play the Spurs in the Finals like I want to see Shaq play a genie in a movie. Instead of a highlight-filled clash of the titans, the low-scoring slugfests are hard on the eyes, ears, and compression tights. Yet hidden somewhere deep down beneath my hatred for all things defensive and fundamental lies the feeling that this might be just what David Stern's communist nation needs.

Look at baseball, where one title by a team with speed and defense led to everyone else retooling their rosters with the same priorities. (I heard something about steroids, too, but you'll have to ask Uncle Larry about that one.) So what would happen if the same two teams that met in last year's NBA Finals landed there again? For starters, terrible ratings. Again. But a sequel to last year's title bout might also inspire some of the league's GMs*.

Right now, conventional wisdom says you should gut your roster every year in order to land the highest profile free agent—or, even worse, the no-name free agent who finished up the last meaningless month of the season on a tear. (SPOILER ALERT: Chris Wilcox isn't as good as he's looked in Seattle.) It's a lose-lose situation—invest tons of cash and time in someone who's never represented your franchise, or see him sign elsewhere and start over with nothing.

Yes, certain big names are tempting on paper, but the reigning conference champs have a much safer way to handle the off-season. Minor tweaks to the role players take precedent over a major overhaul of the core group. No, this doesn't guarantee a title every season, but it does offer consistent playoff experience—and that's more valuable in today's NBA than 22-inch rims.

Free agents aren't the only ones constantly on the move. It seems like anything more than a three-game losing streak throws most coaches directly into the hot seat, Budweiser or otherwise. The Spurs have been Pop's team for nine years now, and no, he hasn't won a title every season, but he's got his player's respect. And while Detroit's been through Carlisle, Brown, and Saunders in the last five years, each one of those moves can be directly linked to Larry Brown's desperate need for attention. Either way, if guys know they can tune their coach out of a job, he might as well be speaking Chinese in the locker room. (And that only works in Houston.)

If you ask me, competing in the league seems pretty simple. So what happens when the rest of the league fails to follow these easy steps toward perennial title contention? All is not completely lost. With no one else regularly competing in June, we may develop our first real rivalry since Magic and Isiah were kissing in the late '80s. While the aesthetics aren't always there when these two play, at least we'll have two teams going at each other on a yearly basis with everything on the line. That's got a helluva lot more substance than most of the NBA's regular season, media-created rivalries like LeBron vs. Carmelo, Shaq vs. Kobe, and Boozer vs. Prince.

*Isiah Thomas not included.