The excellent articles on the Homepage need a forum. I'm starting this one to address the question of why the NBA, moreso than other sports like Baseball and Football, allows teams to rely on one or two superstars rather than an even team approach. McChesney mentions that there are fewer players on a basketball team, but then discards this as a significant factor. I'm going to examine that a little deeper. I'm going to make some estimates to make it easier, so bear with me.
Football (Offense):
Assumption #1: Overall, a team spends approximately equal amounts of time on offense and defense. Not a bad assumption to me, as many good NFL teams score quickly (Rams, Colts) while others are more methodical.
Assumption #2: The Patriots were a good offensive team last season and Tom Brady is a Superstar. I'm comfortable with that assumption.
Perspective #1:
Tom Brady is the Patriots' superstar on offense, and the Patriots are relatively "pass happy." The Patriots ran 1037 plays last season; 586 were pass attempts, so Brady was directly involved in 56.5% of the Patriots' offensive plays. Since offense is approximately half an NFL game, Brady was directly involved in only 28% of plays for his team. If you think the qb should be considered as "directly involved" even in run plays, the number maxes out at 50% or so, i.e. the entirety of the offensive half of a game.
Perspective #2:
Because football is such a team sport dependent upon all players making coordinated plays, you can't just look at plays a qb passed as ones in which he contributed, just as you can't look to Randy Moss's catch attempts as plays he was involved in, since often his job is to draw defense away from the true play at had. A football game is 60 minutes long, with 11 positions. In a coordinated system with each player trying to do their job, each player is responsible for 9.1% of his teams' plays. Because offense is only half the game, an offensive player playing every snap is responsible for 4.5% of his team's success.
Final Verdict:
Very hard to determine, I'd say an offensive superstar is probably worth about 30% of his teams' overall success, but you could argue anywhere from 4.5%-50%.
Football (Defense):
Even harder to calculate. On the one hand, a defensive superstar can be involved in 50% of a teams' plays, as he can be on the field affecting the entire defensive half of a football team. However, football is one sport where you can really try to avoid defensive superstars by simply designing plays away from them. If you have a superstar Cornerback, or superstar Left Defensive End, the opposing team can do a lot to negate said superstars' effect. This is so confusing to think about, it's not even worth trying to discuss now, but the overall potential contribution range is the same as above:
4.5% if you consider a defender as 1 of 11 on the defensive half of a football team up to 50% if you consider him as affecting every play of the defensive half of the game. Probably truly somewhere in between.
Assumption: Defense for baseball is so difficult to quantify, and rarely is defense the defining characteristic of an MLB superstar, but I will attempt to include it in a "best case scenario" player.
Baseball (Position Player):
Ian Kinsler is leading the league in offical at-bats this season. He has 518 plate appearances (walks plus at bats). His team has 4460 total plate appearances, meaning Kinsler has been responsible for 11.6% of his team's total plate chances.
As for defense, other than 1st base (which is cheap, as they get credit each time they catch a put-out at 1st base), shortstop seems to be the position with the greatest potential impact. For instance, Orlando Cabrera is listed as having 528 "total chances." At shortstop, his entire team has had 549 chances; presumably Cabrera would be around this had he played every game at short. His team, the White Sox, have recorded 4303 total chances, so an ideal shortstop with range playing every day would be responsible for about 12.8% of his team's defense.
Combining these two numbers, remembering that each number refers to only half the game, a great hitting gold glove shortstop would be directly responsible for 12.2% of his team's success.
Baseball (Starting Pitching):
C.C. Sabathia led the majors last season with 241 innings pitched; the Indians had 1462.2 total innings pitched, meaning a superstar pitcher can directly influence about 16.5% of his teams' defensive half of the game, or about 8.3% of his team's total success.
Basketball:
Like football, basketball is less one-on-one, and will have a range to consider. On the high end, if you subscribe to the theory that a player affects a game just by being on the court, then an NBA superstar playing 40 minutes per game is directly involved in a whopping 83% of his team's plays. At the low end estimate, if you look at a player as just one of five on the floor, then you consider there are five positions, each for 48 minutes, which means players are responsible for 240 minutes of game time. If a superstar plays for 40 minutes, then at the low end an NBA superstar is still solely responsible for 16.7% of his team's minutes.
Final Comparison of Effect:
Football:
4.5%-50%;
Baseball:
8.3%-12.2%
Basketball:
16.7%-83%
Really you have to compare like-end numbers, so in a best case scenario, an NBA superstar is 3.7 times as important to his team as a football superstar; the low end estimate is that an NBA superstar is 1.7 times as important to his team's success as n NFL superstar; the real number (if there is one) is probably somewhere in between.
Compared to the MLB, an NBA superstar could be 1.4 to 10 times more important for team success.
Thoughts? I know there are probably some major errors in there, but oh well.
In conclusion, I think that the fact that NBA players play offense and defense, the fact that they can play 83% of an entire game and be involved on each of those plays, and the fact that there are only 5 players on the floor at once is a hugely important factor in why the NBA is more of a superstar league, followed by the NFL, followed by MLB.
Topic: Why Are Superstars So Important In Basketball? (Read 2556 times)