The Quick Shot 03.30.09: Super Star Talk

Posted by Andrew Tobolowsky on 03.30.2009

You don't need a player, you need a hero.

As I watch my Mavs struggle desperately to give their playoff spot to the Phoenix Suns (25 points in the second half verse the Cavs today), and the Suns do their best to refuse to take it (losing to the Sacramento Kings, who were actually entered into this year's March Madness by accident) I ponder---what do you want for
your mediocre team without a lot of young talent? And how do you achieve it?

In this league, as everywhere in the sports world, there's a huge premium on milestones. Get to the playoffs. If the Mavs make it this year, and the Suns don't, it'll be the end of an era in Phoenix but not Dallas. And the coach probably won't be fired. To which I say—really? Squeaking into the eighth spot to get housed by the Lakers is better than going to the lottery?

And how many teams are in this position? Just without the juice to make a dent any more, and no bright light on the horizon?

For me, I say be mediocre with style. I want the Lakers. There was hope that the Mavs' would move up, and in that way, they could potentially make the second round. Due to injuries all the other teams in the West are beatable, if not necessarily by these feeble Mavs. But no matter who they play, the Mavs aren't going to make a dent. So why not play the best? If they pull off a miracle, and beat the Lakers—that's the only way anyone in Dallas will be pleased by this year, right?

Why don't more teams want this? Who wants to live a marginal existence? The Mavs have two young players with super athletic talent, and no polish in Gerald Green and Ryan Hollins (I know, who? Trust me. Kid has ups and enthusiasm for a mile. A steal). They have a guy with some surprising talent who always runs hard and is really a decent rotation guy in Brandon Bass. They don't play any of these guys all that much. Green and Bass have their contracts up this year, and they're the only bench we have, rarely as they're used. I bet you they're walking to where there's playing time. And really, you're telling me Dallas can't afford to give them that burn?

For what? To stay mediocre and avoid slipping to bad? Is anyone else out there like me? Are you mad at your team more for being gutless than for being bad?

If you were me, sports fans, wouldn't you rather see a young team that ran and jumped and tried and maybe didn't quite make it to the playoffs to get smashed by the Lakers or a team that played it smart and boring and got that big ol' check mark for "making the playoffs" to get smashed by the Lakers.

Come on Carlisle. Let the kids have a little fun. I assure you, none of the rest of us are.

I do, after all this self-serving rhetoric, kind of have a point to make here.

The best teams of the last decade, and God knows I'm going to forget somebody here are, one would say, the Lakers, the Spurs, the Pistons, the Mavericks, the Suns. The best teams right now are the Lakers, the Spurs, the Cavs, the Magic, and the Celtics.

Shockingly, and again I'm sure I'll miss somebody, more than half those teams (not the Mavs, Suns, Pistons or Celtics) were, during their hey day, in possession of a number one pick in the draft. Shaq, D-Robinson and Tim Duncan, Lebron James, and Dwight Howard. For the others, each had either a pick that even though it ended up being the steal of the draft, was no lower, I believe, than eighth, and that's two high school players, Kevin Garnett and Kobe Bryant, and a foreign player, Dirk Nowitzki.

This leaves out the Pistons, who of course were the only team to successfully build on the "team" model and win a championship with it—but I'll be honest, I look with a healthily skeptical eye on Eastern Conference teams that became Finals champions any time between two and ten years ago. Let's be honest, while the West teams were beating the crap out of each other, the East wasn't really giving anybody any trouble. But still, hats off the Pistons.

And the Celtics are also an anomaly but made a more or less perfect trade (unlike the Lakers, who made a terribly imperfect trade with the Grizz)—the Wolves got what they wanted and the Celts what they wanted and it worked out fine.

But here's something else—only one of those teams was lucky enough to improve dramatically through the draft WHILE they were good and that was the Spurs—because David Robinson got himself injured and the team went in the tank and came out with Duncan. The Lakers, likewise, are the only team to have been good and remained good with, unlike the Spurs, a little dip in the middle and they did so with the help of TWO all-world players.

I think you get it. The only people with a chance to win the whole shabang in this league are the people who get not TOP talent but the TOPPEST talent. To an unhealthy degree number one picks---and if not, top ten and usually in that case there's a reason it wasn't one—high school or foreign country.

Doesn't that seem weird to you? The message here is, it doesn't matter what you do to make your team
better. Every year there is about one person, at best, coming into the league who can make a team a title contender. Some years, there isn't even one but it's hard to believe there's been a year when there were two.
The message is A player—a singular player—makes a team. And if you are not in a position to get that one guy, statistically speaking, it seems like you might as well just not draft.

If true, that strikes me as sad. Brandon Roy, for example, is a great young player and that Portland team is a joy to watch, stocked to the brim with young talent. But besides the people in Portland, does anybody really think Roy is leading the Blazers past Kobe any time soon? When Kobe retires, will he make it past Lebron?
Dwight Howard? No, I don't think so. I could be wrong. The Pistons did it.

Again, I'm not saying that good teams with a lot of good players but without that one otherworldly super star can't win the Finals. I'm saying that in the last decade and a half, with the exception of the Pistons, and the Celtics who compensated for not having one ultra ultra by having three, they haven't.

And I really am not just making this up. Look at the Finals MVPs since 1990: Isiah Thomas, Michael Jordan, Michael Jordan, Michael Jordan, Hakeem, Hakeem, Michael Jordan, Michael Jordan, Michael Jordan, Tim Duncan, Shaq, Shaq, Shaq, Tim Duncan, Chauncey Billups (a fine player, but he looks weird on the trophy with these other guys), Dwayne Wade, Tony Parker (kind of weird too), Paul Pierce (had to give it to one of them).

And this year, is anyone willing to bet against it being either Dwight, Kobe, or Lebron, the three most dominant players in the game today? I think a lot of people have looked at that list and said sure, if those teams were in the Finals, those are definitely the guys who'd be the MVPs. What has I think been neglected is that you can make the argument that since at least 1991it has happened all of three times that a team won the Finals without having one of the top three or four players in the game at the time. And I would say in 13 cases (Jordan, Shaq, Duncan, Hakeem) we're talking about the top one or two.

13 times in the last 18 years the team that won the Finals had one of the two best players in the game. Every single team besides the Pistons had either one of the top five player in the NBA at the time or, as in the case of the Celtics, three of the top 15. And this is even worse than it sounds: Players like those who have been Finals MVPs come along once every five years or so---so you have to be really bad AND lucky. And in case you think the Celtics are a blueprint for a way to build a team, it seems likely that it is even statistically rarer that your team can make offseason moves like the Celtics were able to do.

Now look, I know this is perilously close to saying that teams with talent tend to win which is so obvious it would barely make a three sentence column. What I'm trying to say is how dependent that is on the talent of just ONE player. And how hard it is to be in a position to get that ONE player--Kobe Bryant is I believe the latest draft pick of any of these guys so far mentioned and he was 13th---and we can assume with the level of scouting that now exists he probably would have been much higher. I'm not saying that the team with the most talent wins, which would be a nice thing to say. I am saying that the team that has one specific talent---a talent that can only be gotten under specific circumstances and a truly difficult combination of luck and poor play--will win.

We're not talking about the odds being stacked against someone who doesn't have Kobe, Lebron James, Dwight Howard, Tim Duncan, or Dwayne Wade--we're talking about their being almost (but thankfully not quite) insurmountable.

Here is my argument in a nutshell. There are five players on a basketball court. But although you can make a team around an all-world player bad enough that even he can't pull it off, you can't, without an all-world player, make a team good enough that they can win a title. If one of your five isn't one of the top five players in the league, statistically speaking, you might as well not even play the season. And unless you get two top 15 players at the same time, a la the Celtics, giving you three overall there apparently is nothing you can do in the offseason, draft or trade, that will make a difference. No reasonably attainable amount of superior but not ultimate talent will help you.

It has happened, by my count, 17 times in the last 19 years that the team that won the championship had one of the top three players in the game. One of those times is explicable--the Celtics had great talent at three spots on the floor, and complementary talent at well. One of them, the Pistons, is not explicable by means of this theory. And that's probably a good thing for competitive basketball. But on the other hand, statistical significance is something happening 1 in 20 times. In other words, if either Kobe, Lebron, Duncan, Wade, or Dwight Howard ends up with the next two championships, mathematically speaking the Pistons' championship will be a statistically insignificant event.


This would be bad news for a lot of teams. Because if this is not a statistical anomaly, then mediocre teams? You are going to stay mediocre until you get super bad enough. You're not bad enough. Get worse. Good teams? You're not going to stay good once you lose your main guy. And it's probably best if you don't even try to be. And anybody who doesn't have the first pick at some lucky time in the next ten years?

You are probably not going to win a title in the next decade.

Isn't that something?

And notably, of those best teams of the last decade I identified earlier, it's not exactly surprising that the Suns and the Mavs—like the Kings before them—were notoriously lacking one of the top three players to play the game at that time. And now, without ever winning one, they're fighting to give each other that eighth play off spot.

On the other hand, this could be skewed data. After all, six of those victories belong to Michael Jordan who is the greatest of all time. Three of them belong to Shaq (the most dominant of all time) and Kobe (the second greatest of all time). The Mavs probably should have won a title without having one of the top five players in the game (I'd still say six or seven) and the Heat had two great players. Tim Duncan is great, but his first title was with David Robinson, he's not exactly the dominant player he used to be, and Tony Parker and Manu aren't exactly nothing. And the Celtics made it by adding players. So maybe what the data really tells you is that Jordan, Shaq, and Hakeem were freaks, which we assumed anyway---and that it's a great team, not a great player that wins championships.

We'll see what happens these next couple of years.

Play the young guys, Rick.