The Gold Medal Superstar Theory and NBA Championships: Part 1

	Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

For decades NBA fans have debated the issue of what exactly a team needs to be a legitimate contender for an NBA championship. Common answers include: having a big man or a great point guard, or having a quality core of veterans and a great coach. We now know that all of these explanations are wrong. We now know the truth, and it has dramatic implications for how an NBA GM goes about his job of building a team, and how NBA fans should regard their team's development.

On July 25 RealGM published my piece, The SuperDuperStar Theory, in which I demonstrated that in the NBA, unlike other professional team sports, teams almost never win titles unless they have one of the five best players in the game on their roster, what I now call Gold Medal Superstars. In short, if you made a list of the 20 top players in NBA history, you would find that they account for an extraordinarily high percentage of championship teams.

To some extent this is a no-brainer: Shaq, Duncan, Jordan, Bird, Magic and Olajuwon led teams account for 23 of the past 27 NBA titles. (Dr. J, Moses Malone, Isiah Thomas and Ben Wallace led the other four, and they are hardly stumble-bums.) Each of them probably was considered one of the three best players in the league, if not the very best player in the league, the year their team won the title. But this only begins to convey what is going on.

Just as important, nearly 90 percent of NBA championships teams have at least two players in their line-up who would rank among the 84 best players in the past 50 years. And nearly 40 percent of NBA champions have at least three players from the top 84 in their line-up or rotation from the top 84 players of the past 50 years. Understood that way, the realistic number of contenders every season is pretty narrow.

The moral is not that teams need two or three of these top 84 players to win a title in 2007, since only 16 of them are active and many of those 16 are near the end of the trail. But if a team is serious about winning its best player had better be someone who at the end of their career will rank with the best 20 players on this list. In the NBA today among players under 25 the only realistic possibilities are Wade, James, Paul and maybe Anthony, Howard, Yao Ming or Bosh. Truly legitimate contenders also better have at least one or two additional players in their prime who will qualify for some place on this list when all is said and done. When we think about it, as I will do in my next NBADraft.net piece, this also whittles down the number of contenders. It also suggests a far different approach to building a team than most GM's pursue.

I have received considerable feedback on the piece and many excellent suggestions. As a result, I have revised, expanded and tightened it, and the findings are even more dramatic. In this article I present the revised and expanded research and develop some of the conclusions in more detail.


Restating the Argument: No Gold Medal Superstar, No Title

	Michael Jordan

For starters, recall that the argument I make for the NBA does not apply to baseball or football where it is not uncommon for dominant players like Barry Sanders and Barry Bonds to never play for a champion. In the NBA dominant players almost always end up winning a title at some point in their career. And teams without a Gold Medal Superstar have little hope of winning a title, no matter how impressive their team otherwise. In the NFL or MLB teams can get incrementally better over a few seasons and then win a title with an ensemble core of quality veterans. It doesn't work that way in the NBA, though few NBA GMs have faced the implications of that truth for their strategic thinking.

NBA history is filled with great teams that win over 50 games annually who almost never get to the finals let alone win a title. Think of: the Chicago Bulls in the early 70s; the Milwaukee Bucks in the 80s; the Indiana Pacers in the 90s; and the Sacramento Kings in recent years. The reason: their best players are OK, not great. They lack a Gold Medal Superstar, or even a top 50 player, what I term a Silver Medal Superstar. These teams' GMs often thought like baseball or football GMs: if I can add one more good veteran player who can play a role maybe the team can get over the top and win a title. Wrong. They were doomed from the start. Their only hope was pure luck to be in one of those rare moments in NBA history like the late 1970s when the teams associated with the top few players in the league were in relative disarray, or were being established.

In a way, this seems inappropriate. If basketball were a good team sport, would it not reward the best teams, not the teams with the best individual player? But this misses the point. The best individual players are the best individual players because they make their teams win. And the nature of basketball is that a single player can dominate the game in a manner that is not true in any other major team sport. Having a Gold Medal Superstar does not guarantee a title; it is only a necessary precondition. It often takes years to build the necessary supporting cast, including another top 84 player or two, to win.

And the bright side of this situation is that NBA champions tend to always set a gold standard for the league. Compare this to football. Expansion and especially free agency have diluted the quality of NFL champions considerably and in my view made the game much less attractive -- we will never see a team like the 1970s Steelers with something like 10 Hall-of-Famers again. It seems like teams can rise from the gutter to win a title and then fall back in the gutter in a matter of a few seasons. PR mavens call this parity; I think it undermines the beauty of the game to appeal to the attention span of the marginal fans advertisers wish to attract. NBA champions led by Gold Medal Superstars, on the other hand, invariably are capable of becoming teams for the ages.

And in years in which there are two or three Gold Medal Superstars at the top of their game, with tremendous supporting casts, NBA basketball enters a Golden Age. Go the ESPN Classic or NBA TV and watch the epic playoff matches between Dr. J's Sixers, Bird's Celtics and Magic's Lakers in the 1980s. It is basketball heaven. The tragedy of the Jordan era is that in the 1990s he never had a challenger worthy of him, a challenger who could beat him. Perhaps it was because he was so great, but whatever the reason it was unfortunate from a fan's standpoint.

There are only three truly great top 20 all-time players who never led teams to NBA titles: Charles Barkley, Elgin Baylor and Karl Malone. In their cases an argument can be made that they competed at the same time as several other Gold Medal Superstars who were either better -- Russell, Jordan & Olajuwon -- or who had stronger supporting casts. As Charles Barkley once commented when he was being heckled for not making his Sixers as good as Bird made the Celtics: "Who is it easier to make look good, Kevin McHale or Shelton Jones?" Both Barkley and Malone would have likely racked up titles had they played in the late 1970s. If Bill Russell had never been born, Elgin Baylor might be regarded as the dominant player of his era. He was that good.

Who are the Best NBA Players of the Past 50 Years?

When I first made this argument in years past the response was that the reasoning I employed was circular: we determine who the best players in NBA history are by who wins the most titles, so of course the list of great players will also be the list of the best players on championship teams.

So the key was to come up with a list of who the best players are in NBA history that is done independent of success in the playoffs, and is based on regular season performance.

Fortunately there are two valuable tools that do that. First, is the annual voting for all-pro teams, done immediately after the regular season. Second is the annual voting for MVP, also done immediately after the season. The all-pro vote selects a first and second team, and a third team since 1989. The problem with the all-pro team is that it is selected by position, so great players, especially centers, may not make the first or even second team even if they are among the three or five best players in the league. But the best players in the league tend to make the all-NBA team on a regular basis. The MVP vote is better, since it simply goes for the best player that season, regardless of position. But the MVP vote is not quite comprehensive enough to do justice to the number of superb players in the league at any time, and many have argued that it is a bit too closely attached to how well a team plays in the regular season.

I combine these two measures to determine a list of the best players since 1956, when the NBA first held a vote for MVP. I have altered my calculations because several readers convinced me that the MVP award is more important than the all-NBA team votes.

So for every player I now give 10 points for winning the MVP, 8 points for finishing second in the vote, 6 point for third place, 4 points for fourth place and 2 points for fifth place.

I have made one change in calculating all-NBA point totals: I continue to award 5 points for making the first team all-NBA and 3 points for second all-NBA team. Now I award 3 points also for making third team all-NBA, instead of 1 as I had done in my original piece.

It struck me and some readers as unfair to cheapen third-team status in a league with two dozen or more teams. After all, in the 50s and much of the 60s, there were only eight or nine teams, and much less competition to go all-NBA.

I have made one other adjustment: I have included the MVP and all-pro ratings for several NBA stars who also had primetime years in the ABA. I included those ABA players who also made all-NBA teams: Rick Barry, Julius Erving, Spencer Haywood, Connie Hawkins, George McGinnis, David Thompson, George Gervin and Billy Cunningham. I did this because their career totals were misleading without the ABA accomplishments, and all indications are that they would have dominated the NBA just as they did the ABA had they played in the NBA during those years. But it does mean that more players get credit for that era than for the years after the ABA-NBA merger when there 20 or more NBA teams. The losers here are the many NBA players who might have made third-team all-NBA between 1976, with the demise of the ABA, and 1989 when the all-NBA third team was established. So be it.

I also do the complete career all-NBA totals for players like Sharman, Cousy and Pettit, even the years before 1956-57. I did so because they had at least half of their career after 1956. Dolph Schayes fell exactly in the middle and I included him, and he would be much higher on the list a certain Gold Medal Superstar -- had there been MVP votes before 1956. Schayes led Syracuse to the NBA title in 1955.

Here are my main resources: http://www.basketball-reference.com/awards/all_league_by_player.html; and http://www.sportsstats.com/ACC/NBA/top5mvps.txt

So, for example, a player who goes second team all-NBA in a season and is fourth in MVP voting, gets 7 points (3 for second team all-NBA and 4 for fourth place MVP). The best a player can do is to get 15 points for a season, as Steve Nash has done in each of the past two seasons.

I have made a ranking then of the best 83 NBA players of the past 50 years. I made the cut-off at having at least 9 points to qualify. There was a nice break there, because there were very few players with 7 or 8 points, and around 70 players, including some up-and-comers, with between 3 and 6 points. These were often players with only one or two all-NBA appearances or MVP votes to their credit. Sorry guys, repeat visits to the all-NBA team or MVP ledgers are pretty much required for admission to this list!

Sixteen active players are on the list; they have an asterisk and can obviously improve their totals. (Only 4 are under 30.) I add Dwyane Wade at the end, hence making it a top 84, because unless injured, he, along with LeBron James, will be shooting up this list like an erupting volcano over the next decade.

The 84 Greatest Players in NBA History since 1956:

Gold Medal Superstars

Silver Medal Superstars

Bronze Medal Superstars

And this guy, who will be a Gold Medal Superstar or a Silver Medal Superstar

As you can see, I have broken the list of 83 into three groups based on their point totals: the Gold Medal Superstar, the Silver Medal Superstars and the Bronze Medal Superstars.

The 20 Gold Medal Superstar players are the greatest players in the last 50 years. I think the empirical numbers here pretty much map what everyone would expect. It is hard to imagine a better list of 20 players over the past five decades. Is the rank order perfect? Probably not. It favors guys who have had extremely long careers, like Abdul-Jabbar and Karl Malone. But these are the true legends of the game, guys who were universally regarded as among the top three to five players in the league during much of their careers. They dwarf everyone else.

Just looking at the point totals, only James, Kobe and Wade seem like decent bets to equal Moses Malone's Gold Medal Superstar entry level point total of 72 among current players, and it is no slam dunk for Kobe or Wade. It is time for the new generation Yao Ming, Carmelo Anthony, Dwight Howard, Chris Paul and Chris Bosh to bust a move if they plan to enter that zone, or even get in the Silver Medal Superstar suburbs of that zone. If Nash and Nowitzki have four more seasons like the last two or three they may get there, but Nash is getting long in the tooth. Garnett looked like a sure bet to make it two years ago, but he is losing ground.

And that's about it.

One can appreciate the Gold Medal Superstar list when we look at the next group, the 32 players in the Silver Medal Superstar category. There are some great names here. Almost all of these guys have, or will have, a second residence at the Hall of Fame. Every one of these guys made first-team all-NBA at least once, and most made it more than once. The one exception, Dave Cowens, was league MVP in 1973.

Injuries kept a few of these Silver Medal Superstar players from possibly approaching the Gold Medal Superstar ranks - e.g. Reed, Cunningham, Hill and McGrady -- and drugs messed with others, but probably none of them would have made it to Gold Medal Superstar status in any case. The only Silver Medal Superstar who would certainly be a Gold Medal Superstar had he remained healthy is Bill Walton. Had he continued for another decade as he did in 76-78, at age 24 and 25, he would be in the top ten overall. Maybe top 5. He was that dominant. And God knows what NBA basketball would have been like in the 80s if a healthy Walton had been leading the Blazers out west. (And, as I said before, Dolph Schayes would be a Gold Medal Superstar if the MVP went before 1956.)

Several active players are contenders to join the ranks of the Silver Medal Superstars by accruing at least 23 points in the next decade, but if history is a guide, no more than seven or eight names will be added to this list by 2016.

The 31 Bronze Medal Superstars in the third group are another step down in career accomplishment, but it is a very impressive crew nonetheless. LeBron will be an Silver Medal Superstar a year from now. The border between Bronze Medal Superstar and Silver Medal Superstar is pretty fuzzy, but on balance the guys in the second group had much more storied careers.

There were another 74 players or so who received some points but not at least 9. And after that there are at least another 150-200 players who never got any MVP or all-NBA recognition but had solid careers as excellent starting caliber NBA players for many years and sometimes as periodic all-star game participants. Guys like Paul Silas, Lenny Wilkens, Jack Sikma, Dan Issel, Bob Lanier, Michael Cooper, Bill Laimbeer, Horace Grant, Maurice Cheeks, John Starks, Kiki Vandeweghe, got no all-NBA or top 5 MVP recognition in their careers, but they were excellent players for many years. The list goes on and on.

In other words, when the last few qualifying names on the list of 83 best players in NBA history include McHale, Parish, Dumars, Reggie Miller and English, you know it is an elite list. At any moment in NBA history, only a small minority of NBA teams have players like these on their rosters, when these players are in their prime. And if you are one of the teams that lacks these players, especially the Gold Medal Superstar and Silver Medal Superstar guys, you have almost no prayer of ever winning an NBA title.


*The Gold Medal Superstar Theory and NBA Championships: Part 2