The Superstar Theory: Revisited and Supercharged, Part 3By:

Part III The Superstar Thesis Going Forward

In part I we established
an objective list of the 80 best NBA players since 1956. In part
II we established that these players, especially the 21 gold medal superstars
at the very top, were the best players on every single NBA championship team
since 1956-57, and on all but three of the 52 runner-ups. Such a pattern does
not exist in baseball or football.

So what does this mean, for NBA fans and GMs?

For starters, it means that only a very small number of
current players still in or near their prime are on this list, and therefore their
teams are the only ones that will be legitimate contenders going forward. These
players include:

	LeBron James

Gold Medal:

Tim Duncan

Shaquille O’Neal

Kobe Bryant

LeBron James

Kevin Garnett

Silver Medal:

Steve Nash

Dirk Nowitzki

Tracy McGrady

Jason Kidd

Dwyane Wade

Chris Paul

Allen Iverson

Bronze Medal:

Amare Stoudemire

Gilbert Arenas

Dwight Howard

Jermaine O’Neal

Chauncey Billups

Note that seven of the eight NBA semi-finalists in 2008 were
led by players on the above list; the one exception, Utah, was led by Deron Williams who almost
certainly will be on this list in a year or two.

Note also that the six players in bold are the only ones who
will be under 30 next year, so a definite changing of the guard is taking
place. By 2011 or 2012 most of the other 10, except perhaps Bryant, will be
past their prime or out of the league.

But is there any reliable way we can get a sense of how far
the six under-30 active players on this list already may rise, and who might be
joining them on the list in coming years?

In fact, there is a remarkably accurate tool to do just
that. It is to look at whether a player makes first-team all-NBA by the time he
is 25. Forty-seven players since 1956 have made first-team all-NBA by the age
of 25, and fully 44 of them are on this list of the 80 greatest players.

(The three players who went all-NBA first team by 25 who do
not make the best 80 NBA players list are Wes Unseld, Earl Monroe and Latrell
Sprewell.)

Not only that, the higher one goes up the superstar list,
the more likely the player is to have made first-team all-NBA at a very early
age. All
of the gold medal superstars made first-team all-NBA by 25, and one-half of the
silver medal superstars, though some of them struggled to make first-team
all-NBA in their late 20s.

 

Consider the following:

Age when first make all-NBA? (I use player’s age on January
1 of a season as his age for that season.)

Age first time on First team All-NBA	21-23	24-25	26-28	29+	never
Gold medal superstar:	15	6#	0	0	0
Silver medal superstar:	8+	6	5	5	4*
Bronze medal superstar:	6@	6	6	4	9

(age on Jan. 1 of season in question)

#These deadbeats
are either big men like Russell and Shaq who have to queue up for the one first-team
all-NBA center slot or guys like Robinson and Baylor who enter the league at
24.

+I use first team all-ABA for
Erving

*Dwyane Wade is still active
and may make first-team all-NBA. Dave Cowens won the MVP at 24, but made
second-team all-NBA.

@I use first-team all-ABA for
Haywood and McGinnis

In short, if a player goes first-team all-NBA by 25, he is
an almost certain superstar. And he has
to go first-team all NBA by 25 to be a gold medal superstar. The earlier a
player makes all-NBA first-team the more likely he is to shoot up to gold medal
status. It does not take a long time to see who dominant players are.

Even if a player is not first-team all-NBA by 25, all is not
lost. Since 1956 another 47 players made second or third team all-NBA by the
age 25, and from this group comes 15 players on this list. Hence there is a
vastly higher likelihood of becoming a superstar if one is first-team all-NBA
by 25, but there is still nearly a 33 percent chance of making the top 80 list
if a player makes second or third team by 25. But, to repeat, such a player has
no chance of being a gold medal superstar.

Current NBA players who are 25 or under and who have already
made second or third all-NBA teams are Carmelo Anthony, Deron Williams and
Chris Bosh. We can probably add Yao Ming to the group, because although he is
27, he is a big, not to mention he has made four all-NBA teams already.

So, in addition to the current gold and silver superstars
who will be winding down in two years – Bryant, Duncan, Garnett, Nowitzki, Nash,
Iverson and McGrady –that gives us a working list for emerging NBA superstars
circa 2010-2018 of:

Superstars
Gold:	LeBron James
Gold/Silver:	Chris Paul
Gold/Silver:	Amare Stoudemire
Gold/Silver:	Dwight Howard
Gold/Silver:	Dwyane Wade
Possible Gold/Silver/Bronze:	Deron Williams
Possible Silver/Bronze:	Yao Ming
Possible Bronze:	Gilbert Arenas
Possible Bronze:	Carmelo Anthony
Possible Bronze:	Chris Bosh

The first seven names is where the championship teams will come
from, and from the two or three players we might add to the top of this list
over the next few years. The other 20-25 teams in the league will just be going
through the motions for all intents and purposes.

Let’s dwell on this point for a second. Consider the Atlanta
Hawks, a team full of wonderfully talented players like Joe Johnson, Marvin
Williams, Josh Smith and Al Horford. In any other team sport, such a core of
gifted young talent would suggest a possible title down the road. Get some seasoning,
throw in a few veteran role players, and contend! In the NBA the Hawks have
almost no prayer, unless one or two of the four emerges as a silver or gold
medal superstar. It is already too late for Joe Johnson, so it comes down to
the other three. The chances are slim, not because Horford and Josh Smith in
particular are not good, but because the bar is so high. If Horford is simply
an all-star, not a superstar, simply Elton Brand and not Kevin Garnett, the
Hawks cannot win a title with this core. If Josh Smith is Alex English or James
Worthy, and not Julius Erving or Elgin Baylor, the same is true. This logic
applies to every other talented young team in the league.

I almost have to cry for a dear friend of mine who is a
fanatic Knicks fan. He keeps thinking of ways to get this veteran or that
veteran to join the Knicks so they can contend. But none of his schemes get the
Knicks a gold or silver medal superstar in his prime or before his prime, so
they are all going to fail.

The moral of the story could not be clearer: Smart GMs, and
smart fans, have to always be thinking about how their team can get a hold of a
gold medal superstar, or, if it is the best you can do, a couple of silver medal
superstars. It is the single most important issue before an NBA GM. Once you
have your superstar(s), then your job is to surround him with the pieces to win
a title, but that is a day at the beach compared to trying to get a gold or
silver medal superstar in the first place.

As a GM, that was always the genius of Red Auerbach. He
brilliantly planned far ahead to have his team stocked with gold and silver
medal superstars. From landing Russell to stealing Havlicek to drafting Cowens
and then Bird, Red was playing the proverbial chess to everyone else’s
checkers. His capstone deal was the trade of Gerald Henderson for the draft
pick that became Len Bias. Unbelievable genius by Red; incredible tragedy for
the Celtics and the NBA.

Jerry West showed similar genius as he built the Lakers around
brilliant maneuvers for Magic and Shaq and Kobe.

What Red and West knew, before other GMs caught on, is that
aside from being lucky it takes patience and planning to get in position to
grab a superstar talent.

That is why Danny Ainge may be their heir: he started in
2003 with a woeful hand – little talent, no cap room, and no high lottery picks
— and managed through shrewd drafting and player development to parlay that
into a gold medal superstar, Kevin Garnett, and still have enough resources
left to have a high-quality supporting cast.

And it is why Joe Dumars, generally regarded as one of the truly
outstanding GMs in the game today, will probably not fare well in the history
books. Dumars, it is true, has proven to be a superb drafter and has built magnificent
ensemble teams. But in 2003 he had the second pick in the draft and he passed
on an opportunity to draft a genuine superstar in Dwyane Wade, or potential
superstar in Carmelo Anthony or Chris Bosh. Had
Dumars picked Wade, the Pistons may have been fitting rings for their thumbs
by 2012. He will probably never get a chance like that again. You simply
cannot blow those opportunities when they come along.

But the real measure for ultimate greatness for any NBA GM
is to do what only Red and West have
done: build two or three distinct championship teams around different
superstars. That was the test Jerry Krause flunked after Jordan left. It
is the test before R.C. Buford and Danny Ainge today. If either of them builds
a post-Duncan or post-Garnett champion, they will rightfully join Red and West
on the NBA’s GM Mount Rushmore.

Today in the NBA there are three routes to getting a
superstar: the draft, trades, and free agency.

The draft is the obvious route to get a superstar, because
once you get one you never let him go.

When one looks at the draft, it does not take a genius to
see that a team has to have a very high draft pick to get a superstar player,
especially a gold medal superstar. So let’s see at what point in the draft the
superstars were taken. (Note that due to the ABA and the old territorial draft, six
players are not included, so the relevant pool is 74 players.)

Where players were drafted overall:

 

	1	2-3	4-5	6-13	14-30	31-60	not drafted
Gold Medal:	11	5	2	3	0	0	0
Silver Medal:	3	4	7	6	4	0	1*
Bronze Medal:	4	11	1	5	7	0	0

*Ben Wallace

So what does this mean? More than one-half of the gold medal
superstars were drafted number 1 overall, as were nearly ¼ of all superstars.
Some fifty percent of superstars were top three picks. If the chances
of getting a superstar are slim in the top three of the draft, and they are,
they virtually do not exist as one goes deeper into the first round.

This is no surprise: the greater the player, the earlier in
his career his greatness becomes obvious, even to the untrained eye.

This is why the draft lottery exists. If the worst team got the
highest pick, or even had a coin toss to get either the first or second pick
in the draft as once was the case, it would be extremely rational for teams
to tank their season once they determined they could not contend for the title.
Especially if a no-brainer gold medal superstar was going to be in the upcoming
draft. The fact is, that even with the weighted lottery, it still is quasi-rational,
especially in years like 2003 or 1984 when the draft is crawling with superstar
talent. But, that being said, the lottery has reduced the odds dramatically.
My beloved Boston Celtics have tasted this bitter fruit twice, in 1997 and 2007.
It truly is like playing the lottery. And as the saying goes, lotteries are
a tax on people with bad math skills.

One course smart GMs have used to address the low likelihood
of winning the lottery, and the pain of tanking a season and losing the
lottery, is to make trades to get future no. 1 picks from desperate teams that
probably are going to suck down the road. The NBA has been and is littered with
teams willing to trade the future for a slightly more mediocre present. This
was how the Lakers got the picks that became Magic Johnson and James Worthy. Every
NBA team used to have Cleveland’s
Ted Stepien on speed dial and all the owners would race at the league meetings
to be the first to get Stepien alone in a hotel room with a bottle of Jack
Daniels. Finally the NBA put in the Stepien rule preventing teams from trading
future no. 1 picks in consecutive years. Today even dumb teams are wary about
trading future no. 1 picks because it could blow up in their faces, so they put
restrictions, like lottery-protection, on them. But eventually those
restrictions are lifted. For example, right now Utah
is holding on to the Knicks unprotected 2010 no. 1 pick and probably no one was
cheering harder for Isiah Thomas to keep the coaching job for another two years
than Utah’s
management.

With the emergence of high school players entering the draft,
it became a bit easier to get a potential superstar outside of the top three
picks, like a Kobe Bryant or an Amare Stoudemire. Likewise drafting very young
international players, like Dirk Nowitzki, offers a way to latch on to a stud
further down the first round. But these were and are always super-high risk
picks. For every Nowitzki or Bryant, there are ten or twenty bow wows that blow
up in your face like a trick cigar. Then fans and owners get angry for taking
a chance on a Skita or a Bender when legitimate players are still on the board.
Moreover, the option has been lessened with the rule requiring players to do
a year in college and for international payers to be at least 19 years old.
There are fewer surprises, or at least the surprises are smaller, in both directions.
That makes it harder to use the draft unless a team is picking first overall
and/or it is a year with superstar talent.

As a rule, only four or maybe five gold medal superstars
enter the league every decade, as well as five or six silver medal superstars.
So there are drafts, many of them, with no superstars in them at all. Kenyon
Martin, anyone? How about Andrea Bargnani? Or Kwame Brown?

Bottom line: Tanking makes sense in certain years and
certain situations. But the lottery makes it an implausible course on an annual
basis. (Plus the GM that does it annually will get fired, unless he works for
the Clippers.) Smart GMs try to get future no. 1 picks from other teams that
are unprotected many years down the road. As General Patton said to the allied
troops on the verge of D-Day: the point is not to die for your country, it is
to get the enemy to die for his. That way your own team does not need to stink
in order to have a shot at a top pick in the future. This has gotten a lot
harder to do, though it is not impossible.

As for trades, this is a very difficult proposition. No
rational team with a gold medal superstar in his prime will ever trade him
unless forced to do so by the superstar. There is simply no price on earth that
is acceptable compensation, unless it is another gold medal superstar. (The
exception is a gold medal superstar near the end of the road on a team that is
going nowhere. Then a trade to clear cap space, and accrue no. 1 picks and
young talent makes sense. See Garnett, Kevin. But for a team to be in that
position is likely a sign of incompetent management. See McHale, Kevin.)

Six times gold medal superstars have been traded in their
primes, and in all six cases the gold medal superstars led their new teams to a
title. Conversely, the team trading the gold medal superstar never won a title
as a result of the trade.

So trades for superstars, especially gold or silver medal
superstars, are difficult to use, except in unusual circumstances. There is,
for example, no sane reason a healthy LeBron James, Chris Paul, Dwight Howard,
or Dwyane Wade would ever be traded by their present team unless the player
effectively forced a deal, or if the trade was for one of these other four
players. So if you don’t have one of these guys, your chances of landing one of
them in a trade is almost non-existent.

That leaves free agency.

With the salary cap and the “Larry Bird” rule, it was almost
impossible for a superstar to switch teams due to free agency. Most teams were
over the cap and could not compete, those that could compete tended to be on
lousy teams, and the team holding the superstar could exceed any outside offer.
The rare time this did occur, Shaq to the Lakers in 1996, it was because Shaq
wanted to be in LA so badly, he was willing to accept the salary the Lakers
were in a position to offer. Jerry West did everything in his power over two
years to get under the cap far enough to make a competitive offer. Bravo, Jerry
West.

This is unusual, and had a lot to do with Shaq liking LA. But
aside from Shaq, free agency was not a viable way for a team to grab a
superstar.

That is no longer as true, due to an unintended consequence
of an important change in the 1999 collective bargaining agreement. When the
NBA instituted its “maximum” salary, it meant that a team with sufficient
capspace could offer a superstar nearly the same salary as the team holding the
superstar’s “Bird” rights. So when a Kobe Bryant was an unrestricted free agent
a few years ago, the Clippers and Suns could offer pretty much the same deal as
the Lakers. And when Dwyane Wade and LeBron James can opt out of their
contracts in 2010, any team sufficiently under the cap will be in a position to
recruit them, knowing they can hold their own on the salary front.

Some cities and franchises will always have more pull than
others if salary is off the table, and each superstar may have his own tastes
for where to live and play. But right now a team that is superstar-less should
be thinking long and hard about how to get under the cap by 2010 or 2011.
Donnie Walsh claims the Knicks will do this, and he had better resist the
temptation to add salary over the next two years. Unless the Knicks get a
superstar in the 2008 or 2009 draft – highly unlikely — their only hope to
contend for a long time rides on being able to get enough capspace to attract a
superstar free agent to the Apple.

One other advantage to clearing capspace: it makes it far
easier to do “sign-and-trades” for restricted as well as unrestricted free
agents.

Bottom line: a GM is either actively planning and working to
somehow get in position to corral a gold or silver medal superstar, or that GM
is only treading water until he and his team drown. Danny Ainge understood that
and the C’s can now hoist flag number 17 into the rafters. Does your GM get it?