Simple question, but why is basketball not like football where you can find talent all over the place? Is there really just a handful of athletes on the planet that can lead an NBA team to glory? Or are there athletes who simply haven't been combined with the right coaching staff/given the right opportunities to excel? (i.e McGrady in Toronto, Nash in Dallas). Considering how much talent it takes to break into the NBA, it's amazing that only a select few players that are drafted in the 1-7 range can even make a *dent* in the NBA.
5 players and they all try to do relatively the same thing while in (American) football you have specialized positions. Basketball as a sport is not that versatile compared to football so only a few can be good at it.
Have you seen the number of players on an NFL team roster? Also basketball is a much more skilled sport overall. Of course a position like QB takes a lot of skill but it's not hard to be good at a lot of positions in football in general if you're an athlete.
NBA has the highest average salary of any sports league in the world. You need to be tall (6.6+) which right there cuts down 95% of the population. On top of that you need to be athletic which cuts down more people and finally you need to develop skills (unless you are 7-0). A wide receiver just has to be able to run and catch. A QB does not need to be super athletic. An Lineman can be fat. You can't be any of these and expect to be an elite nba player. You need to be elite in a a lot of categories.
But imagine if that QB had to run the field like the RB and defend WRs. The group of people that could do all of those things is small.
pg/sg/sf/pf/c vs. c/g/t/qb/rb/wr/te/dt/de/mlb/olb/cb/s of course there's more depth in football because there's more players that do specific things.
Basketball is like Tennis. The better player will usually win (or perform better consistently). Success in football relies more on your teammates and coaching staff.
The fewer people playing, the greater the impact of any one person. Assume that the distribution of basketball playing ability has something akin to a normal bell shape distribution, or even that it is heavily skewed toward klutzes. In either case, the people playing in the NBA are going to be way out along the tail of the curve. And the further out you go, the more you are just going to have freakish outliers. That's what you see in the NBA. So yes, the really great people simply are that much better than the others, and because of the structure of the game, they have a larger impact and one that can be shown consistently. This is much like tennis, as someone else noted, where the greatest players simply tend not to lose very much during the time of their greatness. Golf, by contrast, is different because there is so much random chance involved in a few rounds of golf that it tends to even things out. That's what makes a run like Tiger's so especially extraordinary. He was dominating a field where he had to be extra orders of magnitude beyond other people to achieve that sort of dominance.
http://msn.foxsports.com/nba/story/NBA-leads-world-in-average-player-salary-042211 http://bleacherreport.com/articles/1158014-richest-25-players-still-balling-in-the-nba http://www.nowpublic.com/sports/ful...athletes-list-2012-complete-list-2946579.html http://www.forbes.com/sites/kurtbad...list-of-the-worlds-100-highest-paid-athletes/ NBA players have the highest salaries on average, while also having the most endorsements. Endorsements for NFL players is awfully low compared to the NBA.
It's a vertical game. Having to be tall(er) reduces candidates. Having to move that height around, quickly in many cases, reduces it even more.
Think how dominant QB's are in football. And they only play half the game! In soccer one player makes the difference with the best teams. But as others say, it's the number on the court of field. That's why Tiger Woods can be such a huge name - it's all him. Basketball is tough because it requires height and a lot of different skills to be successful at. You have to be able to play D and Offense. You have to be very quick, and yet strong and explosive. You have to be able to put a ball in a basket relatively far away and very quickly. People always wonder why NBA players miss so many shots. They don't understand how fast the players shoot the ball. Most people would have their wide open shot blocked because they would move way to slow and a defender would get there in time and block it. So that kind of markmenship and to do it under pressure is very hard to do. What makes LeBron so scary is that he has all the tools and is so big. So he is literally impossible to guard one on one. He can shoot over shorter defenders and not worry about blocked shots. He can also post them up. Againt taller defenders he can just go around them. He can pass if a double team comes. And he can explode with both speed and strength. It's just really rare for that kind of player to come along. They do stand out and above others, and because basketball only have 5 guys, such players dominate the game unlike in other sports.
Most sports are top heavy these days. MLB because there is no cap, and the wealthiest teams will constantly attract the best player. NBA & NFL because the leagues have expanded too much. With every 2 teams added, the talent is spread thinner and thinner. NBA is a bit worse, because the players run the league.
^ Exactly. I'd like to add that football is top-heavy, too, but with quarterbacks. The Mannings, Brady, Breese, Rodgers, Warner, Roethelisberger have won pretty much every Super Bowl of the past decade and if they didn't win them, they were involved in them. Essentially, having a superstar in the NBA is just as important as having a superstar quarterback in the NFL.
Here's the question - do you need to have one or more top 20 players in baseball to win the World Series? Hard one to answer I think.
