Should MU be worried in a couple years?

[CaribouJim]

Just kidding, but interesting nonetheless - kind of intuitive anyway - "there is only one basketball to go around" theory.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-surprising-problem-of-too-much-talent/

For both basketball and soccer, they found that top talent did in fact predict team success, but only up to a point. Furthermore, there was not simply a point of diminishing returns with respect to top talent, there was in fact a cost. Basketball and soccer teams with the greatest proportion of elite athletes performed worse than those with more moderate proportions of top level players.

Why is too much talent a bad thing? Think teamwork. In many endeavors, success requires collaborative, cooperative work towards a goal that is beyond the capability of any one individual. Even Emmitt Smith needed effective blocking from the Cowboy offensive line to gain yardage. When a team roster is flooded with individual talent, pursuit of personal star status may prevent the attainment of team goals. The basketball player chasing a point record, for example, may cost the team by taking risky shots instead of passing to a teammate who is open and ready to score.

[TheSultan]

Did Murff write this article?

[CaribouJim]

Did Murff write this article?

Funny you should say that - he was the FIRST person I thought of when I read this last night. Now that I think of it - I'll post it on Dodds board as well.

[unclejohn]

Interesting article, but it seems to me that the data would be really hard to pin down. What is talent, anyway? How can you quantify it? This study for instance relied in part on all star selections, which are subjective. A sports psychologist told me once that at the elite level, the differences in ability between athletes is extremely small. The difference is psychological. That strikes me as too simplistic as well, but there does appear to be something to it. Michael Jordan was as good as he was in part because he was so extremely competitive. Larry Bird simply out-thought everyone on the court. So does talent actually include the ability to play nice with others? Does talent include the ability of an athlete to improve the performance of those around them? For years, Don Baylor used to get traded late in the season to some pennant contender. He was the guy you wanted on the team during the stretch run. Yes, it is kind of intuitive. Team chemistry is important. Good teams often talk about how well they work together, and bad teams often talk about how everyone hates each other. OTOH, winning covers a multitude of sins, and losing makes people miserable. Think of the 70's era Oakland A's, who were supremely talented and constantly at war with each other, or just about any Yankee team when Steinbrenner was alive. So what is talent, anyway?

[TheSultan]

Interesting article, but it seems to me that the data would be really hard to pin down. What is talent, anyway? How can you quantify it? This study for instance relied in part on all star selections, which are subjective. A sports psychologist told me once that at the elite level, the differences in ability between athletes is extremely small. The difference is psychological. That strikes me as too simplistic as well, but there does appear to be something to it. Michael Jordan was as good as he was in part because he was so extremely competitive. Larry Bird simply out-thought everyone on the court. So does talent actually include the ability to play nice with others? Does talent include the ability of an athlete to improve the performance of those around them? For years, Don Baylor used to get traded late in the season to some pennant contender. He was the guy you wanted on the team during the stretch run. Yes, it is kind of intuitive. Team chemistry is important. Good teams often talk about how well they work together, and bad teams often talk about how everyone hates each other. OTOH, winning covers a multitude of sins, and losing makes people miserable. Think of the 70's era Oakland A's, who were supremely talented and constantly at war with each other, or just about any Yankee team when Steinbrenner was alive. So what is talent, anyway?


If you read the study itself, you can see they attempted to use objective criteria to determine talent. For instance, they used Hollinger's "Estimated Wins Added" for the NBA.

http://www8.gsb.columbia.edu/cbs-directory/sites/cbs-directory/files/publications/Too%20much%20talent%20PS.pdf

What is interesting is that the results are almost identical for the NBA and European soccer - at some point the marginal value of adding even more talent decreases. But not in baseball - which has been described as more of a series of individual competitions (at least when it comes to pitching and hitting) than a true "team sport."

[Phantom Warrior]

My favorite NBA team of all time was the Knicks' team with Willis Reed, Dave Debusschere, Bill Bradley, Walt Frazier, and Earl Monroe. The individual talent on that team was exceptional. The key to the team's success what that all five guys played together, even Monroe, who had a rep as a ball hog gunner before coming to NY.

My favorite MU team of all time was the one with Jerome, Bo, Earl, Butch, and Lloyd. That was a hell of a lot of talent. But all five were willing to sacrifice individual stats for the good of the team. If they had wanted to, Butch, Bo, and Earl could have easily averaged over 20 ppg had they wanted to pad their individual stats. But none of those guys was a me-fist player, and neither was Lloyd or Jerome.

There is no such thing as "too much talent" if the coach can get all that talent to play together. That is on the coach. One thing I will give Caliperi credit for is that he has generally been able to manage all the talent he recruits to set aside individual egos. Pitino has managed to do that as well.

Next year we will probably have 10 players who were viewed as Top 100 recruits, and that number could be 11. I'd rather be in that position than having three or four Top 100 recruits on the roster.

[unclejohn]

If you read the study itself, you can see they attempted to use objective criteria to determine talent. For instance, they used Hollinger's "Estimated Wins Added" for the NBA.

http://www8.gsb.columbia.edu/cbs-directory/sites/cbs-directory/files/publications/Too%20much%20talent%20PS.pdf

What is interesting is that the results are almost identical for the NBA and European soccer - at some point the marginal value of adding even more talent decreases. But not in baseball - which has been described as more of a series of individual competitions (at least when it comes to pitching and hitting) than a true "team sport."

No, I read the article. Offhand, I do not know what Hollinger's theory is, but I suspect it would be a comparison between how many games a team wins with or without a player. That is itself a guess and is dependent on a lot of other factors, like if a shooter has a good point guard to pass to him. But even then, it would not necessarily measure "talent" in terms of athletic ability. Perhaps a team wins more because a player is a good team leader or something. It seems to me that the data is vague enough that one could reach whatever result one wanted. It reminds me of when Buzz was hired, somebody on Cracked Sidewalks did a statistical analysis of the hiring process. First he asked all his friends what factors should be important in hiring a coach, and assigned percentages to them. Then he compared them to the remarks Cottingham made at the introductory press conference and "proved" that it was a bad hire. How? Well, his friends said that "institutional fit" should only count for about 20% of the hiring decision. Recruiting and game coaching and national reputation ought to count for more. Then, since Cottingham mentioned at the press conference several times how well Buzz fit the university, and never mentioned his recruiting ability or game coaching or ability to inspire the student body or any of that stuff, he figured that it must have accounted for about 75% of the hiring decision. Therefore, it was a bad hire! Of course this was all complete ********. He and his friends had little idea of what factors should have been considered in hiring, much less which actually were. Moreover, figuring how the interview process went by a couple minutes of talk before Buzz was introduced. So he had numbers all right. But the numbers were about as significant as the principals' phone numbers.

So I am suspicious of the "wins added" figure, especially when it is combined with All-Star appearances. I do not doubt the researchers are on to something, but it seems that they have discovered what sports fans already know: team chemistry is important. Too many guys fighting for too little playing time can ruin it. OTOH, if the Miami Heat can sign the three biggest names in a free agent class, including two who are among the best ever to play the game and who are certainly headed to the Hall of Fame, they can win a couple championships and appear in the finals four years in a row or something like that. So it seems that too much talent can be a bad thing. Except when it's not.