Being a star player in the NBA comes with myriad responsibilities, including carrying one's team down the stretch of close games. A great player makes his team better when he has the ball in his hands, raising their chances of winning. But is there really a correlation between star players having the ball in their hands and their teams winning?
To look into this, I wanted to see which "star" players, a term I loosely defined to fit the most-used players on each team, controlled the ball more in wins than in losses, and vice versa. My sample population included about 60 of the NBA's most notable players; I wanted to include every team's one, two, or three highest-usage players. The table to the right depicts the ten players with the highest net differences between their usage rates in wins and their usage rates in losses this season, as well as the lowest net differences.
There's not a lot differentiating the players that make up the upper and lower portions of the table; both groups contain great players and efficient scorers on winning teams and losing teams. There's no definite way to tell if having a higher usage rate in wins than in losses, or vice versa, is a bad or good thing. There are two primary reasons such discrepancies might occur:
To look into this, I wanted to see which "star" players, a term I loosely defined to fit the most-used players on each team, controlled the ball more in wins than in losses, and vice versa. My sample population included about 60 of the NBA's most notable players; I wanted to include every team's one, two, or three highest-usage players. The table to the right depicts the ten players with the highest net differences between their usage rates in wins and their usage rates in losses this season, as well as the lowest net differences.
There's not a lot differentiating the players that make up the upper and lower portions of the table; both groups contain great players and efficient scorers on winning teams and losing teams. There's no definite way to tell if having a higher usage rate in wins than in losses, or vice versa, is a bad or good thing. There are two primary reasons such discrepancies might occur:
- Players make their teams worse when they hang onto the ball more (a bad thing)
- When a team is down, they give the ball more to their "star" players, which might lead to the players having higher usage rates in losses despite playing from behind the whole time (a good thing