LeBron’s 40, Kevin Durant’s 37, Stephen Curry’s 37, James Harden’s 36. They’ve been sharing the title odds for quite some time. But when the very sober John Hollinger recently listed his ten current best players none of these older superstars made the list. The Finals were dominated by Shai Gilgeous-Alexander who was 26 at the time, and Tyrese Haliburton who is still 25.
Almost every coach is talking about picking up full court, and playing intense defense. The league is getting faster and more favorable to the young, and all in all fans seem to be maybe finally, kind of moving on from their familiar list of stars.
But then Kansas University professor Stephen Ilardi, Ph.D.—who played a pivotal role in developing NBA advanced analytics and has worked for several NBA teams—called. Following is our conversation:
Steve you’re making the case that one older player might really lead a team that makes some noise this NBA season.
I want to be careful about that, because I don’t mean to suggest that the title equity of the Golden State Warriors is much above zero. I don’t believe it is. If somebody set their title probability at five percent, I would take the under.
But I do think Golden State has enough depth and talent that, with a little bit of injury luck, they should be a home court playoff team in the West—which would be pretty remarkable given how strong the West is.
Tell me why you say that.
Estimated Plus-Minus (EPM) has a long track record of being quite useful in terms of projection at the individual and aggregate level. Per that metric, the Warriors have nine players who are at least league-average in impact. That’s a high level of depth that would allow them to be somewhere around a plus-four to plus-five point-differential team. There are lots of different mathematical formulas that connect point differential to the expected number of wins, and that would project out to about a 53-win team. So, yeah, they could be good.
We saw after the Jimmy Butler trade last year they were winning at a much higher clip, more like a 60-win team. It would be unrealistic to take just that subset around 30 games and pro-rate it over a full season–they were burning up a lot of energy to try to make the playoffs and position themselves. And we saw what happened–they didn’t make it far.
Back to your earlier point, given the way the game is being played today in the playoffs, and given the every-other-night scheduling, especially in earlier rounds—with players flying all over the court—there’s just no way for an older team to realistically sustain that level of effort without either wearing out or suffering a key injury.
Over the last decade, stars who win titles, and aren’t named Steph or LeBron, average a hair under 27 years old.
Older superstars haven’t won an NBA title since Steph won back in 2022 the stars aligned: He had a little bit of downtime during the season to catch his breath. Klay was pretty fresh going into that as well.
Clicking around Dunks and Threes, it depends how you rate it, but by the default setting, Denver has five players in the positive. Cleveland has seven. Houston has eight. The Thunder have 11.
OKC’s head and shoulders above the rest of the league in depth of talent.
It does put the Warriors’ accomplishment of nine into perspective, though.
Especially given the guys they’re adding to the rotation like Al Horford, who is still a plus contributor. And don’t forget De’Anthony Melton. If he comes back anything like the guy we saw two years ago, that’s a high-impact player on an incredibly team-friendly salary.
And here’s a really interesting thing:
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