Let me run an idea by you which I think helps to frame this question. It has to do with soccer; actually, the difference between soccer and basketball.
MG 10:45
This idea comes from two economists named David Sally and Chris Anderson who wrote a really great book a couple years ago about soccer called The Numbers Game.
MG 10:55
One of the questions they asked was what matters more if you want to build a great soccer team, how good your best player is or how good your worst player is? And their answer was, “In soccer, what matters is how good your worst player is.”
DS 11:09
Soccer is a game where if you get a single goal, if you just happen to be lucky, that goal may hold up.
DS 11:17
And so, mistakes turn out to be a very important part of soccer as a team sport. That leads you to think about, well, mistakes more often happen, are more often produced by weaker players on the pitch.
MG 11:29
Sally's argument goes like this. A soccer team has 11 players on the field at any one time. Suppose one is a superstar and your worst player is maybe only 45% as good as the superstar.
Because soccer is a sport where everyone on the field depends on everyone else, that 45% player can make one mistake and completely negate the skill of the best player.
CA 11:53
You could have 8 beautiful passes in a row, but if your worst player, your 45% player, botches the ninth, then all the previous 8 beautiful passes are all wasted.
DS 12:03
That's right and because of the nature of soccer, the, that, these 8 beautiful passes may have only increased your likelihood of victory by a small percent but then it goes right back to zero because somebody turns the ball over.
MG 12:17
Sally and Anderson did a statistical analysis. They looked at the top soccer clubs in Europe and showed that, if those teams upgraded their poorest players instead of their best players, they would score more goals and win more games, a lot more. Soccer is a weakling game.
DS 12:34
Yes, having a better superstar was of, course, better but actually having a better end of the bench or eleventh guy on the pitch was actually more influential to whether you won matches or not.
MG 12:46
Which would be the exact opposite of basketball?
DS 12:49
Yeah, basketball is probably the opposite and the continuum from... If you think about soccer as maybe the weakest link sport; basketball is probably the most superstar driven team sport that we have.
MG 13:01
Even the greatest basketball teams often have one and sometimes even two players who are barely better than mediocre. What matters in basketball is not how good your fifth player is, it's how good your superstar is. It's a strong link game.
MG 13:16
Think about Lionel Messi, maybe the greatest soccer player of his generation, versus Michael Jordan, the greatest basketball player his generation.
DS 13:25
What Jordan could do on a basketball court was Jordan could guarantee, or virtually guarantee, that he could get the ball; you couldn't really stop him, right? He could go to the back court, pick up the ball, he could dribble it forward, he could break double teams, you could try to send three guys at him, but then you're really, you're really opening yourself up, he could go and get a shot.
DS 13:47
Leo Messi is so good that sometimes, rare times, where, in fact, he can dribble the length of the pitch. But the fact is that he, he, he, he, in most instances, he really can't. He needs to be, he needs those eight beautiful passes to set him up and then he can do something amazingly transcendent with it.
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