basketball

after reading this article by john hollinger about the rockets (it talks about the options they have with yao still injured), it got me thinking.

for the western conference semi-finals, the rockets still managed to beat the lakers twice without yao, mcgrady, or mutumbo.  as hollinger points out, they had $25 million in salaries going up against the lakers' $75 million.

now, what if the rockets, or any team for that matter, built a team without superstars?  ie. they have no max-level contract players?  so, rather than have mcgrady for $20 million, they have 2 or 3 players with the same money?

if you figure the salary cap is $59 million and each team can have 15 players, that works out to $3.93 million per player.  let's just say $4 million per.  that's actually a decent amount.  it's not too far below the mid-level exception of $5.58 million.

so, let's say for the top 8 players on the team, you give slightly more than the mid-level: $6 million.  that totals $48 million.  then you split the remaining $11 million with the last 7 players, or about $1.5 million each.  with the top 8 players, you have the starting 5, plus the backup point, wing (SG/SF), and post (PF/C).

(or, give the top 5 players $7 million, the next 3 $6 million, the next 3 $1 million, the last 4 $750k.)

what this does is two things:

1) it creates insurance.  if one or two or three players are injured, you have a just-as-capable backup there and aren't totally screwed.  similarly, if one of the players blows up and another team gives him a huge contract, again, you aren't totally screwed.

2) it has flexibility.  if you have an internal "player cap" of $6 million, you will never be stuck with an untradeable contract (unless you really overpaid for that player, which is hard to do with a $6 million contract).  a bunch of $6 million and $1.5 million contracts are easier to move than a big $20 million one.

so, while you might not be able to put a super-awesome starting 5 on the floor, if you draft/bid well, you could put a decent product on the floor at all times - regardless of injury.  and if you had 8 players that were all very good players (but no superstars) ... it still might be able to beat out the teams with 1 or 2 superstars and cheap role players.  you'd be able to rotate your players in and give people rest while the other team leans on its superstars and wear them out. 

personally, after the last few years of following the rockets (and wizards) ... i'm jaded on superstars.  in most cases, if your main star gets injured, you're basically a lottery team.  the rockets have been pretty much without a superstar during the entire yao/mcgrady era (the two players combined have played only about 50% of their games over their careers), and because their team and payroll is more balanced, they still manage to almost always get in the playoffs. 

the pistons are another good example (not counting the past year).  they had 5 players that were all very strong and no one had a max level contract.  during that time they managed to get to the eastern conference finals or further like 6 times in a row from 2002-2008, even winning one title in the process.

or, an even more extreme example would be to have your top 10 players all be at the mid-level.  that'd total $55 .8 million, then give the last 5 players about $640k each.  and then go with bill simmons and malcolm gladwell's idea about having a full-court press team.  have your starting 5 play a more traditional style, and have players 6-10 play something totally opposite, like the full-court press. 

back when people used to play street fighter 2 in the arcades, my brother an i used to both play guile, but we had very different styles.  when we'd play other people, one of us would go first.  then the other one would play the second round.  then whichever of us did better would take the third round (if it came to that).  it worked really well.  i think it'd make sense to do that for basketball, too. 

heck, you could go super extreme and have 15 players all making $4 million per year and have 3 teams-of-five with very different strategies.  and then rotate them in each for 16 minutes (for a total of 48 minutes).  so each team would get 1 and a third quarters to play.  and since each team-of-five would only need to play 16 minutes, they could go 110% all out. 

the main problem with this idea, though, is that players like to play a lot of minutes.  if everyone only got 16 minutes, they'd be pretty unhappy.  the two team idea works better because you could probably give the starting 5 about 30 minutes each, and the full-court 5 about 18 minutes each.