Would some of the top players in the NBA still dominate the statistics if their teammates had the same amount of court time?

Abstract

The aim of this study was to manipulate scraped data from the NBA season 2012-2013 to determine if some athletes could statistically match the player with the largest amount of court time over the season’s statistics if they were to have had the same amount. The box-score statistics were analysed alongside a selection of adapted statistics. The same was a choice of 6 teams from the NBA, one of which being a team who won their division, whilst another was a team that did not have a strong season. The other 4 teams were chosen at random to analyse. The initial part of the analysis identified that the athletes that had the most amount of court time would dominate the offensive front with all athletes from each of the 6 teams still being highest on the points per game (field goals made) average regardless of whether their teammates had shared the same amount of court time. On the flipside of this, it also uncovered that some athletes would flourish in their defensive capabilities if they were given the chance. The weighted value of offensive and defensive outputs that players from the winning team indicated that their focus was aimed at defending better in each game than their opponents (0.15%), something in which the less successful team was unable to do falling below their opponents in both their offensive and defensive output. For that reason the theory from the study raised the question of whether defence is the key to any teams success and if that is the case, playing the athlete that scores the most points for the most minutes throughout the season may not be the best way for some teams to approach their season if they are not to have an athlete that can contribute hugely to both their offensive and defensive duties.