What's a Superstar?

When I was growing up in the late 80s, and 90s, I remember the word "Superstar" being reserved for guys like Michael, Magic, Larry, Chuck, Isiah, Hakeem, Ewing, David Robinson, and the like. Now all of these guys have retired and we have a new crop of "superstars." If you ask the average NBA fan who the superstars of the league are, the immediate response would probably be Kobe, LeBron, Shaq, T-Mac, D-Wade, KG, AI, Melo, Vince, and Dirk. These are the guys all over all the commercials. These are the high flying, 30 point a game, sneaker selling, coke drinking, commercial superstars. There are others who lack such a suave soubriquet: Steve Nash, Tim Duncan and Jason Kidd, among others. But are these guys really superstars on the court, or just on Sportscenter and in the collective imaginations of fans of athletic, Jordanesque dunks and Magic-esque no-look passes?

So who are the real superstars, and why?

Jordan was not a superstar because of his ability to dunk. If that were the case, Vince Carter would be the biggest star in the NBA. Nor was he a star because he scored a lot of points (Kobe does that night in and night out, so does T-Mac, Melo, et. all). You often hear the phrase "Well Jordan made the other players on his team better." Uh what does that even mean? Maybe that's what a superstar does? Can that even be observed? Quantified? Made intelligible in any humanly way?

One person might try to argue that a player's ability to get his teammates involved in scoring due to his own playmaking skill is an indicator of superstardom. Well... sort of. It's really nice when a player of any position can rack up some assists. It shows his ability to find the open man or to create a situation where another player is able to score easily. It's surely not an exclusive or exhaustive indicator, though. Jordan only averaged 5.3 assists for his career.

Another might simply argue that when a player puts up gaudy scoring numbers (since there really is just ONE stat in basketball: points), then he is a superstar. It's a pretty simple indicator, but it's certainly suggestive of a player's skill, right? This year, 8 guys in the NBA averaged 25 ppg or more. Of those, 6 played on teams that ended up on the playoffs. Hey, that's pretty good right? Of course, only 1 of them is even still playing (LeBron).

Anyway, enough sophistry. I think (qualitatively) that a superstar can be both or neither. A superstar makes his team better by shouldering a great deal of responsibility with great efficiency. This means the player scores frequently when he tries to. This means the player does not make many bad decisions with the ball (ie take bad shots or turn it over). This means the player does what he can to produce points for his teammates by finding the open man, or crashing the offensive boards consistently and efficiently.

AI is a really good basketball player, and very few people in the world can do what he does on the court, but while he scores 27 a night, he basically does it at the league average in efficiency. Does he really do any more for his team if he scores 30 points a night at 106 efficiency (league average this year) than 2 other guys who score 15 a night at 106 efficiency? Well maybe. The idea that he can score 30 a night certainly plays into the minds of opposing players. Defenders do have to converge on him when he penetrates the lane because he is so quick, opening up easier shots to others, etc. But from a purely numerical point of view, there isn't such a big difference. If you have 5 guys on the floor who score 30, 20, 15, 15, 10 a night, each at 106 efficiency, then you have a team scoring 90 that is a completely average offense. Congratulations, and enjoy the lottery or the first round of the playoffs.

Jordan had 7 seasons with over 120 efficiency (with 105-108 league average), and a career average of 118. Magic had 6 years over 120 and a career average of 121. Larry had 2 years over 120 and a career average of 115. Barkley had 5 seasons over 120 and a career average of 119. The point? These guys (and others listed, but go look up their numbers on your own at basketball-reference.com) were so much better than their contemporaries that they could handle a substantial load of possessions per game (25-30%) and still basically score at will.

So this brings me to a current question: who are the real superstars in the NBA right now?

Kobe's never had a season over 120 efficiency, and he's never had to carry a burden any greater than Jordan did. To be fair, though, Kobe is well above the league average and is a really good player. But I don't think he can really be spoken of in the same sentence as Jordan just because of some gaudy scoring numbers. He is not nearly the player Jordan was. Maybe if his teammates can stay healthy, we'll see Kobe have a little easier time. Maybe not. Even with Shaq he was not nearly as efficient as Jordan was before Pippen.

I love LeBron, but so far you aren't talking about a guy who is just absolutely dominating his peers like Jordan, Magic, Bird or Chuck did. He steadily increased from one year to the next until this year, and after some recent comments ("This is just basketball"), you have to wonder if his heart is really in it. Nevertheless, LeBron was about as efficient as Kobe was this season (114). His team isn't nearly as good without him. I guess that counts right? LeBron could be "The Next Big Thing" but, in my opinion, he's still working on that career defining break-out season.

Dwyane Wade can't spell his name right despite 4 years of college, but he is a pretty damn good player. About as efficient as LeBron or Kobe (112 this year, probably slightly depressed due to his shoulder injury). He carried his team through to a championship last year after being down 2-0. He isn't the dominant force that Jordan was, but I don't think there's much of a debate as to whether Wade is currently a superstar or not. Bright future here. But I wonder what the Cavs would have been like if Shaq went there?

KG, though mired on a terrible team in a terrible franchise, has always been a fantastic player on both sides of the ball. Amare is one of the most efficient players in the NBA offensively, as is Steve Nash. Dirk is also fantastically efficient. These guys don't spring to mind as quickly as Kobe or LeBron or D-Wade, but may very well be better or more valuable players (though Dirk has a pretty huge monkey on his back at this point). And even though Chauncey Billups consumes probably about 10 possessions less than Kobe per-40 minutes, he's now working on his 3rd straight 120+ season over in Detroit.

Melo, AI, T-Mac, and Vince are all fighting to earn their superstardom but continue to fail.

Melo and AI had a good chance to knock off the Spurs, but why did they lose? The Spurs made less mistakes, and executed on offense better. In other words, they were more efficient. The Nuggets were erratic, excitable, and ultimately just not as good. Yet Melo and AI are supposedly two of the league's best, so what gives? Well, maybe they haven't quite earned those labels yet (sad since Iverson has been around for 10 years now). The better label (at least for Iverson at this point) is the overactive scorer who puts up deceptively valuable raw numbers at the expense of the team's efficiency.

Some "experts" argued that T-Mac should have been MVP this year. What? The guy who has never led a team past the first round, and who had a flat average (106) offensive efficiency this year on a team with a legit center to help draw defenders is MVP? Yao had a 111 efficiency, and Battier contributed his part as the very efficient role player (119), but McGrady could not manage more than league average. The point here is that T-Mac was probably an overall good player to have on Houston, but he also probably cost them a lot of games that, say, D-Wade or LeBron might not have (or, of course, Jordan).

Vince Carter is an unfortunate case. He's a fantastic athlete and maybe the best dunker ever. He went to Carolina and stayed 3 years. He came out and immediately started scoring big (27.6 by his 3rd year). Sounds familiar right? Nope, sadly for Vince, his career has largely been average since its early heights in Toronto. Once he quit on his team and forced a trade to Jersey, he was mildly above average. I have questions as to how good he would have been without Kidd, but nevertheless. The point is, Vince is not a very efficient player at all, and epitomizes the "posterize-ability" quality that seems to define contemporary superstars.

There's a reason that the most well known NBA superstars are largely not playing by even the conference semi-finals: they are, largely, not as good as billed. No one in the League is currently the next Jordan or the next Magic or the next Bird. Maybe it's an indicator that there are more good players now and that the kind of domination that Jordan or Magic exhibited doesn't happen anymore... or it could be that what sells is not what wins and that Jordan and Magic were pretty unique players, the likes of which we are not going to see again for some time, or ever.

Maybe we should just christen the 80s and 90s the era of the Superstar. Now the superstar is extinct, and we have the era of team-basketball ruling now. The best teams? Dallas, Phoenix, San Antonio, Detroit are all teams built around a number of very, very good players who play very, very well together - but none of them have a superstar like Jordan. The Superstar is extinct.