The NBA is a Superstar League, Right?
Basketball, whether at the NBA level or any other, is structured to highlight individual greatness.
Some sports, like football or soccer, include significantly more participants active at once than basketball, diluting one player’s impact. In hockey, even the best players can play for approximately one-third of the game. In baseball, the stars may or may not come to the plate — or be available to pitch — in critical situations.
Basketball stars play the vast majority of games, and there’s no limit to the time the ball can be in their hands. The result is a sport where superstars have an outsized impact on the sport and the discourse around it.
The recent trade of Luka Doncic is an excellent example. The Dallas Mavericks' decision to move on from their superstar shocked the NBA and caused Mavs fans to hold a ‘funeral’ for Doncic.
As important as these top players are, they may cast too much of a shadow over other important aspects of NBA team building.
This research seeks to shed some light on the importance of players with a far lower profile than superstars by assessing how important elite strong play is to team success.
The Benches of 21st Century NBA Champions
Our first step was looking at recent champions and seeing what they got from their benches.
The metric we’re zeroing in on here is net rating because it gives us a comprehensive summary of how non-starters performed instead of zeroing in on one facet of the game, like scoring or rebounding.
Looking at the last 25 NBA champions, they tended to get solid net ratings from their bench that ranked in the league's upper tier. Here is a summary:
An average net rating of +1.7 might not seem tremendous, but when a team outscores its opposition with players who are not starters, that’s an excellent sign. In many cases, teams lose those minutes by a significant margin.
In this sample of 25 NBA champions, just three had negative net ratings from their benches during the regular season, and nearly half were in the top three in the NBA.
In 22 of 25 cases, the champs ranked 12th or betting in bench net rating during the regular season, though it’s notable that they topped the leaderboard just four times (2001-02 Los Angeles Lakers, 2006-07 San Antonio Spurs, 2013-14 San Antonio Spurs, and 2023-24 Boston Celtics).
The rare champions that had poorly performing benches during the regular season all made notable adjustments to the situation to aid their playoff runs:
- 2000-01 Los Angeles Lakers: The Lakers didn’t make any significant in-season additions, but they radically shortened the bench during their playoff run. During the regular season, five bench players averaged at least 11 minutes per game over 35 games or more. During the playoffs, that dropped to just two — Robert Horry and Brian Shaw. Limiting bench exposure is a risky strategy as it can overtax the starters, but this Lakers team was so dominant it went 15-1 in the playoffs to avoid long series and possible fatigue issues.
- 2018-19 Toronto Raptors: Like the Lakers, the Raptors shortened their bench in the playoffs using just three players — Fred VanVleet, Serge Ibaka, and Norman Powell — more than five minutes per fame. The notable name there was Ibaka, who was primarily a starter during the regular season but transitioned to a bench role when the team added star center Marc Gasol in February. That major trade strengthened both the starting lineup and the bench.
- 2022-23 Denver Nuggets: The Nuggets had the 29th-ranked bench net rating in the NBA during the regular season but also did some bench shortening. In the regular season, nine bench players averaged at least 10 minutes per game, while in the playoffs, only three saw more than five minutes of action per contest — Bruce Brown, Jeff Green, and Christian Braun. It’s also notable that Brown had a breakout playoff run that earned him a deal worth $45 million. Even with that surprising effort, Denver’s bench net rating in the playoffs was a middling +0.7 — sixth in the 16-team playoff field.
