The NBA is entering a new era with LeBron James, Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh all playing on the same team as they are entering their primes. Never before in NBA history has there been a scenario like this, where arguably the very best player in the game (James) teams up with a player ranked from 2-4 (Wade).  These are not your garden variety superstars. The best passers in the league for their positions, and maybe the two best athletes in the league, they are unrivaled scorers and all-NBA first team defenders. They are very serious about their basketball. Toss in Bosh, arguably a top 10-15 player, also a great athlete just entering his prime, and it is clear we are truly entering uncharted territory.

This new Miami Heat regime also draws everyone?s attention to the Superstar Theory. Over the past few years it has become increasingly acknowledged that the key to winning an NBA championship, or even contending, is to have a genuine superstar in his prime as the best player on your team, ideally with one or two other players who would rank as top 15 in the league.

To give a simple overview of the Superstar Theory, it seems like almost always the team that wins the NBA championship ? and the other team that gets to the finals ? is led by a player who is one of the very best players in the history of the game, and a top three player in the league the year his team won the NBA title. There were only five times in the past 31 seasons that the NBA champion was not led by a player named Bird, Magic, Jordan, Olajuwon, Duncan, Shaq, or Kobe. And those other five teams were led by the likes of Moses Malone, Isiah Thomas and Kevin Garnett. Yikes, this is the high-rent district.

The Superstar Theory demolished the long-standing view that building a contender in the NBA was similar to doing so in major league baseball or the NFL: you collect a bunch of good players, have one or two all-stars, get a good coach and with experience you eventually can contend. This is the view held by most fans and sportswriters and even many GMs. The standard view on building a contender is comforting: it states that it takes good drafting and judgment, hard work and a little bit of luck, but every team has a shot. The Superstar Theory presented a cruel reality: the standard approach never ever led to an NBA championship. A genuine superstar is necessary to have even a prayer for a title. Since there are never more than a handful of genuine superstars in the league at a time, most teams are simply spinning their wheels. That truth obviously does not play well for NBA marketing campaigns in Indianapolis and Memphis.

Public relations aside, the importance of superstars in basketball, compared to other team sports, has always been understood implicitly. It is why the draft lottery was created, because teams had every reason to ?tank? if it gave them a good shot at getting the next Michael Jordan or LeBron James. The dominant superstars are almost always top-three draft choices, and as often as not are taken first overall. The great GMs like Red Auerbach and Jerry West were always planning years ahead to get their hands on the next great cornerstone superstar for their franchises. The mediocre GMs just hoped they got lucky. For years it was the college draft where teams got their hands on the superstar, and then they kept them through their careers. The ?Larry Bird? rule for the salary cap meant teams could outpay any other team to keep their superstars, and there was precious little superstar movement.

The maximum-salary rule installed a decade ago changed everything. Free agents now can get basically the same money with a new team as they can get by staying put. This was an unintended consequence of the maximum-salary provision, and it took until 2010 for the game?s greatest stars to figure out how to play this to their advantage. Barring a change in the Collective Bargaining Agreement in 2011, it will remain like this from now on. Consequently a single team is getting two extraordinary talents and one very good talent as the players enter their prime.

The Miami Heat are taking the Superstar Theory to its ultimate test. If the theory is right, evidence suggests we are looking at a team that should win, at the very least, four or five of the next six titles. The only factors that could derail them would be health, internal dissension, a new wave of young superstars, and the formation of other ?dynasty? teams laden with multiple superstars. Even competing superstar teams might not succeed, because it will be hard to match the James-Wade tandem with the other remaining stars.

In this essay I demonstrate how getting superstars is the key to contending and winning championships in the NBA. I then discuss how this helps us understand the Miami Heat?s present position and what this means for all the other teams in the league. I specifically look at all the instances where multiple superstars played on the same team, what I term ?dynasty? teams, and how those teams fared. If you are not a Heat fan, this is not a pretty picture. But the truth, as they say, will set you free, or at least help an NBA GM navigate a new route to contention in the suddenly much deeper waters.

The Superstar Theory is a matter I have been researching for several years. Two years ago I published a three-part article on the topic. The response was positive, including from people in and around the NBA. I also received some valuable criticism, so I have significantly refined and recalibrated the data. I tightened the argument so that the case is considerably more muscular now. If anything, by doing so the relationship between having a superstar and winning an NBA title is made that much stronger. The implications for how to build an NBA team could not be more dramatic.

In short, the most important exercise for any GM is to plot to get at least one superstar. Everything else is secondary. If your team?s GM is not doing that, if he is not always plotting to do that, he is not serious about winning an NBA title. He is getting your team further from the goal, not closer.

My exercise is simple: First, I make a list of the very best players in NBA history over the past 54 years, or since the MVP award was introduced in 1956. I use objective criteria, not my personal opinion. I want the list to be made based upon regular-season performance, to avoid having a list of best players that rewards players for playing on championship teams.

Once I locate a list of the top NBA players over the past 54 years, I figure out who the two best players have been on each NBA champion, and the best player on each team that lost in the finals, and on the other two teams that lost each year in the conference finals. In other words I determine the best players on each of the NBA?s ?final four? every season, as well as the second best player on the championship team. I then see how many of these best players are from the list of best regular-season players, and where on the list they can be found. The results are astounding.

The context for the superstar theory has changed with the addition of James and Bosh to Wade at Miami. It is like nuclear weapons have been introduced to what had been conventional warfare. So after laying out the hard evidence for the superstar theory and its implications, I take a look at what it tells us about what to expect from the Miami Heat, and how the rest of the NBA will adjust. We are entering a new era, one that can only be altered by a new CBA in 2011. At any rate, no matter what happens in the new CBA, the next six years in NBA history are going to be defined by the Miami Heat.

Part One: Determining the Best NBA Players since 1956

Who are the best players in NBA history? How can we determine it, without it becoming a battle of subjective opinions? In particular, for our purposes, we want to determine the best players in NBA regular season history. If we have a system that rewards players for playoff performances my overall argument will be circular, because players on championship teams will be far more likely to be at the top of the list of best players.

I have tracked down the four most objective criteria I could find. The value of each of these is that they are determined every year immediately after the regular season and before the playoffs. I want this list to be based on the best judgment at the time, not on hindsight. None of these is perfect, but they are as objective a standard as we can hope to find that can extend back over 54 years. In a weighted combination, they will give us our list of superstars.

The first and by far the most important criterion is the MVP voting, because this is done explicitly to select the best players in the league for the season. Its strength is that it does not care about positions, so if the best players are all centers, they can get the most votes. The weakness is that players may get privileged a bit too much for regular-season team success, over their actual performance. I have gone through every MVP vote since the award was introduced in 1956 and allocated points to players on the following system:

MVP:

MVP: 16 points

MVP 2nd: 14 points

MVP 3rd: 12 points

MVP 4th: 10 points

MVP 5th: 8 points

MVP 6th-10th: 6 points

MVP 11th-15th: 4 points

So if a player wins two MVPs, finishes third in the MVP voting one time, and finishes 7th and 12th on two other occasions, that player would get 54 MVP points.

The second criterion is all-NBA teams. There were first and second all-NBA teams until 1989, when a third team was added. Because the league has so many more teams in recent decades I do not think it unfair to include the third team all-NBA team in this study. The strength of these all-NBA teams is that they tend even more than the MVP to reward players independent of a team?s success. The weakness of the all-NBA teams is that they are determined by position. This means that only one center can make first-team. We have seen the absurd situation of a center like Bill Russell or Dave Cowens winning the MVP award yet making second-team all-NBA. The all-NBA teams cannot accurately reflect how bigs dominate the sport. Great players like Nate Thurmond and Bob Lanier never made first or second team all-NBA in their careers, yet they often finished in the top 10 of MVP voting.

Likewise, there are periods where there are three truly great forwards or three truly great guards in the game, but only two can get first-team status. When healthy, for example, Wade, Kobe Bryant and Chris Paul are all top 5 players, but only two can make first-team all-NBA.

The scoring is pretty straight forward.

All-NBA:

First team all-NBA: 10 points

Second team all-NBA: 6 points

Third team all-NBA: 4 points

The third criterion is the first and second all-Defense teams, which the NBA introduced in 1968-69. I decided to add this because the NBA wisely understood that its standard all-NBA team tended to favor players with impressive offensive statistics, even though great defensive players won many games in their own way. I give the all-defensive teams much less weight than all-NBA teams, but I suspect I give it more weight than many other observers would. Defense is half the game, and all-NBA teams do not tend to give it anywhere near half-weight.

All-Defense:
First team all-Defense: 4 points

Second-team all-Defense: 3 points

Because the all-defensive teams did not begin until 1969, I retroactively estimated how players who made these teams after 1969 but who had much or most of their careers before 1969 would have done had the all-defensive teams gone back to 1956. This way players like Russell, West, Havlicek, Chamberlain, Gus Johnson, and Thurmond were not slighted in the rankings. (I put an asterisk their all-defensive figures to indicate they include my estimates.)

I give an additional 2 points for the player selected Defensive Player of the Year. This award honors the truly dominant game-changing defenders, who were insufficiently recognized by merely being first-team all-Defense. Because this award began in 1982-83, I retroactively award points for it to players who would have been likely winners between 1956-1982. That means: Bill Russell, Jerry West, Wilt Chamberlain, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Bill Walton and Dennis Johnson. (Again, where my estimates are added to the real totals, I use parentheses.)  

So if a player makes the first-team all-Defense twice and second-team once, he gets 11 all-defense team points. If he was Defensive Player of the Year once, he gets 2 more points, for a grand total of 13.

Finally, I give a single point for every year a player makes an NBA All-Star team for the mid-season game.

Using these criteria, I tabulated a point total for every player in the league since 1956, assigning points for every time a player got one of these honors. (Thanks to the extraordinary Basketball-Reference.com, this is not such an arduous task.) The more times a player gets in the top 15 in MVP balloting and the more times a player makes all-NBA and all-Defense teams, and plays in the all-star game, the more points a player will accrue. The most points a player could get in a single season is 33: MVP (16 points), first-team all-NBA (10 points), first-team all-Defense (4 points), Defensive player of the year (2 points), and the all-star game (1 point). In 2010 LeBron James, for example, racked up 31 points.

One might quibble with how I weighted the categories, but after considerable debate and input this is the best I could do. I will say that after playing with these numbers for some time, the actual ranking does not change very much if the weighting of these four categories is altered. It is pretty much the same cast of characters in pretty much the same order.

There were a few issues I needed to sort out along the way. First, I decided not to include the ABA, because to do so would mean that there would be almost double the points given for players in the years from around 1968 to 1976, and that would give players from that era an unfair dominance in the rankings. At the same time, to not include those MVPs and all-ABA awards would disadvantage tremendous players like Julius Erving and Rick Barry who spent years dominating that league. They would have certainly dominated the NBA had they been in the NBA during those same years.

I solved this problem by doing the ranking not by the total number of points accrued during a career, but rather by taking a player?s total number of points and dividing it by the number of seasons they played at least 1,900 minutes. (I also counted as seasons years in which they played less than 1,900 minutes, if they were seasons in which the player still received points for all-NBA teams or top-15 MVP votes or if the player averaged at least 28 minutes per game for a minimum of 55 games.) That way the rankings are based on yearly averages rather than total points and do not penalize players who had fewer seasons in the league because of the ABA. It still clobbers Dr. J and Barry because they had monster years in the ABA that would have raised their averages, but it does not clobber them as much as if we simply used raw totals.

Using season averages as the basis of rankings also has the beneficial effect of not penalizing players like Bob Cousy or Bill Sharman or Dolph Schayes who had several great years before 1956.

Most important, by basing it on yearly averages rather than total points, it means we can slot active young superstars right in the heart of the list. They do not need to play ten years to get on the list. That makes it much more useful for the evaluation I do later in the piece. We can see who the real up-and-coming studs are. (Active players are bold-faced.) Most young stars like Paul, James, Howard and Wade will see their averages shoot up in their late 20s as they rack up several 20-plus point seasons in a row. If a player fails to make this list by 25 or 26, it is unlikely they will ever be a superstar. You usually know if you have a superstar very early in his career.

24 of the 101 players on this list are active players, though most are north of 30.

What follows is the list, then, of the 101 best regular season players in the NBA since 1956. Why 101? I cut it off with players who averaged at least 4.0 points per season for their qualifying years. A player who averages 4.0 points per season is someone who over the course of his career is getting regular recognition as one of the 15 best players in the league a majority of his years in the league. That is the ante for admission.

This may seem like an easy target for a player to achieve, but it is not. Only 101 players made the cut. A lot of very good players, perennial all-stars, did not make the cut. Even the number 101 is misleading, because 12 of them had short careers usually for health reasons. Only 89 of the players on this list had seven qualifying seasons. That is the heart of the list.

In the list of 101 there is a huge drop-off from the top to the bottom. Therefore, I break the 101 superstars into four groups: the platinum medal superstars, the gold medal superstars; the silver medal superstars and the bronze medal superstars. By doing so we can see who among the superstars are carrying the most weight.

There are two major problems with basing the list on annual averages rather then career totals points: First, players with short but productive careers get favored over players with longer and almost as productive careers. This would distort the list. Without some qualification, Bill Walton would rank as the very best player in NBA history, because for two seasons Bill Walton was unstoppable. But does anyone think Bill Walton is the best player in NBA history?

So I solved this problem by making the number of qualifying seasons at seven for a player to make the top of the list. Those players whose annual totals qualify but who do not have seven qualifying seasons, like Bill Walton, are on the list, but they are ranked after those players who did have seven qualifying seasons.

I keep active players in the main list, under the assumption that they will all eventually get seven qualifying seasons. No reason to penalize their ranking.

Second, players who extended their careers into their late 30s see their season averages decline, and this pushes them down the list below where they would have been had they retired on their 36th birthday. Does anyone really think Michael Jordan was any less a dominant superstar from 1984-98 because he came back for two seasons as he approached 40?

I solved this problem by not including as seasons those years players played after their 36th birthday, unless they were seasons in which the player received some MVP or all-NBA points by my above categories; in other words, seasons with over 1,900 minutes counted for players over 36 as long as the players were in or near their primes. Players like Jordan, Kareem, Ewing and Havlicek are not penalized for having such long careers.

Even with these qualifications, I do not think the list is perfect. There are players not on this list who I think are better than some of the players on it, especially toward the bottom. Some of the druggies who make the list from the 70s and 80s seem out of place. But that is unavoidable. Part of the problem is that the four categories I use are not perfect. The voters are far from perfect. Players get penalized when they play in the same era as other great players at their position. Some players are dominant for a handful of years, like Moses Malone or Dave Cowens or Hakeem Olajuwon, and their career averages do not demonstrate exactly how incredible they were for their peak years.

That said, this list is as objective as it gets using the available resources.

Nor do I think this can be regarded as statistically the final word: that, for example, Larry Bird is necessarily a better player than Magic Johnson because he has a higher score.

Nevertheless, I think we can use this system to separate these players from the other really good players in NBA history and the balance of the league, and then among these 101 players, to create four general clusters: platinum medal, gold medal, silver medal, and bronze medal superstars.

The 101 Greatest Players in NBA History since 1956:

COMMENT: I made the platinum medal cut-off at averaging 20 points per season. Only 10 players in NBA history since 1956 qualify, 11 if one includes Bill Walton, who basically owned the NBA for two seasons in the late 1970s. They are the NBA?s Mount Rushmore, the legends of the game. Pettit is unknown to all but the old-timers, but he was a dominant player in his era. These players basically ranked as among the top three-five players in the game virtually their entire careers, or until injuries took their toll as with Bird and Robinson. They were invariably MVP candidates every year. They personify the term ?franchise? player.

COMMENT:  This rounds out the NBA top 25 since 1956, counting the players with at least seven qualifying seasons. I made the cut-off for gold-medal status at 13 points, because a player who averages that during his career is basically going first-team all-NBA and/or getting top 10 MVP votes a majority of the years when they are healthy. They are among the seven or eight best players in the league throughout much of their career. Many of these guys gave multi-year stretches where they are arguably the best players in the league. Don?t let the presence of Bryant and James at the top of this list confuse you. They will both be joining the platinum ranks in the next year or two. Howard will shoot to the top of this gold medal group, and has a chance to make the platinum list. Their places will be taken by active players like Wade, Paul and Durant from the silver-medal list the follows forthwith.

COMMENT: This group rounds out the NBA top 52 since 1956, not counting the players with under seven qualifying seasons. Generally the silver medal players, averaging between 7 and 13 points per season, were first or second team all-NBA much of their careers and received frequent recognition in MVP voting. During much of their careers, these are players who would be considered among the 10 best in the league. Several of the silver medal players have periods in their careers when they rank in the top 3-5 in the league; they simply do not have this status extend for their entire careers, like the gold and platinum medal superstars. These are all sure-fire Hall-of Famers, legends, and all-time greats who had stellar careers. Note that in the silver medal group, and the bronze medal group that follows, are a handful of the drug casualties from the 1970s and early 1980s. Some of those guys probably would be gold medal stars had they not been leveled by the white powder.

COMMENT:  Here, too, we see a list of Hall-of-Famers and legends though there is a notable drop from the platinum, gold and silver medal categories. Averaging at least 4.0 points means that these players all got recognition annually of being among the 15 best players in the game during a majority of their careers.

So there we have as close to an objective list of the best players in the NBA since 1956 as I can imagine.

To provide some sense of how elite this list is, consider this: Fully 20 NBA players from the post 1956 era who have been inducted in the Basketball Hall of Fame did not qualify for this list. Twenty! It is true that some of these 20 Hall-of-Famers were inducted as much for the college careers as pro careers, like Bill Bradley, but that Hall of Fame list includes NBA stalwarts like Adrian Dantley, Bailey Howell, Calvin Murphy, Gail Goodrich,  Dan Issel and Earl Monroe.

Or consider this: Since 1956, some 340 different players have qualified to play in the annual mid-season NBA all-star game. To discount players who may have made the team on a fluke, there have been some 235 players who made the NBA All-Star game at least twice in their careers since 1956. Yet around 60 percent of those wonderful multiple all-star players do not qualify for this list. Nine players who have made the NBA All-Star team at least seven times ? e.g. Ray Allen, James Worthy, Lenny Wilkens, Jack Sikma, Robert Parish, JoJo White and Vince Carter ? do not make the cut for this Glorious 101 list.

This is rarified air, and this is where you must go if you want to find the key to winning NBA championships. You are about to discover there is an enormous difference between having the best player on your team being led by a genuine superstar than one or two very good all-stars, much more than you might have imagined.

Part II: Who are the Best Players on Championship and Contending Teams?

In Part I, I established a list of the 101 best players in the NBA since 1956. This was done based upon regular season performances. Now we want to make a list of the very best players on the 54 NBA champions since 1956. To fill out the analysis and to see what patterns emerge we will also determine the very best player on the team that lost in the finals and the two teams that lost in the conference finals every year. (In other words, the best players on each of the NBA?s ?final four? teams every season.)

Finally, we will also determine the 2nd best player on the championship team every year to see what patterns emerge. So altogether, I am making five selections for every season since 1956-57.
   
I used the MVP vote standings, rather than my own opinion, to pick a winner in every case where possible. In most cases it was a no-brainer without even relying upon the MVP data. Sometimes MVP data was not helpful and I had to use my own judgment, using team statistics from the season. There was one truly difficult decision: who was the best player on the 1990 Pistons? Isiah Thomas or Joe Dumars? In every respect they were almost identical. After consulting a few Pistons aficionados, I went with Isiah, but it was basically a coin toss. It has no bearing on the overall findings.

Now that we have determined who the best players have been on the NBA?s ?final four? teams for the past 54 years we get to the fun part: seeing how many of these players rank on the super-elite list of superstars complied in part one. I hope you are sitting down.

Platinum Medal Superstars

Gold Medal Superstars

Silver Medal Superstars

Bronze Medal Superstars

Ponder this above chart for a few moments. The implications are so striking, they approach being self-evident.

Click here to read the Conclusion of this article.