The Knicks Are Breaking My Understanding of Basketball

The NBA's Shrinking Talent Gap

Here’s a take. We talk so much about this new NBA parity between teams that we’ve lost sight of a perhaps even more pronounced NBA trend: Parity between players.

In that vein, I appreciate how Sam Quinn of CBS Sports will often post interesting NBA ideas. After Game 1 of the Finals, he said the following:

I think in almost any sport, the gap between star-level players and median-level players tends to shrink over time. It’s certainly happening in the NBA. I think stars are better than they’ve ever been, but role players have improved more than stars have throughout NBA history.

I don’t think many people would disagree with this, yet it takes a while for the implications of what we observe to be absorbed. NBA conversation is nearly wholly dominated by discussion of superstars. A team victory is seen more as validation of a main character than it is a collective accomplishment.

And yet, this way of watching the NBA is hard to reconcile with the following New York Knicks fact: