The Power of Parity

Stephon Marbury was credited with improving the Minnesota Timberwolves substantially this past year, the team going from 26 wins to 40 wins in one season. But what should be expected from a team that wins 32% of their games?

Looking at teams since the 1959-60 season, a typical team that wins 32% of their games should improve about 8% to 40%. In other words, any old team winning 26 games one year should win 33 games the next year. So the Wolves picked up 14 extra wins, but only half of them were in addition to what history says they should have won.

There have been three other teams that have improved by 14 or more games from a 26-56 record. None of those three were very memorable.

• Detroit Pistons, 1973. This Pistons team made an identical leap upwards behind Bob Lanier and Dave Bing, both of whom also contributed to the 26-56 team of '72. The Pistons had a new coach in 1973 who would take the team to 52 wins in 1974, only to fall pray to the power of parity in 1975, ending the season once again at 40-42. The coach would be fired midway through the following season as the Pistons stagnated around 0.500.
• Indiana Pacers, 1987. The second team to improve 14 or more games from a 26-56 record was the Indiana Pacers of 1987. I wrote about this team ten years ago because the team that won only 26 games was really just unusually unlucky. That team should have won about 33 games, but could not buy a break in close games. Then, in 1987, Rookie of the Year Chuck Person and new coach Jack Ramsay came along and the team improved to 41-41. With too much credit getting bestowed on Person, the Pacers declined in 1988 down to 38 wins.
• New Jersey Nets, 1992. Anyone familiar with the current state of the Nets knows that they didn't keep it up. The Nets of '92 were not led by a new coach -- Bill Fitch actually got fired after the season in favor of Chuck Daly. Nor was there a hot shot rookie leading them. Derrick Coleman was in his second year and the rookie on the club, Kenny Anderson, certainly could not be called a hot shot with his 39% shooting. The Nets' improvement was directly attributable to the late Drazen Petrovic. Petrovic would play one more season, bring New Jersey over the 0.500 mark, then die in a car accident. The following season, 1994, without Petrovic, the Nets would also break 0.500, then fall back to what we expect from the Nets in 1995, winning just 30 games. Interestingly, this decline corresponded with Chuck Daly's resignation to the broadcast booth.

This comparison does not say a whole lot for the Minnesota Timberwolves. Yes, their improvement was real behind the very talented Kevin Garnett, the raw-but-flashy Marbury, and the old man Tom Gugliotta, but teams that made the same kind of improvement had similar talent and really did not become great.

The T'Wolves are now a 0.500 club and it is much harder to improve from that record than from a 26-56 record. That is what the chart below demonstrates.

This chart shows how teams are pulled towards 0.500. Bad teams improve and good teams decline.

I plotted the chart this way because I think of a 0.500 record as a Well of Mediocrity, the point to which every team has a tendency to fall. The real bad teams at the left of the chart tend to improve by almost 12%; the real good teams at the right of the chart tend to decline by about 6%. The average teams, like the Wolves, tend to stay the same, drifting along with great "potential", achieving only mediocrity.

This is what the Minnesota Timberwolves face in their upcoming season. So many hopes of greatness, but a strong tendency to stay the same. I will look at the Wolves in more depth at the start of the NBA season because there are always reasons to believe that any one team will buck the trend....

...But are any of those reasons valid for the Wolves?