Researchers looking at basketball, soccer, and baseball found that more talent can hurt the team:
In each sport, they calculated both the percentage of top talent on each team and the teams’ success over several years. For example, they identified top NBA talent using each player’s Estimated Wins Added (EWA), a statistic commonly employed to capture a player’s overall contribution to his team, along with selection for the All-star tournament. Once the researchers determined who the elite players were, they calculated top-talent percentage at the team level by dividing the number of star players on the team by the total number of players on that team. Finally, team performance was measured by the team’s win-loss record over 10 years.
For both basketball and soccer, they found that top talent did in fact predict team success, but only up to a point. Furthermore, there was not simply a point of diminishing returns with respect to top talent, there was in fact a cost. Basketball and soccer teams with the greatest proportion of elite athletes performed worse than those with more moderate proportions of top level players.
Why is too much talent a bad thing? Think teamwork. In many endeavors, success requires collaborative, cooperative work towards a goal that is beyond the capability of any one individual. Even Emmitt Smith needed effective blocking from the Cowboy offensive line to gain yardage. When a team roster is flooded with individual talent, pursuit of personal star status may prevent the attainment of team goals. The basketball player chasing a point record, for example, may cost the team by taking risky shots instead of passing to a teammate who is open and ready to score.
Two related findings by Swaab and colleagues indicate that there is in fact tradeoff between top talent and teamwork. First, Swaab and colleagues found that the percentage of top talent on a team affects intrateam coordination. For the basketball study, teams with the highest levels of top performers had fewer assists and defensive rebounds, and lower field-goal percentages. These failures in strategic, collaborative play undermined the team’s effectiveness. The second revealing finding is that extreme levels of top talent did not have the same negative effect in baseball, which experts have argued involves much less interdependent play. In the baseball study, increasing numbers of stars on a team never hindered overall performance. Together these findings suggest that high levels of top talent will be harmful in arenas that require coordinated, strategic efforts, as the quest for the spotlight may trump the teamwork needed to get the job done.
This also applies in business, they suggest.
I think the source of the basketball effect is quite particular: it results from the pairing of elite 6 9″-and-under penetrators. It’s like this:
1) All 6’9″-and-under superstars are elite off-the-dribble penetrators. Being exceptionally good at getting to the basket is necessary and sufficient to be a superstar.
2) Some of these guys can shoot (Durant), some can’t (Wade). Some can play D, some can’t; some can pass, some can’t. It is penetration that’s the distinguishing factor.
3) To penetrate you need the ball in your hands.
4) Since there’s only one ball, penetrating players substitute for one another.
5) In contrast, 3-point-shooting complements penetration; and defense and rebounding are neither substitutes nor complements; more D and rebounding is always good.
Concretely, the Spurs have two stars, one penetrator (Parker) and one bigman (Duncan). And their “non-stars” like Leonard and Green are elite 3-point-shooters, defenders and rebounders (for their positions).
There are many more examples.
But I think the explanation for their findings isn’t that too much talent is bad; it’s that certain kinds of talent are substitutes; and since, for non-big men, the ability to penetrate is superstardom, that’s that.
The effect would vanish if you didn’t have idiots running teams like the Knicks and Nets.
Oh, and if my explanation (complements/substitutes) is right, and their explanation (kumbaya chemistry) is wrong, then I doubt we’ll see the “too much talent” effect is many other contexts.
Brains are more flexible than bodies. If Bob Noyce takes over what Gordon Moore was doing before, I think you can still find work that’s more useful for Moore than the NBA equivalent of stashing the 28% 3-point-shooting D. Wade in a corner.