A pair of researchers analyzed nearly thirty thousand NBA games, David Epstein explains (in Inside the Box), in an attempt to discern the impact on a team when a star player is temporarily absent:
Pre-injury, when a star was present, he acted as a hub, receiving the ball much more often than other players. When the star was sidelined with an injury, the other players were forced to try new strategies. They started passing the ball around more, and shot attempts became more evenly distributed. When the star returned from injury, the team’s strategy went only partly back to normal. The nonstar players continued to spread the ball to one another more than before and the teams improved their winning percentage upon the star’s return compared to before the injury.
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In his book Anatomy of a Breakthrough, New York University psychologist Adam Alter likened the NBA study to one in which economists examined the impact of a labor strike that closed London Underground stations for two days in 2014. During the brief strike, a portion of commuters experimented with new routes to work. Some of them subsequently stuck with those routes for good, saving a collective fifteen-hundred hours of transit time each workday.