NBA Champions from 1984 to 2015
The NBA Finals have been held each year since 1947. This year marks the sixty-ninth time the, best-of-seven, final round has been contested. One player in particular has a connection to nearly half of the championship teams. His name: Shaquille O’Neal. And while his teams’ have only won the title four times (2000,2001,2002, and 2006) he has a path to thirty-two different titles via a single connection. At least one player has been on a roster of the last thirty-two NBA championship teams (for at least a few games during the regular season) in their winning season and has spent some time on a roster with Shaquille O’Neal. The last time an NBA champion team has won the title without a direct link to O’Neal was the 1982-83 Philadelphia 76ers.
This relates to the class as a hug network of players that spent time on the same roster as O’Neal at some point during his career. To create the graph for this analogy, every NBA player in history is a node and the edges are formed by time spent on the same roster. The network of NBA players will continue to expand as long as the league is still in existence. The odds are that these particular connections to O’Neal will continue for at least a few more seasons as the first direct link was eight seasons before O’Neal entered the league and it has only been four years since he has retired. This article is pointing out all the NBA championship teams with connected paths O’Neal. There are likely many more paths with two or three connections to Shaquille O’Neal and other championship teams in the past (and eventually teams in the future).
http://espn.go.com/blog/nba/post/_/id/3772/83-sixers-were-the-last-champs-with-no-shaq-connections