Networks and Basketball Success
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0047445
Basketball is an interesting game because it is highly dependent on skill and talent, but it also has a heavy emphasis on floor spacing, ball movement, and teamwork between players. When hearing about the strength of ties between different nodes in class, I began to compare that to the present day Golden State Warriors, the seemingly unbeatable juggernauts in the National Basketball Association. They were famed for their ability to spread the floor, open up spaces, and share the ball, which I think specifically attributes to a sense of network structure. So, although the above article focuses on a variety of different aspects of structures in Basketball, I will focus on its findings on ball movement and the connections between different players.
In basketball, especially at the highest level, we can see how network structures affect team success. Specifically concerning tie strengths and weaknesses, and unbalanced ego-centrality to the network. Although the article does admit that these are not definitive, conclusive theories, the data does allow one to believe that higher rates of passing allow for greater success. One reason for this is that greater amounts of connections, meaning a higher rate of links between different players, translates to a greater amount of ball sharing, hence less need for any one certain player to endlessly hold onto the ball. When there are not many links, especially strong links, between different players to different positions, it points to a scenario in which certain, maybe one or two, player(s) seemingly dominate the ball on the offensive side for one team. This would point to the possibility that they would much more quickly be tired out and less efficient. Thus, in this sense, having a variety of strong links allows for greater team success with more efficient stars. In addition, having a more balanced network structure within the team, ideally a complete graph, would be better, because as evident with last year’s Cleveland Cavaliers in the NBA Finals, if an overwhelming ego, Lebron James, leaves the court, the team becomes much less efficient and unable to score the ball. Thus, in basketball, having one ego dominant ego can allow for high scoring at moments, but because of entropy — the loss of energy, this ego has to be rested. When this overwhelming ego that has a huge load of ball centrality is taken out, the lack of ties between the other different players, who are so used to only having local bridges to the ego, leads to an inability to score and often to defend. In contrast, the Golden State Warriors’ strategy was predicated on ball movement (although there are many other different factors), passing the ball between a number of different players through a number of different paths, not just all through one player. Thus, taking out a Stephen Curry or a Kevin Durant, the most “ego” like players on the team, does not nearly damage the team as much. When either of these “egos” is taken out of the lineup, the Warriors often do not lose too much in terms of scoring as the other players already have strong ties with one another and are not wholly dependent on passing the ball to an ego via a local bridge. Therefore, although there are many more factors, in a simplified explanation, the Golden State Warriors’ success does not dominantly rely on any one player. It relies on ball movement through strong ties between different players, a complete graph per say, and the strong passing links which causes defenses to spread themselves thin, allowing for greater gaps in the defense and a higher rate of easier scoring opportunities as opposed to ego-centric teams like last year’s Cavaliers which tighten defenses up, diminishing scoring opportunities, and leaving 5 isolated components on the court when the ego, Lebron James, is forced to rest.