Spurs Brazil
06-18-2010, 03:15 PM
Intro to all-time NBA franchise rankings
Here is Hollinger's system for ranking the franchises from best to worst in historyEditor's note: These rankings were originally published in 2009 and have been updated to reflect the 2009-2010 season.
My team is better than your team.
That simple argument is at the heart of sports. Fans can debate about players or strategies or countless other issues, but what tends to get hearts pounding the most is when fans start trading boasts about which side is better.
Almost immediately, the barbs will begin about the various sides' accomplishments. Celtics fans will throw their 17 championships in the face of anyone who dares challenge them; Lakers fans might answer with their 30 conference titles; while Spurs supporters will point out that their past decade is arguably the best of anyone's. And so on down the line, until we get to a few scattered Grizzlies supporters waiting meekly in the corner for a Clippers fan to walk by.
And that's where we step in. With six decades of history to fall back on, we can take a look in the rearview mirror and stack up each team's accomplishments from 1 to 30. Obviously we can't account for every single credit and debit over such a huge time frame, but it turns out that once we install some basic accounting principles, the list pretty much falls into place.
To start with, we set this up to look at things from the perspective of fans, as opposed to coaches or owners or -- God forbid -- statistical analysts.
Therefore, the rules are as follows:
1. Winning matters.
2. Winning in the playoffs matters more.
3. Winning a championship is far and away the best thing that can happen.
4. Watching superstars is amazing, even if the team around them isn't any good.
5. Intangibles matter: Fans want to like and admire the team they're cheering.
With those rules in mind, I set up a simple formula to award "points" for all the positives and rank the teams' accomplishments accordingly:
Regular-season wins are worth one point. This is the source of 82 percent of the points in this system, but it matters much more for noncontending teams.
Playoff wins are worth two points. You might argue that this tends to favor recent playoff teams since the current postseason is so much longer; on the other hand, it's a lot harder to accumulate these in a 30-team league than it was in an eight-team league.
Playoff series wins are worth four points. There's a big difference between 3-4 and 4-3, and having an added category for series wins reflects this fact. During some seasons the league had staggered playoff systems in which teams advanced with a bye, and in those years teams were awarded "phantom" playoff series wins for earning a bye.
Playoff losses don't matter. Nobody cares if they won 4-0 or 4-3. In fact, most fans end up with much fonder memories of a hard-fought 4-3 series than they do of a 4-0 rout.
Championships are worth 30 points. I settled on this while trying to balance out the dilemma of "Would you rather win one championship and stink for the next four years, or be halfway decent five years in a row?" I think nearly every fan would take the former over the latter, and I'm guessing a lot of Heat fans are nodding in agreement right now. Putting such a premium on championships gives us the right balance between being great and merely being competitive.
All-Star selections are worth two points each. Most fans would much rather watch superstar performers than ensemble casts, with the only exception being if it's a championship-caliber ensemble. For instance, ask a Hawks fan whether it was more fun to watch Dominique's teams in the '80s or Mookie Blaylock's in the '90s. The '90s teams were about as successful, but from a fan's perspective there's no comparison.
Relocation is a 100-point penalty. Changing cities is the ultimate failure for a sports franchise, leaving the fans in the former city out in the cold and forcing the team to build a new history with unfamiliar faces in a different locale. In a couple of instances I penalized teams 50 points for "half-relocations" -- Baltimore to Washington for the Bullets, Long Island to New Jersey for the Nets -- when they stayed in the same general region but likely had to cultivate a new base of ticket holders.
Intangibles matter too, and I created a separate category for special circumstances. For instance, the Blazers of the early part of this decade were perfectly respectable in terms of wins and losses, but few were eager to admit rooting for that team because of all the scoundrels littering the roster. This is the one part that's completely subjective, but for several teams I subtracted or added 50 to 150 points based on playing styles, player behavior, superstars and other major factors.
ABA playoff results count half. The NBA likes to pretend the ABA never happened when it presents historical results, but by the early 1970s the two leagues were of similar quality, and the best player in basketball (Julius Erving) was in the ABA. Still, I had to count the results at half because the league was so small at times. It's pretty easy to make a deep playoff run in a six-team league.
Once I summed up the total for each team, I divided by the number of seasons the team had played in the NBA; otherwise this system would be horribly unfair to expansion teams.
The result is a number of points per season for each team, and conveniently the average is almost exactly 50: 50.17, to be exact. In the following pages we'll get into where every team ranks and why.
No. 3: San Antonio Spurs
Email Print Comments By John Hollinger
ESPN.com
Archive
SAN ANTONIO SPURS: 62.1 POINTS PER SEASON (1967-2010)
Wins: 1,985
Playoff wins: 164.5
Series wins: 38
Titles: 4
All-Stars: 61
Best player: Tim Duncan
Best coach: Gregg Popovich
Best team: 1998-99 (37-13, won NBA title)
They may not have the tradition of the Lakers or Celtics, but ever since David Robinson came aboard in 1989 the Spurs have arguably been the most successful organization in sports. Twenty of the past 21 seasons have resulted in playoff appearances, and an amazing 17 of them produced 53 wins or more (prorating for the 1998-99 season). The one season in that span when the Spurs weren't good (a 20-62 season in 1996-97 when Robinson went out with a back injury), they had the good fortune to win the lottery and draft Duncan.
Two years later they won their first title with one of the league's most underrated championship teams. With both Duncan and Robinson in their prime, it was virtually impossible to score in the paint against the Spurs, and over the final 53 games of the lockout-shortened season and playoffs they were a dominant 46-7.
FRANCHISE HISTORY
San Antonio Spurs (NBA) (1976-present)
San Antonio Spurs (ABA) (1973-1976)
Texas Chaparrals (ABA) (1970-1971)
Dallas Chaparrals (ABA) (1967-73)
San Antonio bracketed the Lakers' threepeat on the other side by winning again in 2003, and could have had a threepeat of its own if not for the infamous "0.4" shot by the Lakers' Derek Fisher in Game 5 of the conference semifinals a year later. The Spurs rebounded to beat the Pistons in seven tough games in 2005, and added a fourth title to their résumé with a four-game sweep of Cleveland in 2007. Again, they were one play from a possible threepeat -- a last-second three-point play by Dirk Nowitzki in Game 7 of the conference semifinals against Dallas in 2006 when the Spurs were up by three points.
The businesslike Spurs attract shockingly little attention despite their success, perhaps because it's so monotonous -- in 13 years with Duncan they've won at least 60 percent of their games every season and at least one playoff round 11 times.
Prior to that point they were almost the opposite, a franchise renowned for the scoring exploits of George "Iceman" Gervin but unable to win when it counted. San Antonio lost in the conference finals three times in the Gervin era, with the 1979 Eastern Conference finals loss against Washington the most painful -- the Spurs led 3-1 and had a lead in the fourth quarter of Game 7 but lost by two.
In their ABA days they also fell short, dropping a 1976 semifinal series in seven games to eventual champion New Jersey in the league's final season. That was one of only three ABA seasons they spent in San Antonio -- the others were in Dallas, where they were known as the Chaparrals and made the playoffs five times in six years.
The move down the highway earned them the relocation penalty, but in this case it had no effect on their ranking. With more wins than any other franchise except the Lakers since 1968-69, the Spurs are a comfortable No. 3 on this list.
http://sports.espn.go.com/nba/playoffs/2010/columns/story?columnist=hollinger_john&page=FranchiseRankings2010-Spurs
Here is Hollinger's system for ranking the franchises from best to worst in historyEditor's note: These rankings were originally published in 2009 and have been updated to reflect the 2009-2010 season.
My team is better than your team.
That simple argument is at the heart of sports. Fans can debate about players or strategies or countless other issues, but what tends to get hearts pounding the most is when fans start trading boasts about which side is better.
Almost immediately, the barbs will begin about the various sides' accomplishments. Celtics fans will throw their 17 championships in the face of anyone who dares challenge them; Lakers fans might answer with their 30 conference titles; while Spurs supporters will point out that their past decade is arguably the best of anyone's. And so on down the line, until we get to a few scattered Grizzlies supporters waiting meekly in the corner for a Clippers fan to walk by.
And that's where we step in. With six decades of history to fall back on, we can take a look in the rearview mirror and stack up each team's accomplishments from 1 to 30. Obviously we can't account for every single credit and debit over such a huge time frame, but it turns out that once we install some basic accounting principles, the list pretty much falls into place.
To start with, we set this up to look at things from the perspective of fans, as opposed to coaches or owners or -- God forbid -- statistical analysts.
Therefore, the rules are as follows:
1. Winning matters.
2. Winning in the playoffs matters more.
3. Winning a championship is far and away the best thing that can happen.
4. Watching superstars is amazing, even if the team around them isn't any good.
5. Intangibles matter: Fans want to like and admire the team they're cheering.
With those rules in mind, I set up a simple formula to award "points" for all the positives and rank the teams' accomplishments accordingly:
Regular-season wins are worth one point. This is the source of 82 percent of the points in this system, but it matters much more for noncontending teams.
Playoff wins are worth two points. You might argue that this tends to favor recent playoff teams since the current postseason is so much longer; on the other hand, it's a lot harder to accumulate these in a 30-team league than it was in an eight-team league.
Playoff series wins are worth four points. There's a big difference between 3-4 and 4-3, and having an added category for series wins reflects this fact. During some seasons the league had staggered playoff systems in which teams advanced with a bye, and in those years teams were awarded "phantom" playoff series wins for earning a bye.
Playoff losses don't matter. Nobody cares if they won 4-0 or 4-3. In fact, most fans end up with much fonder memories of a hard-fought 4-3 series than they do of a 4-0 rout.
Championships are worth 30 points. I settled on this while trying to balance out the dilemma of "Would you rather win one championship and stink for the next four years, or be halfway decent five years in a row?" I think nearly every fan would take the former over the latter, and I'm guessing a lot of Heat fans are nodding in agreement right now. Putting such a premium on championships gives us the right balance between being great and merely being competitive.
All-Star selections are worth two points each. Most fans would much rather watch superstar performers than ensemble casts, with the only exception being if it's a championship-caliber ensemble. For instance, ask a Hawks fan whether it was more fun to watch Dominique's teams in the '80s or Mookie Blaylock's in the '90s. The '90s teams were about as successful, but from a fan's perspective there's no comparison.
Relocation is a 100-point penalty. Changing cities is the ultimate failure for a sports franchise, leaving the fans in the former city out in the cold and forcing the team to build a new history with unfamiliar faces in a different locale. In a couple of instances I penalized teams 50 points for "half-relocations" -- Baltimore to Washington for the Bullets, Long Island to New Jersey for the Nets -- when they stayed in the same general region but likely had to cultivate a new base of ticket holders.
Intangibles matter too, and I created a separate category for special circumstances. For instance, the Blazers of the early part of this decade were perfectly respectable in terms of wins and losses, but few were eager to admit rooting for that team because of all the scoundrels littering the roster. This is the one part that's completely subjective, but for several teams I subtracted or added 50 to 150 points based on playing styles, player behavior, superstars and other major factors.
ABA playoff results count half. The NBA likes to pretend the ABA never happened when it presents historical results, but by the early 1970s the two leagues were of similar quality, and the best player in basketball (Julius Erving) was in the ABA. Still, I had to count the results at half because the league was so small at times. It's pretty easy to make a deep playoff run in a six-team league.
Once I summed up the total for each team, I divided by the number of seasons the team had played in the NBA; otherwise this system would be horribly unfair to expansion teams.
The result is a number of points per season for each team, and conveniently the average is almost exactly 50: 50.17, to be exact. In the following pages we'll get into where every team ranks and why.
No. 3: San Antonio Spurs
Email Print Comments By John Hollinger
ESPN.com
Archive
SAN ANTONIO SPURS: 62.1 POINTS PER SEASON (1967-2010)
Wins: 1,985
Playoff wins: 164.5
Series wins: 38
Titles: 4
All-Stars: 61
Best player: Tim Duncan
Best coach: Gregg Popovich
Best team: 1998-99 (37-13, won NBA title)
They may not have the tradition of the Lakers or Celtics, but ever since David Robinson came aboard in 1989 the Spurs have arguably been the most successful organization in sports. Twenty of the past 21 seasons have resulted in playoff appearances, and an amazing 17 of them produced 53 wins or more (prorating for the 1998-99 season). The one season in that span when the Spurs weren't good (a 20-62 season in 1996-97 when Robinson went out with a back injury), they had the good fortune to win the lottery and draft Duncan.
Two years later they won their first title with one of the league's most underrated championship teams. With both Duncan and Robinson in their prime, it was virtually impossible to score in the paint against the Spurs, and over the final 53 games of the lockout-shortened season and playoffs they were a dominant 46-7.
FRANCHISE HISTORY
San Antonio Spurs (NBA) (1976-present)
San Antonio Spurs (ABA) (1973-1976)
Texas Chaparrals (ABA) (1970-1971)
Dallas Chaparrals (ABA) (1967-73)
San Antonio bracketed the Lakers' threepeat on the other side by winning again in 2003, and could have had a threepeat of its own if not for the infamous "0.4" shot by the Lakers' Derek Fisher in Game 5 of the conference semifinals a year later. The Spurs rebounded to beat the Pistons in seven tough games in 2005, and added a fourth title to their résumé with a four-game sweep of Cleveland in 2007. Again, they were one play from a possible threepeat -- a last-second three-point play by Dirk Nowitzki in Game 7 of the conference semifinals against Dallas in 2006 when the Spurs were up by three points.
The businesslike Spurs attract shockingly little attention despite their success, perhaps because it's so monotonous -- in 13 years with Duncan they've won at least 60 percent of their games every season and at least one playoff round 11 times.
Prior to that point they were almost the opposite, a franchise renowned for the scoring exploits of George "Iceman" Gervin but unable to win when it counted. San Antonio lost in the conference finals three times in the Gervin era, with the 1979 Eastern Conference finals loss against Washington the most painful -- the Spurs led 3-1 and had a lead in the fourth quarter of Game 7 but lost by two.
In their ABA days they also fell short, dropping a 1976 semifinal series in seven games to eventual champion New Jersey in the league's final season. That was one of only three ABA seasons they spent in San Antonio -- the others were in Dallas, where they were known as the Chaparrals and made the playoffs five times in six years.
The move down the highway earned them the relocation penalty, but in this case it had no effect on their ranking. With more wins than any other franchise except the Lakers since 1968-69, the Spurs are a comfortable No. 3 on this list.
http://sports.espn.go.com/nba/playoffs/2010/columns/story?columnist=hollinger_john&page=FranchiseRankings2010-Spurs