# Greatest Teams (statistically) in US Sports **URL:** \ **Category:** The Game Room\ **Created:** [June 17, 2017, 1:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/greatest-teams-statistically-in-us-sports/789194 "2017-06-17T13:40:38Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 4\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![asahi](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/asahi/32/8693_2.png) [@asahi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/asahi)\ **Post date:** [June 20, 2017, 3:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/greatest-teams-statistically-in-us-sports/789194/21 "2017-06-20T15:01:10Z")
> [@RickJay](#): > > Having a wartime team on the list is preposterous. You have to consider timeline at some point, and the quality of MLB talent was **really, really** significantly impacted by the war. There’s a reason Mort Cooper was a good but not fabulous pitcher and suddenly became Greg Maddux during the war and then suddenly wasn’t anymore after the war. The 1944 Cardinals have a bunch of guys who curiously happened to have terrific years that year but went back to being ordinary when everyone came home in 1946. As a Cardinals fan, I’d also say that the teams between 1964 and 1968 were probably the best in the history of the franchise. Some might argue the teams between 2004 and 2006 were as good but the only team that managed to win the champion in that stretch was a very suspect team that barely won 83 games during the regular season and took advantage of Pedro Martinez’s absence against the Mets to win the NLCS. I’m also eternally grateful to the Tigers infield for throwing away the series and their lineup for going ice cold at just the wrong time. Anyway, back on point, I think the best baseball team I’ve seen in my lifetime has to be the NY Yankees of 1998-2000. And I don’t know if there’s any team among all the Yankees that have been that good. I don’t know of any team in baseball history that’s been that good. I’m not sure where to rate the Warriors in NBA history. They’re certainly good but I’m not even sure they’re better than the Spurs of 2014 or 2007, the Bulls of the 90s, the Lakers of the 2001-2, or the Celtics and Lakers teams of the 1980s. Hard to tell. The best football team I’ve ever seen is probably San Francisco’s 1988 and 1989 squad(s) and their revamped 1994 squad along with the team that won it the year before, Dallas, gets an honorable mention. The Patriots are consistently good but those teams were just loaded with talent. ---
**Author:** ![Snarky\_Kong](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/a183cd/32.png) [@Snarky\_Kong](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Snarky_Kong)\ **Post date:** [June 20, 2017, 5:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/greatest-teams-statistically-in-us-sports/789194/22 "2017-06-20T17:46:57Z")
> [@Chronos](#): > > The variance is also why you can get away with a single championship game for the Superbowl, but you need a whole 7-game series for the World Series. If you played just one game for the baseball final, you couldn’t be at all confident that the right team won. > > I’m not sure what it says if basketball has the same per-game variance as football, but still has a championship series. It probably says there are more upsets in football championships than there are in basketball. The degree to which you want the better team to be confident in winning the championship game/series is largely a matter of taste. The better team “deserves” it more, but upsets are exciting. That’s why you play the game. In addition to the idea that the leagues might have different preferences on how to run playoffs, football has more of a physical/injury limitation. Even if it took 7 games to accurately determine the better team, they’d never play a 7 game series because it would take 2 months and lots of people would be hurt. I think in The Signal and the Noise, Nate Silver says baseball series are too short to be a good indication of the better team in a lot of situations. Again, comes down to preference, but I think I’d want to err on the side of the “right” team winning rather than it being more random. ---
**Author:** ![RickJay](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/bb73d2/32.png) [@RickJay](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RickJay)\ **Post date:** [June 20, 2017, 8:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/greatest-teams-statistically-in-us-sports/789194/23 "2017-06-20T20:05:17Z")
> [@Chronos](#): > > The variance is also why you can get away with a single championship game for the Superbowl, but you need a whole 7-game series for the World Series. If you played just one game for the baseball final, you couldn’t be at all confident that the right team won. They don’t play one Super Bowl game because of “Variance,” they play one game because it would be silly and boring to have a championship series go seven weeks. Lots of Super Bowls have been won by the seemingly inferior team, so there does seem to be “variance.” ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [June 20, 2017, 8:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/greatest-teams-statistically-in-us-sports/789194/24 "2017-06-20T20:24:23Z")
Oh, of course there’s still variance in any sport. I’m just saying that there’s less of it in any single football game than in any single baseball game. Is there more variance in one football game than in seven baseball games? I’m not sure on that one. And yes, there are also limits on football because of risk of injury. But that’s not the whole story. We could just make football games only 15 minutes long, which would presumably reduce the injuries by about a factor of 4. But we don’t. Why not? Partly because a single quarter of a football game still has too much randomness in it. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/greatest-teams-statistically-in-us-sports/789194.md?page=1)