Imagine the NBA were organized into, say, four divisions, with each division being limited to players of a certain height: one would have players under 6’4", another would have players between 6’4" and 6’6", a third would have players from 6’7" to 6’9", and the fourth would consist of players taller than 6’9" (or something like that–the number of divisions and the specific measurements doesn’t really matter). If that was how the NBA was structured, is it clear which division would have the league champion every season?
Boxing is sort of organized along these lines, with weight rather than height determining who one’s opponents are, and that seems to make sense to people.
Except that boxing generally doesn’t have fighters from different weight divisions taking one another on.
Height is definitely an advantage in basketball, and your idea has all of the shortest guys in one division, and all of the tallest ones in another division – and the divisions compete against each other.
Even if they did win most of the time, wouldn’t it be cool to root for the 6’7" to 6’9" guys trying to pull off an upset? They’d have a real ballhandling advantage, as the shorter players would have generally. I don’t think it’s clear that the tallest division would win out.
No, I’m not sure of it; the shortest teams will certainly win sometimes. But, I am pretty sure that there’ll be a positive correlation between the height of the teams in such a setup, and their overall performance. And if so, it becomes ultimately boring and predictable.
Winning one’s division would be a valuable commodity in itself. The idea of beating the taller guys in the playoffs, as rare as it might be, would be exciting. There would be bragging rights in coming close to winning a round.
Every effort to create a height-limited league (and there have been a few) have ended in miserable failure. Not sure there’s a market for height divided league.
I think this is part of the issue with your idea – you’re essentially trying to come up with something radical that will interest someone who currently has very little interest in the NBA (i.e., you), not really caring if it fundamentally changes the sport, effectively sets up a caste system within the league, and likely turns off a lot of the league’s current fans.
It’s not as though I think this has a prayer of becoming a reality. It’s just interesting to me, especially because I think it would be far more exciting to watch and far more competitive than you seem to think.
The taller teams are going to have substantial advantages in defending and rebounding, especially compared to the shortest teams. They’re also going to be heavier, and likely stronger, overall. It could well wind up being like watching high school freshman take on high school juniors.
Sure, ballhandling is an important part of the game, and even if ballhandling skill does correlate negatively with height (and I’m not sure that it does), I think that the overall advantages of the taller teams are going to outweigh that.
Oh, it definitely does. I mean, not only are the shorter guys going to have tons more experience in handling the ball, but shortness is actually an advantage in dribbling the ball (if you’re a foot taller than I am, you’re going to have to go off balance just to swipe at the ball I’m dribbling, and I’m going to get around you any time I see you off-balance). It’s also an advantage in stealing the ball on defense.
And I concede that height is a bigger advantage than dribbling is, and that bigger teams will win more, though I’d like to see that tested, and I’m fairly confident that games would be closer than you seem to think, and upsets more common. There’s a reason NBA teams don’t assign their backup center to defend against a guard who’s killing them–there’s more to the game than being tall, and that’s the exciting part to watch.
I think you would find that it did matter. And also that it would matter which players were on which team.
If your question is which height range has the biggest advantage, it’s certainly the 7/8/9s, for the simple reason that they’re in the middle. There are 6 foot 7 point guards and 6 foot 9 centers. There aren’t 6 foot 4 centers or 6 foot 11 point guards. There are a couple of 6 foot 11 guys you could almost sort of play at point guard, but they’d be playing against teams in the other division who had 5 NBA players playing their actual NBA positions.
Of course it matters which players are on which teams–why would you even think that i said that it doesn’t matter?
Kenobi_65 seems to think the tallest team would win the championship running away. I agree with you that the next tallest group would win, but not “certainly” and there would be a lot of upsets.
I said, in response to you replying to me with “Are you sure the tallest team will win? I’m not.”
Positive correlation does not mean “would win running away.” In any given game (and hell, in any given championship series), it’s absolutely possible that your “shortest team” would win, and over the long run, you’d likely see that happen sometimes.
What I was actually saying was that, over the long run, the taller teams would likely be winning more than the shorter teams.
The tallest team will be all centers. You really think they’d consistently win over the long run? I don’t. I’m not even sure they’d be competitive.
It would be sort of like an NFL league realigned by weight, though obviously not as severe as an NFL team consisting only of interior lineman. (Unless you convince Jared Larenzen to unretire, maybe? But then who would he throw to?)
In retrospect, and reading the posts in this thread, I tend to agree now.
The tallest division in the OP’s hypothetical league, as you note, would be nearly, if not entirely, centers (since his original definition for that division was “over 6’9"”). They’d have certain advantages, especially in the paint and rebounding, due to their height and reach, but many centers are probably pretty one-dimensional players. There’ve been a few centers whose game might have been more well-rounded, or were just very gifted athletically (like Abdul-Jabbar and Chamberlain), but at any given time, that “super-tall division” would likely only have a handful of those sorts of players.
After further consideration, I now suspect that the two extreme divisions (the very shortest, and the very tallest) would be the ones which would be least successful in the long run.