Sports team of GOAT clones

The Game Room
1

You are the manager of a sports team in a current top competitive league (ie, MLB/NBA/NFL, or one of the top European Soccer leagues).

Due to an arcane deal with a genie, you have a chance to summon one of the greatest players in the history of your sport, of your choice, in his/her prime, and clone that player as many times as you like, to join your team. BUT, if you do that, you may not have any other players. So you can have a baseball team of 9 Babe Ruths or a soccer team of 11 Peles, but the clones must play every position on the field.
In which sports would this be a good idea? A bad idea? Which players would be good to choose?

(To answer a few obvious questions: (a) somehow, no one will notice or care that you are doing this, (b) you can summon a player who is still alive and playing. That player will continue to be alive and playing on whatever team they’re on. © the other teams in the league will NOT be doing this, you’ll be competing against “normal” competition (d) you’ll have enough spare clones to make an entire squad, so you can sub players in to avoid fatigue at the normal rate)

Seems to me there are two main factors that affect how successful this would be:
(1) How interchangeable the positions are, how many specialized skills are needed
(2) How much better the GOAT is than the average player in the league

Seems to me the obvious sport where this would be a success is basketball. The positions are relatively interchangeable, and the truly exceptional players can basically carry a team to a championship all by themselves. You’d definitely want to pick a player who is big and strong to avoid just getting outmassed. Fortunately, you’ve got the obvious pick of LeBron James. Five LeBrons (with more LeBrons coming in off the bench) would be the greatest NBA team that had ever played by a huge margin, I suspect, and probably better than five Michael Jordans. Five Magic Johnsons would a good choice as well.
Among sports I’m familiar with, the worst choice would probably be NFL football. The skills and knowledge and body types needed to play the various different positions vary vastly. The GOAT quarterback would be a terrible offensive lineman, and vice versa. If you really had to give it your best shot, maybe your best hope would be to pick someone of freakish athleticism, and then completely reinvent an offensive and defensive scheme to take advantage of that… but I’m pretty skeptical of how well that would work.

Soccer and Hockey are interesting. What you really need to find is one of the all time great soccer players who’s at least a decent goalie. I’m not an expert, but my guess is that a Messi/Pele type could play defense/midfield at a very high level, high enough to make up for a substandard goalie; same for Wayne Gretzky. I wonder if there’s also something to gain by having the flexibility of your attacking and defending players being able to constantly and fluidly switch places?
Thoughts?

2

I’d take 11 CR7’s. He is so athletic and technically brilliant he could likely successfully play any position.

3

I should add CR7 is Cristiano Ronaldo, a Portugese footballer.

4

In hockey during GOAT discussions it’s often said that 5 Bobby Orrs would beat 5 Wayne Gretzky’s (mostly by Boston fans who wrongly feel that there’s a case to be made that someone other than The Great One is the GOAT). This is probably true, but I think quality of goalie play is both too different and too critical to make any reasonable assertions about how a team with 6 Gretzky’s or Orrs would perform. Your 5 Gretzky skaters might outshoot the opposition 60 to 30, but if their goalie saves 90% and Gretzky with pads saves 70% you still lose 9-6.

5

I think in the goalie sports, one question would be would 5 Orr/Gretzkys or 10 Pele/Ronaldos be good enough that the goalie becomes somewhat irrelevant?

Particularly in soccer, there aren’t that many shots on goal already, so if our clone can play well enough at all positions, the opposition may not get many shots.

I’m not familiar enough with hockey to know if a smothering defense and/or slashing offense could similarly control the puck well enough to protect a weak goalie.

For baseball - Ruth is an interesting choice, since he actually started as a pitcher and IIRC held some general or World Series records in that position for quite a while. Of course, no way to know if his skills would translate to the modern era - but assuming modern training methods got him into some sort of shape, who knows?

6

Agreed that football is a bad sport for this to happen. The cloned team would be significantly worse than any current team in the league.

Ronaldo is a good pick for soccer, but I’m not sure he’s the best. Better pick than Messi, even though Messi is the GOAT. 11 Messis would get eaten alive defensively.

I think Michael Ballack would be the archetypal 11-clone soccer player. Defense, possession, great attacker. Zidane? Beckenbauer is interesting too. Probably Zidane, IMO.

11 Xavis would be super interesting as well as 11 Essiens or Davids. The former would never lose possession and the latter would be near impossible to break down. Don’t think those players are it, just interesting, super lopsided teams.

7

Yeah NFL would be tough. I’d probably just say “give me 22 Bo Jacksons” and hope for the best. Or maybe look at really athletic/fast tight ends or defensive ends. If someone like Khalil Mack can throw, could probably get a decent clone team going.

8

For baseball, it seems like you’d want a great infielder with a tremendous arm who can hit well, and with power. Theoretically, one of the clones can take that great arm and learn a decent enough second and third pitch to make it work.

Manny Machado? A-Rod?

9

It’s not tough, it’s impossible. Blown off the line defensively on every single play. The worst running team in the league would average 5+ yards on every running play, and would never pass the ball. They’d score a touchdown on you nearly every drive. Without proper linemen you are just utterly, utterly screwed.

And if you clone a proper lineman, you are also utterly, utterly screwed, just in a different way.

10

You’d have to completely change how the team played no matter who you picked. I’m thinking of a long snap and then basically acting like a rugby team?

If you could pick a different person for offense and defense it gets more interesting. On offense something like 11 of Anthony Muñoz and just pounding out 4 yard runs. Defense, you’re kinda hosed because if you go big, then you’ll get killed on passes and if you go fast you get killed on the run. Have to go with a more modern uber-athletic safety.

11

Baseball is kind of odd, here, in that there’s only one really special position… but there is one. You can find hitters who can field and pitchers who can field, but it’s very hard to find pitchers who can hit. And it’s not like a hockey or soccer goalie, where you can hope that your superiority in other positions can keep the action away from that one player, because the pitcher is the one player who’s guaranteed to be involved in every play.

If playing against his contemporaries, Babe Ruth might get the job done, but he probably wouldn’t stand up against modern players.

12

Catcher.

13

1st pitch hit/out.

14

Why not? A way to measure his greatness is the vast gulf between he and his contemporaries, unmatched in the history of baseball. With modern diet and training there is no reason to believe he wouldn’t be an all star today.

15

Best sport for this is probably cricket, in that there already exists the concept of the “all rounder”. i.e. someone equally adept at batting and bowling and they are highly prized and greatly revered to the point that no christian name is needed.
Sobers
Kallis
Dev
Khan
Botham
Hadlee
Pollock

A full team of any of the above would be highly entertaining and probably unbeatable

16

The most versatile baseball player of all time was probably Martin Dihigo.

Babe Ruth of course could pitch and hit like a crazy bastard, and was a much more athletic man than people realize; as to his adaptability to modern baseball, watch him swing. Ruth had a very modern swing, an absolute picture of how players are taught to swing today. I am 100% convinced he’d be a great player today. His problem is that as a lefthander it’s not possible for him to play second base, shortstop or third base at a major league level. I don’t care how talented you are, that cannot be done.

Dihigo was righthanded, so he’d be my baseball pick.

I think you’d be better off, however, with a hockey team of Wayne Gretzkys. I don’t know if Gretzky ever played goalie, but

  1. All evidence suggests he’d learn the position really fast, and get at least pretty decent at it, and
  2. With a team of Gretzkys in front of him the Gretzky-goalie wouldn’t see many shots anyway. Every game would be a comical slaughter. No regular NHL team could withstand waves of Gretzkys.
17

A point that occurs to me: We’re allowed a full bench full of clones, too. Now, in a normal game in a normal sport, there are a lot of players who never leave the bench. They can if you really need them to, but they’re enough behind the first-stringers in ability that you’d really rather not field them, or field them only in games that’re already decided to keep them in practice.

But with all of our benchwarmers being identical to our starters, and all of them interchangeable, you could afford to be a lot more liberal with your substitutions. You don’t have to wait until a key player gets tired enough that he’s worse than the second-string; you can replace him as soon as he’s tired enough to be worse than his fully-rested self. And you don’t need to keep a spare for every single player on the bench in case any one of them gets injured; you can leave just a few spares, any of whom can replace any injured player.

A team of GOATs might be tough enough to face, but a team of well-rested GOATs is going to be even tougher.

18

Definitely true… except for sports like Soccer where you only get 3 (?) subs the entire game. That said, it would be useful in Soccer also where you don’t lose anything by making the sub, so you can just sub out whichever of your Peles has done the most sprinting after 45 minutes if you want to, purely for fresher legs.

19

I was going to suggest a team full of Kallis, but any of the others would also be great. The only problem would be that your bowling attack would necessarily be one-dimensional. Also, your wicket keeper might not be great.

20

A team of GOAT-clones definitely couldn’t succeed in the NFL. But I wonder what is the best team they could beat? I would say they could easily take down a high school team. but how well could they do against a college team?