I read an incredible statistic today; the San Antonio Spurs have a .712 winning percentage - over the last twenty years. There is no sign of this stopping; it was higher than .712 this year.
That is, I assume very unsurprisingly, the highest winning percentage any NBA team can even claim to have had over 20 years. It might be the highest winning percentage any team in any major North American sport has ever had over 20 years; I’m not sure about football or hockey, but I know it’s quite impossible in baseball.
I mean, that’s amazing. Sure, they started that period off with David Robinson and Tim Duncan but this is a team that hasn’t been awarded another high draft pick in a career’s worth of seasons.
I’m not a Spurs fan but, holy crap, guys, hats off. Obviously Gregg Popovich must be the greatest coach who ever lived.
Pop does an amazing job getting the team to play team basketball and generally very solid defense. There is no doubt that having Robinson and Duncan helped this immensely, but they were also a great fit for the system, where someone like Shaq would just not have functioned as well, despite him possibly being a more dominant player than either. Tony Parker was an above average point guard, Manu was a very solid player, and now Kawhi Leonard has picked up the torch. It really is a testament to the organization, coach, and players.
Pop is great, but you also have to credit their front office and scouting. SA has been able to do 2 things that basically zero other NBA teams have managed in that time frame.
Consistently hit on late first round and second round draft picks. Tony Parker: 28th overall. Manu Ginobli: 57th overall. Kawhi Leonard: 15th overall. This is a league where every pick outside the top 5 feels like a crap shoot.
Not get bogged down by shitty contracts. You’ve never heard of SA having to dump salary. They convince their stars (Duncan, Parker) that winning > money. And they can still entice top free agents (Aldridge) to come to their tiny market.
Note that they didn’t pick Kawhi Leonard. Indiana did, and the Spurs convinced them to do that and trade him to the Spurs for George Hill, a trade that, obviously, was utterly brilliant in retrospect. Hill’s not the worst player around but he’s not one of the ten best players in the NBA, which Leonard is.
It is pretty damn amazing. Many will say that Kawhi Leonard is THE best player in the NBA. Definitely Top 5, and if I had the opportunity to start my own team, I can’t think of another player I 'd pick ahead of him except for Giannis Antetokoumnpo (maybe).
That said, the Golden State Warriors record over the past 3 seasons is also pretty ridiculous. They are 207-39 for an 84% winning percentage.
They also manage to find good players that think that winning is better than twitter,strip clubs,reality shows all the other asinine drama that tanks good players on other teams around all sports.
For a perspective in another sport. A quick look at Real Madrid stats for the last 20 years (in the league only) shows played - 494, won - 344 and drawn 69.
That gives them a raw win percentage of about 70%
If you assume those drawn games could be played to a conclusion and they only win half of them then they’d have a percentage of 77%. If you assume those drawn games would be won in line with the raw win ration then the overall percentage would be about 80%
Well, as pointed out, the Patriots have edged the Spurs by a fraction of a percentage point, though I’d argue it’s rather more impressive to post a .712 in twenty 82-game seasons than in twenty 16-game seasons. But, they did it.
I figured one or more European football teams would have astounding winning percentages. The comparison doesn’t really work, though. Top flight European footy leagues are not like North American sports leagues; they lack the competitive balance mechanisms of North American leagues and, as a result, are ludicrously unbalanced. Generally 2-4 teams more or less own the league. La Liga has had Real Madrid and Barcelona finish first and second or vice versa eight of the last ten years.
Euro leagues tend to have era’s of dominance, we had Manchester United win 13 titles on 20, before that we have Liverpool win something like 12 in 20. Juventus dominates in Italy, 5 in a row, before that it was Inter Milan with 5 in a row as well.
Which does not seem much worse than the NFL, NBA, we remember Lakers and Bulls dominating over the last few decades. (6 in 8) and LA Laker 5 in 9 (with two Finals defeats) and the Spurs winning occasionally since the late 1990’s.
Looking at the NFL, which I admittedly know little about and only from the list of SuperBowls, we have four teams dominating in different eras. The Pittsburgh Steelers in the 1970’s, (4 in 6) the San Francisco 49ners (5 in 13) and Cowboys, 3 in 4. The Patriots have 5 titles in 15 years, with two further defeats in the Super Bowls in the time, so they seem to be in the game once every couple of years. out of 51 titkes, these four teams own 21, (6,5,5,5) and another three teams own another 11.
Not so much different from European soccer and remember no team has repeated a European Cup victory since A.C Milan in 1990 and no defending champion has reached the Champions League final since 2009. Madrid have a chance this year.
Your example of the Bulls winning six of eight titles is the extreme case in North American sports, but is not at all out of the norm in top flight European football. There is no North American equivalent in recent years to Beyern Munich’s domination of the Bundesliga, in which it has finished first more years than not for well over a generation; I can’t think of any North American sports team that dominant for that long, except, arguably, the New York Yankees dynasty of the 1940s-1960s, and that was prior to the implementation of the amateur draft to prevent such things.
Most “dynasties” in North American pro sport are, as you illustrate, short lived; the Steelers winning four times in six years, the Cowboys three times in four, stuff like that. Some teams are better than others, that’s for sure. But in soccer it’s practically institutionalized; the same teams dominate for incredibly long stretches of time.
It’s worth noting that when a longshot came out of nowhere to win the Premier League that was regarded as a sporting miracle, a 5000-to-1 bet. Literally no team in North American pro sport has odds that long; I would take 2000-to-1 odds, without hestitation, on any team at the beginning of any season. When a long-suffering team finally wins (like the Kansas City Royals in 2014 and 2015, or the LA Kings suddenly winning a Stanley Cup a few years ago) it’s a remarkable story but not regarded as any sort of a miracle. The leagues are set up for that kind of thing to happen; every franchise is given the means to win a championship.
Bayern Munich can buy wins indefinitely; there is nothing stopping them. Top soccer teams live in a structure where they can stay on top through sheer force of money. The San Antonio Spurs can’t; **the NBA is actually set up to prevent that. ** Because they win, they are awarded worse draft picks. There’s a salary cap to prevent them from simply buying all the best players. Same with the Patriots and the NFL, which is what makes it remarkable.
You don’t have promotion and relegation in N American sports either. A team can lose literally all its games in one season and still know that they will play in the League next year. This year the English second flight contains two former European Cup winners; Aston Villa and Nottingham Forest. The Champions League Quarter Finals this season contains a team which was relegated 5 years ago Monaco, and another which was playing second flight three years ago; Leicester.
You are right, its difficult to compare. The closest comparison you have to N American i.e continent-wide, sports in Europe is the UEFA Champions League. In the Champions League Era, I know of no team which has played in the CL and being a finalist 50% of the time like the New England Patriots. have since 2001.
That’s what I was going to say; the Euro leagues are set up with a “make it, take it” sort of scheme, where once a team’s good, they have the wherewithal to ensure that they stay good indefinitely, barring gross incompetence or negligence.
Most of the US leagues are set up to deliberately prevent that and/or enforce a great degree of parity- drafts, free agency rules, salary caps, etc… all serve those purposes.
So the Spurs or Patriots tend to be all the more remarkable as a result; they can’t use their success to reinforce their future success; if anything, the system punishes them worse the better they do.