NBA Championship Big Threes - Not all built the same, not all dominant in the same way either

The NBA is a fantastic league, and every NBA Playoffs is more than just a competition between the best teams - but a spectacle. It's where heroes are made, and storylines are written into the big book of basketball history. Strategy goes up against defensive breakdowns. Star players go up against systems meant to thwart them. Road teams look to quiet the crowd, and the home team game operations staff want the busywork of having to stay after the game and clean up balloons and confetti hours after the final buzzer. Through all the excitement there's sadly only one winner. That, perhaps, is the only static thing about this league which has persisted and evolved for decades. Today, with the assistance of mass global marketing, the league is a player recognition device. The best players today have a reach players from previous generations couldn't even dream of. Furthermore, if we believe what we are being sold, the players today benefit from rules and system changes that favor their dominance. In the 80s you could "get away with" guarding Magic Johnson with Bob Hansen. Today's mortal players have nowhere to hide from the titans of this era.

Perhaps another remnant of multiple eras would be the need for at least a "Big Three" to help get your team over the edge of also-rans into the land of eternal champions. So let's look at the "Big Threes" of each championship team from the modern era till today (1980 NBA Playoffs, to last season). That's 36 Big Threes, and while not every team is just three players, for the most part there were three clear-cut leaders on most of these clubs. Exceptions did pop up (Jamaal Wilkes or Norm Nixon in '82? Dennis Rodman or Toni Kukoc in '98?), but I resolved that issue by going with either star power, or actual playoff production for that year. This is a numbers based exercise, and there's a bias to the players who eventually put up the larger playoff numbers. (Ray Allen over Rajon Rondo in '08, Jason Terry over Tyson Chandler in '11) I didn't penalize bench players, and recognize that production and rate of production both matter. (And for the record, I summed all the stats of the top seven minute getters for each championship team to find out which guys truly were worthy of being called a part of the "Big Three".)

This exercise looks at all the minutes played by these players, their combined minutes per game, and more interesting to me -- an estimation of how many of the team's total possible minutes went to them. (Estimated on total number of playoff games played by that team in that championship season, omitting overtimes.) Some teams really leaned on their Big Three, other teams had much more depth and didn't need to. Surprisingly, in some cases a big three wouldn't play a huge percentage of the total possible minutes while still producing MORE than other big threes out there who did. Ultimately, the quality of the players matter the most. And that's what divides champions from footnotes.

So here are the big threes from each champion for the last 36 seasons. I've added the simple stats (I didn't hand calculate a Big Three PER, or anything). One of the simple stats I've included is BARPS, which is just BPG+APG+RPG+PPG+SPG; and also, that value divided by minutes played. It's simple, it's fun, and it's educational.

On first blush, Gregg Popovich doesn't lean on his Big Three for heavy minutes. You didn't need to read this article to find that out. And I didn't need to spend hours hand calculating the top seven players from every championship team over the last 36 years to do so either. There are some teams that did lean heavily on them, where the Big Three amassed more than 50% of the total available minutes for that club in the playoffs, the Los Angeles Lakers ('80, '01, '02), Boston Celtics ('86), and Chicago Bulls ('91, '92). That only makes sense when you have obvious Hall of Famers on that squad and poor depth.

Statistically, the teams that played a higher pace (not indicated on the table) obviously put up the larger numbers. Slower, defense first teams are penalized here, like the '04 Detroit Pistons. But if you had the possibility to ‘drill down' on each team you'd see that the distribution of stats is important to see. The Shaq and Kobe Lakers teams had amazing big threes, but in reality, it was because both of those guys were at their peaks and averaging something close to 28 ppg each during each of their runs. The third guy in their big threes was almost a bystander.

Very few "Big Threes" were shot blocking groups, in fact only 9 of 36 were. By contrast, most groups were high in points and steals. The best "Big Threes" were the 80s Celtics and Lakers, and 90s Bulls. If we were doing "Big Twos" the Kobe and Shaq teams would probably dominate. And for what it is worth, the average values were playing 20 playoff games on their way to the championship, with 2,287 minutes, as a 47.0% haul of all the total team minutes. The big three, on average, played 112.8 player minutes, and dropped 59.0 ppg, 22.1 rpg, 13.1 apg, 4.0 spg, and 3.0 bpg. The BARPS ended up being 101.15, with a BARPS/min value of 0.90.

If you look beyond the numbers you also find some fascinating things. Not all big threes are equals, and not all championship teams are built the same way.

• Only 19 of 36 Big Threes included a point guard (52.78%)
• While 26 of 36 had a shooting guard (72.22%, the largest)
• Small forwards were found in 22 of 36 championship big threes (61.11%)
• But the smallest group represented were power forwards, only 17 were found amongst the Big Threes (47.22%)
• Still, for the most part teams elected to have one of their three best players be a bigman in the middle, centers same in second place with 24 of 36 Big Threes needing one (66.67%)

As a Utah Jazz fan it's educational for me to see that PG/PF cores don't usually win titles. The ones who do win it with a PF are PFs usually in that Dennis Rodman, Otis Thorpe, Robert Horry, or Draymond Green role. The success of the group isn't on them, but on the top two guys. Contrasting that, there were lots of "actually useful" point guards in the big threes of these teams: Magic, Isiah, Tony, Chauncey, and Stephen last season.

Though, the overwhelming trend is to have great wings in order to get wins. In the last 6 years (2010 to 2015) there have been nine wing players in the Big Threes of those six teams. By contrast only three point guards, and six bigmen. So that's half. If you are a team building against this trend you are an outlier for sure.

The Utah Jazz are such a team with their proposed big three of Gordon Hayward (SF), Derrick Favors (PF), and Rudy Gobert ( C). Can that win? Has it before? Yes, the last time that happened was when Larry, Kevin, and Robert were champs. (It also happened five years earlier with Larry and Robert sharing the joy with Cedric Maxwell at the three.) So two out of 36 isn't so hot. Similarly weird, the ‘balanced' approach of a PG, SG, and C isn't that popular either, with only Lakers (Magic, Jamaal/James, Kareem) and Spurs (Tony, S-Jax/Kawhi, Timmy) doing it a combined five times total.

In a star league the star players are a) the best, and b) also get help to win along the way. If your big three are all stars (All-Stars, even) then you have a leg up on your opponents. If two of your guys are Hall of Famers to be, even better. Very few championship clubs have a lot of talent equality in the top of their rotation. If they do, then that's awesome. If they don't, it's usually because they don't have an outright, dominant star. Not all championship teams are built the same, and not all "Big Threes" are equal. But at the end of the day, it's difficult to win a ring without one.

You can (and probably will) debate if the isolation star power game is the right way to win. It probably isn't, but if you have the right stars your path to a championship is easier than if you are busting your butt out there with a bunch of Eddie Jones and Matt Harpring types out there. No disrespect to them, but it's hard to build your team around them. As for the Utah Jazz, GM Quin Snyder is trying to rebuild the Spurs in Utah. They did go guard / big / big back in the day. But perhaps the evidence suggests we should look for a more green build, like the massively talented front line they had in the 80s? Time will tell.

Are big threes still a big deal when the last two Championship winners were team first squads like the Spurs and Dubs? Or did they really only succeed because, at the end of the day, their teams also still had enough of the best players on the floor to tip the scales in their favor?