Being a life long Cavs fan, I was excited to see LeBron return to Cleveland to try and make a run at a championship. I’ll admit, in 2010, when he made the decision to leave for Miami, I was pretty upset; but, I don’t fault players for going to different teams if it means more money and better opportunities to win championships. Additionally, how can you fault a guy for wanting to play on a super team with athletes like Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh? What makes LeBron’s second stint in Cleveland so exciting is the possibility of another super team, this time with Kevin Love and Kyrie Irving. Of course, when these teams get together and don’t automatically win 20 straight right out of the gate, fans tend to get a bit unruly and start to jump ship.
Similar to LeBron’s first year in Miami, it took some time for things to click between the players on the team. The media pundits always like to bring it back to the fact that the players need to, “Learn to play together”, because, as some point out, they have such similar games and are all three such dominant players on the court that they have to figure out who is going to play which role (which might actually change from game to game).
With that in mind, I decided to look at some of the data of these players on the super teams to see how similar they are and, perhaps, try and understand how similar LeBron’s current super team, the Cavs, is to his former super team, the Heat.
The Data
Since I don’t have access to a ton of NBA data, I took whatever I could get a hold of from www.basketball-reference.com. I compiled the player data for all of the years LeBron was at the Miami Heat, all of the years Kevin Love was at the Minnesota Timberwolves (his entire career), and all of the years Kyrie Irving has been at the Cleveland Cavs (his entire career).
Only players who participated in more than 30 games per season where included (NOTE: Doing this removes Kevin Loves 2012-2013, as he only played in 18 games that season do to several hand injuries).
I then created a cluster analysis to evaluate how similar or dissimilar players in the data set were (you can click on the picture to make it larger).
As we see, LeBron lies on a node all to himself, and rightfully so! LeBron is a truly unique player, who can play every position on the court and is both a significant defensive and offensive threat. To the right of Lebron, we see a second node, which then breaks down into two more nodes. It is in this cluster on the tree that we see the main players we care about – those that make up LeBron’s former and current super team. Kevin Love and Chris Bosh are clustered close together while Dwyane Wade and Kyrie Irving are clustered close together, owing to the similarities in their game.
LeBron’s Supporting Cast
We see that the supporting cast for LeBron have some similarities when we evaluate their performance metrics within the data set of these three teams (Cavs, Heat, and Timberwolves). Looking deeper at LeBron’s supporting cast in both Miami and Cleveland allows us to see how each of these players compare to each other.
Looking at Field Goal Percentage, we see that LeBron’s former teammates are a clear favorite when it comes to making shots. However, it is important to remember that this data is showing us the years that Wade and Bosh also played with LeBron. Perhaps having LeBron on the team created new opportunities for Wade and Bosh to score, opportunities that Irving and Love did not have given the weaker teams they were on?
When it comes to rebounds we see that Kevin Love has had more success in this category than the other four players, while we see that Bosh is roughly equal with James.
Below is some comparison of the four players against each other for a few of the other metrics in the data set (all graphs are showing mean +/- SD).
Conclusions
It is interesting to compare these players against each other. I am a bit surprised to see Bosh with such a low number of assists compared to the rest of the group. Additionally, it is interesting to see how many blocks Wade and Bosh had in comparison to Irving and Love. The Heat were definitely a defensive juggernaut, while also being a huge offensive threat, making them one of the most dangerous teams in the NBA. While it appears, from the cluster analysis, that Love and Irving play similar games to Bosh and Wade, it seems like Bosh and Wade are slightly better in some of the statistical categories.
Wade was already a great player (one of the best ever) before LeBron, and Bosh was no slouch himself. I wonder if “figuring out how to play together” allowed them to improve different aspects of their game, as having a unique player like LeBron on the court tends to draw a lot of interest from the opponents defense, opening up new opportunities for Wade and Bosh. One way to evaluate that might be to look at their individual statistics during their career before LeBron and then after LeBron. Additionally, it might be interesting to compare how much LeBron’s game changed from his first years with the Cavs and then his years with the Heat, where he “figured out how to play” with the other superstars on the court.
It will be interesting watch James, Love, and Irving, figure it out over the next few seasons. They have potential to turn this into another big three and hopefully dominate the NBA. With the similarities between Bosh and Love, and Wade and Irving, perhaps LeBron can put his new teammates into a good position to elevate their game and take things to the next level.