A longstanding NBA tradition (especially this time of the year) is to throw stars under the bus for not leading their teams to the title. If Michael Jordan (before the 90s) and LeBron James had to endure that, you know nobody is safe. This approach puts a lot of emphasis on the star’s perceived shortcomings and not enough on the context in which the failure occurred. It could be due to injuries, but very often, it’s simply not having enough star power around them to go all the way.
The truth is, few things predict success better than the quality of your teammates, which is kind of duh considering no player is going to play more than 20 percent of the minutes on any given team. But we wanted to put that to the test with a fun exercise where we awarded points to each player in NBA history based on the star power of their teammates. We gave 10 points for playing with the MVP, nine points for the second-place finisher, and so on down to one point for playing with a 10th-place finisher. This is admittedly an arbitrary way to measure the star company of a player, but pretty telling all the same.
Below, you’ll see a ranking of the 75 players who played with the most star power, a list that includes both big-name players and rank-and-file ones. On average, they won 3.03 championship rings. For context, the players selected to the NBA75 list, the finest the league has ever seen, won 2.12 rings on average. It’s almost like playing with stars gets you closer to a title than playing like a star.
At the top of the list is Derek Fisher, who played with five players who finished in the Top 10 of the MVP voting with him on the team. Also worth noting: Seven of the nine winningest players in NBA history (rings-wise) crack the Top 9 of this ranking.