Using mathematics to find best sports team
Picking the greatest sports team ever is one of the hardest things to do, it could simply be because people have such vastly differing opinions about what constitutes a great team. At the end of the day though a lot of people point to certain factors that
they think defines a great team.
Some of these factors are a great win-loss record, very talented players, a great coach and a team that plays like a single unit. Over the years there have been a large number of these teams but now researchers are trying to use mathematics to solve the
problem. By leaving people’s opinions out of the equation, they hope to come up with a definite answer once and for all.
Measuring greatness, especially in sports, is very difficult to do. This is simply because of the fact that the opinions of the fans of the team get involved. When that happens, even the worst team suddenly becomes great in the eyes of a fan. Due to this
reason, an unbiased and purely mathematical method of evaluating greatness needed to be developed. This is exactly what a team of researchers at Forbes Magazine came up with. They used a mathematical formula to develop a score that they could rate teams on.
In the study only teams from the big four sports in America were studied, but the same system can be used to determine the greatness of other teams all over the world. The big four sports that were looked at were American football, basketball, baseball and
ice hockey.
The formula was simple. The research team looked at a team’s win loss record in relation to the level of competition in the league at the time. This resulted in a deviation score for each of the four sports. So if a team that had an amazing win –loss record
played in a very tough league or in a time with equally good teams, its G-score or Greatness score, would be higher. The same way if a team had a great win-loss record but it played in a league with very weak teams its G-score would be lower.
By comparing the different teams over the decades resulted in a very interesting phenomenon. It looked like the teams with very high G-scores in all four different sports belonged to the 1980s. At first the researches were puzzled about this but then they
looked deeper into the decade and found the answer.
It was in the 80s that sports really started to become popular among fans and sports in general became a viable career option. So those kids, who were growing up in the 70s started to pursue sports passionately. So the 80s had some extremely talented players
in all four of the big sports. The other reason was that this was right before the era of huge salaries and salary caps so it was easier for the management of a team to keep a talented bunch of players on the same team without them being poached by another
franchise.
So onto the results; after all that research, the one thing the team claimed was that it was not possible to compare teams in different sports using this method. So they came up with the four best teams from the different sports in America.
In the NFL, mathematically speaking, the greatest team of all time seems to be the 1989 San Francisco 49ers. The team had a win-loss record of 14 and 2 and a G-score of 4.6, which was the highest among other teams in the NFL. In baseball it was the 1975
Cincinnati Reds with a win-loss record of 108-54 and a G-score of 2.67 for the MLB. If we look at the NBA, the greatest team there was the 1983-84 Boston Celtics with a win-loss record of 62-20 and a G-score of 6.6. The greatest team in ice hockey was the
2001-02 Detroit Red Wings with an incredible record of 51-17-10 and 116 points overall. They managed to achieve a G-score of 7.7 in the NFL, which was the highest in the whole league’s history.
A lot of fans will not agree with this method of determining the greatest team but this was a purely mathematical way to do it. It will be interesting to see if a team of researchers can find a way to mathematically evaluate the greatest sports team of all
time in any sport using the same or similar methods. It seems greatness in sports can be mathematically proven.
Tags: