What Constitutes a “Successful Season” and Why Does It Matter?

“Wins Above Replacement;” "Pass-Completion Percentage;” “Defensive Win Shares;” The sports world seems to revolve around measurement even more than it did when some of us devoured the numbers on the backs of baseball cards. One key metric you may not find on the back of a card or in the spreadsheets of analysts  : “Successful Season.” How do we define such a thing?

Having a “Successful Season” matters a lot to sports marketers.  It’s necessarily imprecise, because it exists in the minds of supporters. It’s important, though, because their vibe about the previous season’s accomplishments fuels season ticket and sponsorship purchases for the following year’s campaign.

Some seasons make such evaluation simple. If a baseball team wins the World Series, or a football team the Champions League, or another kind of football team the Super Bowl, they have clearly experienced success. Only one team per sport earns those distinctions, however, and lots more need their fans to believe that the just-completed season sets them up for a satisfactory campaign-to-come.

Leagues (and entire sports) further their own success when they maximize the number of member teams fans consider to have had “good years.” It therefore follows that more than the one franchise that wins the year’s biggest trophy needs the ability to claim a satisfactory result.

Does winning more games than you lose constitute success? If you had a poor won-loss record the year before, it might. Improvement sells.

Most U.S. sports have playoffs, and a season that finishes in the end-of-season tournament generally creates a perception of success. The exception can lie with teams who have made the postseason a number of years running without winning big, as happened with the Atlanta Braves.⁽¹⁾

It helps if you can claim a title, even if it isn’t the ultimate one. In American arena sports, if you win a division or conference title, you get to raise a banner the next year.

In European sports like soccer, you get lots of chances to win silverware.  You might win a continent-wide competition, one of a couple of domestic cups, or the domestic league itself.

In some U.S. sports with player drafts, faring extremely poorly can counterintuitively lead to a positive evaluation. If you “win” the opportunity to draft a Shaquille O’Neal or Mario Lemieux⁽²⁾, the resulting expectations of immediate improvement can drive ticket sales. They can also fuel allegations of unsavory conduct, as in the cases of Patrick Ewing⁽³⁾ and Hakeem Olajuwon⁽⁴⁾.

In sports with relegation, the poorest teams have no path to positive spin. They drop to a lower league the following year. The overall effect of the system may prove positive, however, since an equal number of teams sell their fans the triumph of promotion and visits from Barcelonas or Chelseas the following season. Some number of teams who narrowly avoided relegation, especially recently promoted ones, can often declare a positive result to their year.

Qualifying for European play in itself often prompts supporters to have happy feelings about a season. Soccer clubs who fare well enough to earn high-profile weeknight games in the Champions League or Europa League have something special to sell to prospective ticket buyers.

The Europa League logo adorns Olympic Stadium ahead of a Lazio/Tottenham clash

College sports have several ways to declare success besides a national or conference title. Numerically speaking, advancing to a Final Four, Frozen Four, Elite 8, or Sweet Sixteen plays well. For many smaller schools, simply making it to a national tournament becomes a transcendent achievement. Bowl games have always seemed a genius way of setting up tons of schools to claim seasonal success. Time will tell if recent national football playoffs have removed the luster from the historically useful designation “bowl team."

Departure of key players can blunt the marketing impact of a strong collegiate season. Graduation rates, no matter how good, don’t seem to move a lot of tickets.

If your team hasn’t met one of the above criteria for in-season success, can you still have a successful offseason? Absent spending big money on free agents or transfers, one has to seek positive stories to tell. Customer-facing employees should know about young players who could break out and what the official company line is about scenarios under which a team could improve. Using social media to seem earnest about improvement and offering stories about individual players doing good things on- and off-field can help a brand’s image after a down year.

One can also take a page from minor league teams, where sales tend to revolve more around fan experience than winning. An emphasis on group tickets and community involvement becomes paramount.

Governing bodies have designed the likes of salary caps, international free agent restrictions, and Financial Fair Play to help engender the competitive balance that maximizes a given team’s chances of plausibly claiming that success awaits in the coming season.

As the saying goes, “everybody loves a winner.” The more leagues can ensure fans perceive that everyone IS a winner, the more success they will have.

Rush Olson has spent two decades directing creative efforts for sports teams and broadcasters. He currently creates ad campaigns and related creative projects for sports entities through his company, Rush Olson Creative & Sports.

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Footnotes

⁽¹⁾ Demetrius Bell “Braves daily news digest 10/12: Attendance hits 10-year low,” Talking Chop.

http://www.talkingchop.com/2014/10/12/6964075/braves-daily-news-digest-10-12-attendance-hits-10-year-low (accessed April 3, 2015)

⁽²⁾ Tom McMillan “Lemieux Gives Pens Sign of Hope,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. http://penguins.nhl.com/club/news.htm?id=721633 (accessed April 3, 2015)

⁽³⁾ “Draft Conspiracy Delivers Ewing to Knicks?,” Lost Lettermen. http://www.lostlettermen.com/article/video-1985-nba-lottery-bent-envelope-ewing-knicks (accessed April 3, 2015)

⁽⁴⁾ Dannie “Coin Flip to Lottery: Did the Rockets Tank to Get Olajuwon?,” The Recliner GM Sports Blog. https://reclinergm.wordpress.com/2008/01/19/coin-flip-to-lottery-did-the-rockets-tank-to-get-olajuwon/ (accessed April 3, 2015)

Winning the NBA Without a Hall of Famer Would Make History

Assertions around which this blog will revolve :

• Atlanta, Memphis, and Toronto each currently occupies first-place in its NBA division. None of the three teams has a 20-points-per-game scorer on its roster.

• Tim Duncan, LeBron James, Dirk Nowitzki, Paul Pierce, and Kobe Bryant will earn election to the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame when they become eligible.

• Kyle Lowry, Marc Gasol, and Paul Millsap probably won’t join them in the Hall.

The Hawks’, Grizzlies’, and Raptors’ presences among the league’s elite has given rise to a new theory : You don’t need a superstar to win a championship.⁽¹⁾

This runs contrary to the sort of traditional thinking that led to the Heat’s three-headed monster taking its talents to South Beach, Jerry West’s machinations to acquire Shaquille O’Neal, and the Knicks’ recent run to the top with Carmelo Anthony. OK, that last jab wasn’t very nice. As Charles Barkley, Bob Lanier, and Stockton/Malone know, it does take more than a superstar (or even two) to win a ring. But historically, you’ve pretty much had to have at least one to do it.

No NBA champion whose complete roster has become eligible for the hall won the title without at least one Hall-of-Fame player on the team. Assuming we’re correct about our list of future inductees (which could also include Jason Kidd, Dwyane Wade, Kevin Garnett, Ray Allen, and others), that trend will continue among all the recent winners, save one.

The Detroit Pistons of 2003-04 will likely become the first NBA champs with no playing inductees (Hall-of-Fame coach Larry Brown doesn’t count). They had a great mix of stars who put up some outstanding years and went to consecutive finals, but Billups, Wallace, Hamilton and company seem real long shots to enter Springfield’s shrine without a ticket.

Historically, those Pistons show up as an amazing aberration. HoFers George Mikan, Jim Pollard, Slater Martin, and Vern Mikkelson led the Minneapolis Lakers to a non-showtime title in the NBA’s first season, 1949-50. For good measure, one of their forwards, Bud Grant, later earned election to the Pro Football Hall of Fame.⁽²⁾ That core set a precedent with three more titles.

Actually, the precedent had already been set. The Lakers, whose nickname made sense in those days, had won a title the previous season in the third and final year of the NBA-precursor Basketball Association of America. Both previous champions of the BAA boasted Hall of Famers, and half those of the league with which they merged, the National Basketball League, did. The latter number would rise if you believe one can make a Hall-of-Fame case for Oshkosh All-Stars standout Leroy Edwards.⁽³⁾

All those teams competed before there was a Hall of Fame, but they knew you needed superstars. Heck, even in the ABA, only the ’70-'71 Utah Stars won the title without a Hall of Fame player. The likes of Julius Erving, Artis Gilmore, and Roger Brown proved needed components for championships in that league, too.

Just making the final seems to require a transcendent player. Pending what Dwight Howard does the rest of his career, the ’75-'76 Phoenix Suns may stand as the only NBA runners-up without a Hall-of-Fame player (although 4.6 ppg-man Pat Riley did achieve that status for his post-playing accomplishments).

Since the beginnings of pro basketball, then, “nice" teams, plucky bands of no-names, and Don-Nelson-matchup-nightmare squads have struggled to break through a wall composed of Russells, Chamberlains, Jordans, Birds, and Magics.

Hall of Famers have traditionally stood tall, in this case Wilt Chamberlain with the author's father (left)

With only ten competitors on the playing surface at any one time, the game lends itself to individual brilliance. What could change it? How about big data?

Brett Koremenos of Sports on Earth wrote that "in today's NBA, it's becoming increasingly possible to compete for titles without elite players.”⁽⁴⁾ He did so while making the case that the Celtics might be adopting a new-school Moneyball approach to building his team.

As an aside, I feel old because I just used “new-school” to modify “Moneyball.” I remember interviewing former Oakland A’s assistant GM Grady Fuson about player evaluation tools back when there was only a book, not a Brad Pitt movie.

The last decade, however, has seen an explosion of fresh statistical evaluation approaches, ala the Moneyball premise, across all sports. The baseball A’s needed to find a way to compete with the Barry Bondses and Alex Rodriguezes. Have some of these newly successful hoops teams found market weaknesses they can exploit?

If so, you might offer the widely-imitated Spurs some credit, as they found ways to discover Kawhi Leonards and Danny Greens to take up the slack as their core closed in on aging out of MVP contention.

Better information on how a player's activity contributes to winning may result in superior player evaluation. Coaches willing to incorporate such data into their substitution patterns and floor sets may further improve their teams’ chances to get past star-laden opposition.

Innovative salary cap management can play a role, too. Paul Georges, Bill Waltons, and Derrick Roses get hurt sometimes, and superstars do cost a lot. Not every all-NBAer will injure himself, however, so a new power can still expect to face its share of Stephen Currys and Chris Pauls come playoffs.

Can the upstarts deal with the powerhouses? They might. The ’03-’04 Pistons did. So did the ’70-’71 Stars (their coach, Bill Sharman, had been a Hall-of-Fame player) and the ’48-'49 NBL champs Anderson Duffey Packers.

Still, a one-year wonder might prove possible. The trick, I think, might be how to make it more than a limited phenomenon, since teams that have big-time players can take similar approaches. In baseball, the big-market franchises began to pay attention to Bill James, good teams started to spend big on prospects, and defensive shifts began to reduce BABIPs across the big leagues. History does not rest comfortably on the side of the Hawks, Grizz, and Raptors.

Unless, that is, you go back to the Akron Firestone Non-Skids. No Hall-of-Famers, back-to-back champs.

They did it in the NBL. In 1939 and 1940.

Rush Olson has spent two decades directing creative efforts for sports teams and broadcasters. He currently creates ad campaigns and related creative projects for sports entities through his company, Rush Olson Creative & Sports.

RushOlson.com

Linkedin.com/company/rush-olson-creative-&-sports

Facebook.com/RushOlsonCreativeandSports

Footnotes

Note : Statistical records drawn from http://www.basketball-reference.com/

⁽¹⁾ Ian Levy  “Does A Team Really Need A Star To Get To The NBA Finals?,” FiveThirtyEightSports.

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/does-a-team-really-need-a-star-to-get-to-the-nba-finals/ (accessed February 25, 2015)

⁽²⁾ Andrew Astleford “From hardwood to pigskin: Bud Grant understands basketball skills translate to the NFL,” Fox Sports Florida. http://www.foxsports.com/florida/story/from-hardwood-to-pigskin-bud-grant-understands-basketball-skills-translate-to-the-nfl-051714 (accessed February 25, 2015)

⁽³⁾ “NBL alums snubbed by Hall,” apbr.org. http://www.apbr.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=2058 (accessed February 25, 2015)

⁽⁴⁾ Brett Koremenos “THE CELTICS' INNOVATIVE REBUILD,” Sports On Earth. http://www.sportsonearth.com/article/109916244/boston-celtics-veteran-contributors-nba-draft-isaiah-thomas (accessed February 25, 2015)

7 Reasons Why You Should Read This List of 7 Reasons

Reason #1) It’s A List

We can tell that people like lists because we see them all over LinkedIn, the blogosphere, late-night television, and every marketing website ever created. When I was a kid, I had a roll of “Book of Sports Lists” toilet paper. I owned the book, too, incidentally.

Reason #2) Organization

A list must stay at least somewhat organized, by its very nature. Paragraphs can ramble. Sentences can run on. With a list, the author had to at least consider in what order he or she would make his or her points.

Reason #3) Reason #4

Even if reason #3 is terrible (as this one is), It’s only one point of several. You can easily move on to the next one.

Reason #4) Minimum knowledge

If a person writes an article, you can’t be sure they know a darn thing until you’ve read a bit of it. A 12-item list, though, implies the creator certainly knows a minimum of a dozen things about the topic (in this case, lists).

Reason #5) The Count

We Americans all watched Sesame Street. The show's mathematically inclined vampire taught us to love counting things. Admit it, you can hear Count Von Count’s Transylvanian accent in your head whenever you read a list, saying “Five! Five Reasons to Include Yik Yak in Your Content Marketing Mix!  Hahahahaha!”

Reason #6) The Cute Photo

Reason number 6 includes a picture of an adorable child wearing a shirt advertising one of my projects.  Generally speaking, at least one entry per list has some image, animated gif, or infographic embedded in it. Look! Pretty colors!

This young film enthusiast has I Am Douglass on her list of must-see movies

Reason #7) It’s Finite

When you read an article, it can drag. You find yourself scrolling down to see if you have a chance of making it to the end of the prose before your children are grown. Even with a stupid list like this one, you at least know it will come to an end once it has reached its appointed number. Listmakers seem to have a really good track record for honesty. If they say their list will have ten reasons, you can feel pretty darn certain it won’t have eleven, or twenty-six, or a hundred-forty-seven. When it’s over, it’s over. As this list thankfully is.

Rush Olson has spent two decades directing creative efforts for sports teams and broadcasters. He currently creates ad campaigns and related creative projects for sports entities through his company, Rush Olson Creative & Sports.

RushOlson.com

Linkedin.com/company/rush-olson-creative-&-sports

Facebook.com/RushOlsonCreativeandSports