The NBA Aging Curve
A common theme in this course has been “basketball is unique!” And while that’s still true, the topic of this particular course is one that is common not only in every sport in the world, but just for humanity. I can’t drink as many beers and bounce back as early as I could when I just turned 21; similarly, LeBron James can’t go 40-plus minutes a night for five nights in a row and maintain his play like he did in his early seasons in the NBA.
Aging. It’s a part of life and a part of sports. Lucky for us, it’s also incredibly predictable and quantifiable in basketball. There have been a variety of studies done on aging curves – first popularized by Bill James and the MLB community – and we now have a firm grasp on how a player should develop or regress as they get older and older. And lucky for us, we can actually add that aging curve data to other statistics – like Plus/Minus, as mentioned last lesson – and fairly accurately predict season-to-season player performance.
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