You could do this in different ways, the simplest approach in my mind is looking at total minutes played.
- I compiled the data from basketball-reference for every rookie that made a debut in the
- NBA (https://www.basketball-reference.com/leagues/NBA_1962_rookies.html) and
- ABA (https://www.basketball-reference.com/leagues/ABA_1969_rookies.html)
- from 1951 until 2023
- and totalized these for players that played both in the NBA and ABA.
- Since 1951 had some missing data and it doesn't make sense to include recent drafts, I only looked at
seasons 1952 up to and including 2008, which resulted in this dataset:
So far I've just done some initial analysis, and while players in '50's fared worse than modern players, it seems that players making their league debut in the '60s (with '62 being the exception), especially the late '60s, actually played the most minutes of any era on average:
Top 10 years sorted by total average minutes played by players making their debut in that specific year:
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Bottom 10 years sorted by total average minutes played by players making their debut in that specific year:
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Note the spread (standard error mean) though, you have more variance in the '60s (most likely due smaller player pool), compared to later years:
1965
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1966
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1988
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1990
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Now this is probably related to NBA players jumping to the ABA, so this skews things a bit, but I think discounting that entirely is also unfair to older players. Also while modern medicine and training regimens have improved in general, I think due to the bigger talent pool, it is also more difficult to stay in the league when it's easier for teams to find a replacement.
Any thoughts/suggestions?
Probably a better method would be by looking at the number of seasons a player played major minutes (>= 24 minutes), but that takes more effort to collect. Another thing to consider is to only look at the top 10%-20% and look at big minute players, if one wants to focus on higher profile players.
