Johnson played 13 seasons with the league and played for six different teams. Other major hubs include Joe Smith at 257 connections – Smith played for 12 different teams over his 16 years career – and George Johnson at 255 connections. The length of his career, combined with the number of teams he played for, makes Howard the largest “hub” on the NBA node graph, with 264 connections. Some players have played with more players than others, making them better “hubs.” Juwan Howard, for example, who is currently an assistant coach with the Miami Heat, played six and a half seasons for the Washington Bullets/Wizards, three seasons for the Houston Rockets, and three seasons for the Miami Heat, and had stints with the Dallas Mavericks, the Denver Nuggets, the Orlando Magic, the Charlotte Bobcats, and the Portland Trail Blazers. This is because as the league grew larger, the likelihood of players playing with each other grew fainter.
Of note is the fact that as the graph moves closer to the modern day, it grows less dense. For example, the integration of the American Basketball Association (ABA) in 1976 increased the constellation of players, as did the expansion drives of 19 – the second of which saw the NBA expand into Canada. The graph also shows how the league’s various contractions and expansions have affected the players’ connections. As a visual representation of the league’s history, the graph reveals a shared heritage among those who played in the league, which is inherited and passed on from generation to generation. As is expected from such a query, the node graph is a linear chain, where connections are most likely to exist only with the nodes next to it. The graphic above represents every player who has played for the NBA since the second season of the league’s predecessor – the Basketball Association of America (BAA) – in 1947. The NBA Family Every NBA Player Since 1947 What do the networks of some of basketball’s greats look like? Check out the connections of Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant, Kevin Garnett, and LeBron James. Check out our methodology to see that while players who played in the same season would be connected by relatively short degrees chains, the chain of acquaintances between modern players and Hall of Famers may be significantly more complicated. In more practical terms, “Six Degrees” – or the “small world theory” – suggests that everything and everyone in this world is connected to one another in a meaningful way.įanatics decided to put this theory to the test by examining how separated NBA players who have played on the same team are from one another. While this concept is famous for exploring the prolific film career of actor Kevin Bacon, the theory is actually a complicated 87-year-old computational mathematics problem that later took more than 20 years to prove and went on to serve as the basis of modern social media.
There is a theory that in this interconnected world, any two people can be connected by just six acquainted links or less.