These charts look at each NBA champion’s distribution of “win shares” across players during their playoff runs. Win Shares are a measure of a players total contribution to a teams success, as explained here:
http://www.basketball-reference.com/about/ws.html
Some players on a championship team are not listed, either because they had negative win shares, a net of zero win shares, or did not play in the playoffs.
Some random observations on a few team’s championship team’s win-share distributions:
2014: The Spurs player with the most win-shares during their 2014 run was Tim Duncan, at 17% of their win-share total. This is by far the lowest percentage for any championship team’s top player. The 2014 Spurs really live up to their reputation as a team that shared the ball and had everyone contribute, as 6 different players had over 10% of the team’s playoff win shares apiece.
2013: This is the most recent year where the top player on a championship team had over 30% of the team’s playoff win shares (Lebron obviously). Interesting to note that the “Big Three” according to win-shares for this playoff run was not Lebron, Bosh, and Wade, but actually Lebron, Bosh, and Andersen. Wade had a bit of a down playoffs, and the Birdman was able to sneak into the top three in win shares.
2012: Like in 2013, one of the “Big Three” didn’t make the Heat’s top three in win-shares. In this case, the Big Three was Lebron, Wade, and Mario Chalmers, with Bosh falling to fourth in win-shares during this playoff run.
2004 Pistons: This is one of the most unique win-share distributions of any championship team. Chauncey Billups led the team with 20.4% of their playoff win shares (only Duncan on the 2014 Spurs had a lower % of win shares as the top player on a championship team), but Ben Wallace also had 20% and Richard Hamilton 19.4%. That means there was only a 1% difference between the top player and the third player in win-shares, by far the lowest of any team. This is one of the few championship teams without a clear-cut top player, or even top two players.
2003 Spurs: This was a very un-Spursy Spurs team, with Duncan carrying a massive load with little help at 34.9% of all the team’s playoff win-shares.
2000 Lakers: Shaquille O’Neal had the highest win-share % on any championship run, at 35.3%. During this playoff run Kobe wasn’t quite on his level yet, at only 15.8% of the team’s playoff win-share total.
Nick Conway 