Never Too Much – The Benefit of Talent to Team Performance in the NBA: Comment on Swaab et al. (2014)
The Too-Much-Talent Effect (TMT, Swaab et al., 2014) challenges the common belief that teams’ performance is directly proportional to the talent of its members and aligns among various Too Much of a Good Thing (TMGT) phenomena. Although the assumption holds up to a point, the authors argue, beyond that point, talent becomes detrimental to performance. Support was provided by the results of quadratic regressions between team performance and talent across 10 NBA seasons, testing whether the coefficient of the quadratic term was negative. We reexamined the TMT effect for the same 10 NBA seasons and for a larger data set spanning 64 NBA seasons using the two-lines, interrupted regression approach (Simonsohn, 2018). Our results show that similar to lay beliefs (Swaab et al., 2014, Study 1) teams generally benefit from more talented members, the benefit appears to be marginally decreasing, but more talent is never detrimental to team performance.