Age Distribution of High Potential Players, Part 1 of 4: General Population

[Bob Breum]

Recently, there has been a lot of chatter about the imbalance of high value players in the league. League officials have stated that it is their intention to normalize the distribution of players as an existing bubble of high value older players gradually age out of the population.

There has also been speculation about which positions exhibit the greatest scarcity of high value players.

I thought it would be interesting to quantify these concerns. I downloaded the BBA universe of players and used Excel to create these visualizations.

Here is the entire universe of players:

There is roughly a bell curve centered around age 21, with a smaller bubble centered at 30. This is logical, as draftees range from 16-21; after that, the population shrinks through retirement and career-ending injuries. The smaller bulge is likely an historical artifact from league structure changes before my time.

Obviously, GMs desire to employ players who are more talented than replacement level players, who are in relative abundance. Here is a look at the universe of players whose potential is at least 55:

The bell curve is now centered around 24. Perhaps this represents successful development of players who have improved their potential ratings. Typically, such development occurs by this age, and accounts for the peak. The historical artifact at 30 remains, but now there is a large spike at age 35, no doubt another historical artifact.