Imagine if you picked a sports team by the most paid players in their league.
The football team would be half quarterbacks, the hockey team mostly goalies and so on.
The football team would be half quarterbacks, the hockey team mostly goalies and so on.
The baseball team the New York Yankees.
They seem to do OK.
Obviously it's early on the season, but we can look at last year's season to get a better heuristic. The top two teams in terms of roster salary were once again the Dodgers and Yankees. The Dodgers did come in first in their division but finished the season 12.5 games behind the eventual World Series winners, the Chicago Cubs, whose roster salary was barely 2/3 of the Dodgers. Oh, and the Yankees came in fourth place (of five) in their division, a whole nine games out of first place.
So yes, spending money helps you be a contender, but spending the most money is not a good metric for the best team (at least, not in baseball, and I'd imagine that being smarter about spending your money rather than spending more is useful in other fields as well).
http://www.spotrac.com/mlb/payroll/2017/ http://www.spotrac.com/mlb/payroll/2016/ http://m.mlb.com/standings/?yyyy=2016&view=divisional
At least in MLB, 40 multi-year players isn't that large a sample!
To throw another example on the list, the New England Patriots are 30/33 for salary money spent. The Miami Dolphins are 5th. Spending big money for rockstars is neither necessary nor sufficient.
http://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/look-nflpa-salary-cap-char...
Isiah Thomas was deserving, and Laettner was picked over Shaq. At the time, both were tossups. Johnson was older and so was Bird, but I assume they had high salaries per the topic.
[0] http://www.basketball-reference.com/olympics/teams/USA/1992/
But even great quarterbacks struggle if the O-line is dysfunctional.
And you definitely wouldn't be better off with 6 star quarterbacks than 1 average quarterback and 5 O-line players.
The larger point is that individual stars definitely matter a lot in pro sports. And recruiting and retaining them with extremely disproportionate amounts of money doesn't seem to be irrational for most sports.
The same reason your team fights a lot when the other team messes with your goalie; can't afford an injured goalie.
http://www.thehockeynews.com/news/article/new-war-stat-for-h...
4 of the top 50 highest paid players in the NHL are goalies.
You hear a lot about how a good goalie is half the team in modern hockey, so I thought that would translate to salaries.
Anyway, I hope I made my bigger point clear, despite the questionable example.