How old is your favorite team's supporting cast?

A new way to think about young vs. old teams

Photo by Meg Oliphant/Getty Images

Most NBA fans know that the Oklahoma City Thunder are a young team, while the L.A. Clippers are an old team. Not a single player among OKC's top eight in minutes played is older than 25, while none of L.A.’s top nine is younger than 26.

Accordingly, Oklahoma City has the league's youngest minutes-weighted age, according to Basketball-Reference, at 23.1 years old. On the other end of the spectrum, L.A. has the oldest, with a minutes-weighted age of 30.6 years old — the only team in the league over 30.

Determining whether a team is young, old, or somewhere in between gets murkier when looking at the teams whose minutes-weighted age is closer to the league average. This season, the average is 26.5 years old, and there are eight teams (Atlanta Hawks, New York Knicks, Cleveland Cavaliers, Toronto Raptors, Brooklyn Nets, Sacramento Kings, Dallas Mavericks, Denver Nuggets) with a minutes-weighted age between 26 and 27.

This is where I think it’s helpful to differentiate between the age of a team’s stars, and the age of its supporting cast. Because while Brooklyn and Dallas have the exact same minutes-weighted overall (26.5), the players Dallas has surrounding Luka Doncic and Kyrie Irving are far younger (26.4) than the ones Brooklyn has surrounding Mikal Bridges (29.3).