Why Don't Supergroups Work?

You might have heard that a certain very talented basketball player has decided to join a very talented basketball team. Amongst NBA fans, Kevin Durant's decision has sparked rampant speculation about just how good the Warriors can be. And they all range somewhere between giddy analysis and borderline lunacy. But all the pundits seem to forget; if this superteam meets its full potential, it will be the exception, not the rule.

Managing that level of star talent is incredibly challenging. It applies not only to your favorite sports teams, but also to movies, TV shows, and bands. It's not clear whether the expectations become so outsized or the stars genuinely perform worse when playing in an ensemble, but the whole rarely meets the sum of its parts.

Assessing expectations is what makes this exercise tricky. I know 29 other franchises that would take back-to-back championships and four consecutive finals appearances in a heartbeat, but can the Heatles era in Miami really be considered a success? They certainly fell short of where Lebron James saw them landing...

And for that matter, couldn't it be argued that the Beatles themselves underachieved? Their peak was undeniably the highest in the history of pop music. But while contemporaries like the Stones and the Who are still kicking, the Beatles were essentially dead before the 1970s began. And that's all due to the egos that formed once all the members developed a god complex.

It's even worse when musicians decide to team up while their star power is still shining. Remember Young Money? If you didn't, I apologize for reminding you. But it featured standout talents like Drake and Lil Wayne, up-and-comers like Nicki Minaj and Tyga, and whatever Gudda Gudda is.

The Brady Bunch of hip-hop, but way funnier.

I'll admit that "Bedrock" was a big hit, but that's mostly thanks to the chorus sang by Lloyd, who as you may notice isn't a member of the group at all. If you take just these eight together? You effectively have nothing. It's an issue of stars and scrubs, in which the three truly talented members are drowned out by all the blahness of the remaining five. The G.O.O.D Music album deals with this slightly better, but there are still too many cooks in the kitchen. And even when everyone involved really does have star power, you can still run into problems.

We all assume that we want the most star-studded cast when we pick out which movies we're going to see. It's why trailers make such a point of telling which actors are in the movie in the first place. But there's a fine line between loaded and overloaded. Take Now You See Me, for instance. There's simply too much going on in that cast (it's even worse in this summer's sequel).

Not pictured: the two other members of the Screen Actors Guild

There are so many well-known actors, and so many actors well-known for performing with a specific personality or essence. A star power, if you will. But rather than make the movie shine brighter, this oversaturation winds up cancelling itself out. If you replace one of those big names with a lesser-known but just as talented character actor, perhaps it's an entirely different dynamic. But then it's not the supergroup everybody covets.

So why do so few of these all-star alliances fail? It's difficult to say considering they do so in so many different ways. And even when there is success, it can almost always be considered an underachievement because the demand was set so high.

The one possible thread we can find in common is a lack of complimentary talent. You can get two of the strongest paddlers in the world for a kayak race, but it doesn't do you much good if they have to paddle at completely different paces. It's what happened with the "your turn, my turn" Heatles and the "your song, my song" Beatles and any "your scene, my scene" movie you can think of. If you aren't going compliment each other with your skills, you may as well go it alone.

The widespread thinking with the new-look Warriors is that Kevin Durant can blend right in with Golden State's system. Their fans better hope that's true, or the past tells us this won't go nearly as well for them as the prognosticators expect.