Question

Given the law of diminishing marginal returns, why might rules that limit the size of a teams roster be unnecessary in professional basketball?

Answer 1

The law of diminishing marginal returns states that as we increase the amount of units employed of an input(variable factor), keeping other factors constant, the marginal productivity of the variable input will eventually fall and this will lead to the final output increasing only at a diminishing rate.

Applying this law on basketball game with team players as the variable input explains that, as the number of players is increased on the fixed size of a field,it will eventually lead to fall in the marginal productivity(player's performance) in the game. This is because with the increased number of players,the chance that each player gets to score a point decreases, and with too much of tplayers on the field, it may also get too congested for each player to perform at their best. So, at the point where one more additional player on the field reduces the productivity(returns) of the players, the team will automatically stop accomodating more players. So based on the law of diminishing marginal returns, we can say that rules limiting the size of team's players is unnecessary in professional basketball because even if there are no rules on the size limit,no team will keep increasing the size of their teams after accomodating an adequate number.