my own personal feelings wrote:
I generally rate athletes from differing sports on the likelihood they'd be able to compete in the others genre. How would a bball player fare in running, football, rugby, triathlon, swimming, bazzball.....
What sports players have the greatest chance of excelling at other sports.
I personally agree this is the best starting definition. However, when we actually do that, the results are at best unpredictable, I think. Michael Jordan, for example, did not fare very well at baseball. Neither did Danny Ainge (although better than Jordan).
It helps me to think conceptually about two parts of different sports--generally I think that different sports lie along a continuum of fitness sports to skill sports (perhaps continuum is a bit simplistic). The more a sport emphasizes basic fitness elements the more translatable that athlete might be to other fitness based sports (or to the part of the sport that involves only fitness and not skill).
So in my sort of thinking track and running events generally are basically fitness based activities. So athletes from other sports who have good fitness seem to tranlate pretty well--we see this when we see threads on here about football players who ran track in high school and college, when we see threads about soccer players showing up for track practice and doing well, when we see threads about distance runners translating well to bicycling in a relatively brief period of time. Of course we see immediately the downfall in this sort of thinking--there are at least two different kinds of fitness--speed and endurance--so that sprinters might translate well to basketball, baseball, football and endurance guys to bicycling, triathlon, swimming. Amd of course this generalization works better the lower down on the food chain you get--many great football players may make great high school sprinters but at some point the training requirements for a professional sprinter diverge both in technique (block work) and in body type (can't gain too much weight). That doesn't even get into the complications of more technical field events.
The situation is even more complicated when you start talking about skill sports. Baseball is one that you think of pretty quickly--it takes very specific hand-eye coordination and lots of reps to do well at it. Sure fitness in speed, endurance, power all help but are not sufficient for success. Swimmers have efficiency and technique that can only be learned through long hours in the pool. Soccer players have a need for foot-eye coordination that I don't see in many other sports. Hockey players needs skates and ice, etc. Those are all skills which do not translate very readily from other sports at all. I would pick a modestly athletic kid who grew up on skates rather than a very athletic NBA player who had never been on the ice (it would take this guy years and years to catch up, if he ever could).
So, I think every sport has some mix between fitness and skill. If you want to talk just a mix of fitness attributes, I think that NBA players probably rank pretty high on a range of measures. To a certain extent that does translate well to a variety of other games--for example they would do OK with the running in a soccer game and could do OK at high jumping with a bit of practice. However at the elite level almost every competition also has technique and skill that is specific to that game that makes the top practitioners at that sport very specialized.