In the scope of the NBA landscape, the importance of big-name stars is more integral to championship contention than it is in any other professional sport. Teams without a bonafide go-to guy can certainly succeed via team play, but without that one dominant leader an alpha dog, if you will winning a title is nothing more than a pipe dream.
Looking back at the 2015-16 NBA season, PointAfter, a sports data visualization site thats part of the Graphiq network, aimed to rank each teams alpha dog against one another. In this case, the term alpha dog merely means each teams best player.