Achieving success in the National Basketball Association is not only a priceless and historic feat, but teams that have success in the playoffs and regular season also benefit from financial bonuses. This paper estimates a production function for professional basketball teams, and uses the results to determine significant areas of focus that are positively and negatively associated with regular season win percentage. A Cobb-Douglas production function and multi-variable Ordinary Least Squares regression models are applied to data collected from the 2010-11 through 2014-15 seasons in the National Basketball Association. The results are also applied to successful teams in the playoffs in order to determine how regular season results translate to the playoffs. The resulting estimates indicate that successful NBA teams over the last five seasons have focused on shooting efficiently, keeping opponent shooting percentages low, rebounding, forcing turnovers at a high rate, and building their teams through the draft.
