Recent history in the NBA has shown a preference for efficiency in determining greatness. After all, the world becomes more technologically and biologically efficient each and every day. What makes this transition even more prudent is the fact that the best player in the NBA over the past decade has been LeBron James, a player who turned in two of the most efficient seasons of All-Time in 2012 and 2013 -- proved mathematically using the now widespread Player Efficiency Rating (PER).
The problem, however, is that efficiency doesn’t always translate into results and wins. As efficient as LeBron is, it is impossible to play an absolutely perfect basketball game. Even if you make every shot you take an offense, you still have to defend the other team. Since defense depends so much on unity and teamwork, a “perfect” offensive player will still lose his “perfect game” if the opposing team scores a single point. In other words, nobody is perfect.
So if efficiency is simply a single factor of a player’s greatness, then what is the other factor?
It’s simple, a player’s overall value on the basketball court. This may seem an impossible statistic to measure, but developments in technology and the prevalence of new statistical categories (e.g. turnovers, blocks, steals) have made it possible for men like John Hollinger to quantify a player’s overall impact on a single game -- specifically with two metrics.
The first of these metrics is the Plus/Minus (+/-) factor, which calculates a team’s success with versus without a specific player on the floor. In other words, a player with a higher +/- will be more likely to help his team win an individual game. Over the course of a season, this statistic can be compiled as Box Plus/Minus, showing which players helped their team win games the most.
The other metric is the GameScore statistic, which gives a rough measure of a player’s performance in an individual game, taking into account all available statistics in a box score. Like Plus/Minus, the higher the GameScore, the better the player and the higher likelihood that his team will win the game.
Like everyone, however, even the most talented NBA players lose games on occasion (since no team has ever gone 82-0). So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that teams can still lose games despite having the best player in the game on their team (e.g. LeBron James and the 2014 and 2015 NBA Finals).
So how do we decide who is the best player after an individual game if the greatest can still lose? After all, the object of the game is to win, isn’t it.
It’s simple. We bring together the two factors: efficiency and overall value. By weighting these two metrics equally, because they are both important to a player’s greatness, we can assign a rank to any given player so long as he played minutes and is quantifiable through PER and either GameScore (GmSc) or Box Plus/Minus (BPM). It is important to note, however, that overall value is the stronger of the two factors because it actually impacts the Final Score of a game -- since it is possible to play efficiently without contributing any real value.
Player Ranking, therefore, is calculated by taking the average of your two factors, and at any point during a given season you can rank each individual player in the NBA based on his up-to-date statistics throughout the year.
On the evening of February 3th, I broke a news story (http://popgates.com/stephen-currys-historical-night/) that asserted that Stephen Curry had replaced LeBron as the best player in the NBA. Although my estimation was correct, it actually has nothing to do with the historical fact that he scored 51 points for a team on pace to win 73 games. The actual evidence is tied entirely to my new Player Ranking system. If you appreciate numbers and hard facts like I do, then you’ll notice that on Basketball-Reference.com, you can see up-to-date League Leaders for every statistical category. As of Wednesday night -- and pretty much all season -- Curry leads the league in PER and BPM (http://www.basketball-reference.com/leagues/NBA_2016_leaders.html?lid=header_seasons). And while he is still very much in the conversation for Best Player in the NBA, LeBron James’ averaged efficiency and value ranked him as the fourth best player this season behind Curry, Russell Westbrook, and Kevin Durant.
My first step in testing my new metric was to apply it to NBA history and see whether the MVP accolade has been awarded appropriately. The test passed in all of the obvious seasons -- Wilt Chamberlain in 1967, Larry Bird in 1986, Michael Jordan in 1991, and Shaquille O’Neal in 2000 -- but where it failed is even more important.
For all five seasons when Bill Russell won the award, my metric said that Chamberlain or someone else should have won it instead, and this made me think carefully...
What I realized, was that the people who voted on the awards back in the 1950s and 60s did not have the same statistical system that we use today, and therefore could only base their reasonings on a few factors: points scored, rebounds, assists, and team success. Chamberlain repeatedly came up short in the playoffs versus the Russell and the Boston Celtics. So voters back then thought it was safe to assume that Russell was more valuable than Chamberlain, even though our statistics today prove that Wilt was the better player, and Russell benefited more from the talented team around him -- enough so that he won eleven championships.
And so my metric proved to be correct. In every situation where the test failed, it was because voters selected the MVP based on him being the “best player on the best team” instead of the “best player overall.” In various situations the failed test can also be attributed to voter bias (as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was not liked by the media), voter fatigue (like when Charles Barkley won the award in 1993), or player “villainy” (like when Derrick Rose won the award in 2011 over LeBron).
*Note that I am going to be referring back to LeBron James many times in this discussion. This is because I was watching live on TV in 2007 when he turned in one of the greatest games in NBA history versus the Detroit Pistons (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHaSiWClteQ). I was there to see him claim the title as best player in the world that night, and I was following online when Curry stole his crown the other night.
*Another side note: Curry actually scored more than 51 points earlier in the season -- when the Warriors were still on pace to win 73 games -- making it even more plausible that he has been the best player in the league all season. Technically all teams are on pace to win 73 games until they lose for the ninth time, so it is more significant that Curry scored 51 this far into the season when their probability of breaking the All-Time record is even higher due to fewer remaining games.
I used LeBron James as a sample, because I realized that it is also necessary to define the terms peak and prime. And on February 4th, I had the epiphany that the average player’s talent over the course of his career will resemble a bell curve with normal distribution. This curve may skew to the left or right, depending on if a player peaks early or later in his career, but it will include only one crest, at the peak of the player’s talent.
His peak will occur when he plays the greatest game of his career -- and reaches his highest GameScore (value), and his prime will typically encompass his first definitively historical, legendary, or unique performance as an elite talent until his last. In this sense, LeBron may still be in his prime, but he is more than likely past his peak -- the night he turned in a GameScore of 44.7 in the 2009 playoffs.
Like all visual graphs, even if they are not drawn to scale, every individual game can be represented and quantified on this bell curve, meaning that a player can be ranked within the league -- or within a single game -- on any given night throughout his career. And since statistics exist to see a player’s up-to-date career statistical ranking on any given night throughout his career, we can pin-point exactly how many minutes LeBron had played on the night he entered his prime (a safe approximation would be game five of the 2007 Eastern Conference Finals -- 13,736) and the night he exited his prime (which may be yet to come, but for the sake of analysis, we’ll say the night when Curry stole his crown -- 37,456).
Since he is our sample, we are going to assume that LeBron’s career will have normal distribution -- even though we have no way of knowing how much longer he will continue to play in the NBA. With normal distribution, LeBron’s peak also equals the median and mean of his career. By using the fact that normal distributions are perfectly symmetrical, we can estimate his peak as occurring when he had played 25,596 minutes.
We continue by estimating the amount of space under the graph through subtracting the minutes played of his prime and dividing by the peak minutes played. Our estimation results in a value of 0.9267, which isn’t perfect but is close enough to 0.95 to assume that a player’s prime will be within two standard deviations of his peak.
If we follow the 68-95-99.7 Rule, we can say that a player cannot possibly accomplish 100% of the potential he had at the beginning of his career, but as he approaches retirement, the probability is that he will accomplish around 99.7% of his initial potential. This 0.3% is small but plays the part of “what-if”? As in, what if Derrick Rose never tore his ACL? Or, what if Michael Jordan never retired in 1993?
*Note: Outliers are very relevant, like Kobe Bryant scoring 38 points in his farewell season, the “fabulous” Tony Delk scoring 51 points, and the under-achieving Terrence Ross tallying 51 as well, but very early in his career.
I am also of the firm belief that this “what-if” can be attributed to legendary shots, like what if Ray Allen missed in game six of the 2013 NBA Finals? Or, what if Magic Johnson’s Skyhook in 1987 had bounced off the front of the rim? These scenarios are far too wild to imagine, and I’ll leave them to professional statisticians.
Back to the idea of a player’s graphical representation -- all of a player’s recorded statistics are present along the edge of the curve. And while a player’s peak may be higher than another player’s, the deciding factor as to who had the better career comes down to whose graph has the most space underneath the curve, or the integral of their career.
Clinging to blind faith that he is the Greatest of All-Time, I ventured to guess that Michael Jordan would have the greatest career integral, a metric that I am going to call Absolute Player Value. In order to prove his position, it was necessary to reuse my Player Ranking system to evaluate his entire career.
To avoid the snag of measuring him with statistics that did not exist in the early decades of the NBA, I instead measured Jordan against all of the greatest players who came after him. And since a player’s career is comprised of all minutes played in the regular season, playoffs, and NBA Finals -- because it is reasonable to assume that the greatest players in history reached the championship series and won -- I decided to compare Jordan with all the other players that my test determined to be the best player in the league for each entire season after 1985 (a period I will hereby label the Modern Era).
*Note: My test picked Michael as the best in the league for seven full seasons: 1987-1991, 1993, and 1996, tied with James for the most in the Modern Era.
Using the formula for GameScore, I created a new metric: CareerScore. After inserting all compiled regular season data and standardizing each player with their minutes played, I determined that the Greatest Regular Season Players since 1985, in order, are: Michael Jordan, David Robinson, LeBron James*, Hakeem Olajuwon, Shaquille O’Neal, Dirk Nowitzki*, Kevin Garnett*, Dwyane Wade*, Kobe Bryant*, and Tim Duncan*.
*Active players still have the potential to move up or down the list, which is why I am waiting until later in Stephen Curry’s career to add him.
Utilizing the same method, I ranked these same top 10 players by their statistics in the playoffs (PlayoffsScore), and subsequently, by their statistics in the NBA Finals (FinalsScore). After another standardization of minutes played -- creating some last-minute jostling, because each player spent a different proportion of his career in these various stages of a season -- I tallied my Overall Ranking as: Jordan, James, Robinson, O’Neal, Olajuwon, Wade, Bryant, Duncan, Nowitzki, and Garnett.
*For those disappointed in Kobe’s “underrating,” my MVP test determined that LeBron deserved the award in 2008 instead, not to mention that his early, in addition to late, unimpressive seasons really hurt his overall regular season value despite playoff success. He may have peaked higher than others, but peak doesn’t encompass every quantifiable factor.
And so my blind faith in Michael Jordan has paid off. His intangibles, technically impossible to measure, made him the Greatest of All-Time during his career -- and now I have statistical proof that shows that he truly is, in fact, the GOAT. At this current juncture, it is unwise to try to measure him against players that came before the Modern Era -- because the early NBA’s lack of advanced statistics heavily favors centers like Wilt and Kareem -- but I am supremely confident that my application of efficiency and overall value would rank him as the best of Any Era if the necessary data is available.
My final conclusion is that as we continue to lose players and eyewitnesses to the annals of time (i.e. that “Great Basketball Gym in the Sky”), we should no longer compare players several decades apart. We have to establish definitive eras to acknowledge the growth and evolution of the NBA and the sport in general. I propose that the eras divide the league’s history according to the prevalence of certain statistics, rules, and playing styles.
As the first step in identifying these eras -- which will still need to be subdivided -- I am going to call the years 1947-1951 the Pioneer Era, 1951-1974 the Classic Era, 1974-1978 the Divided Era (because of the ABA), 1978-1985 the United Era, and 1985-Present the Modern Era. For some reason, though, my instinct tells me that I should end the Modern Era with 2009 -- the year Stephen Curry was drafted.
After all, “Chef” Curry is the Best Player in the NBA, and his unprecedented shooting ability combined with the Warriors’ success with Positionless Basketball are likely to change the way the sport is played forever.
© Austin T. Murphy 2016
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