As you may have noticed, I like to rank things. I rank places I’ve been, movies I’ve watched, books I’ve read; but basketball is where my rankings border on the excessive. For whatever reason, I just can’t seem to watch a player without putting them in some kind of historic context. For most of my life I have ranked players primarily by watching them play, reading books on NBA history, and listening to analysts I respect provide their views on specific players, especially those I did not have the privilege of seeing in person. Recently, however, I started to look for a more analytical way to evaluate players against each other that would allow me to put current players in historic context while also enabling me to adjust their ranking as their careers progress. In order to be able to wrap my head around this daunting task, I decided to only include players drafted in 1982 and after; basically post Magic, Bird, and Isiah, as I consider that the last generation of which I have no firsthand recollection.
The purpose behind this comes down to the following: Its relatively easy to watch Kevin Durant and know that he is the second best small forward of the past 35 years (after Lebron), but it is much harder to watch a guy like Kyle Lowry and be able to put him in proper context with players that have come before him. Where does Lowry rank and how does he compare to other point guards? Turns out he ranks 81st overall, and when compared to other point guards, he is just behind Deron Williams and just ahead of Sam Cassell. At this point you are probably asking yourself one of two questions, who cares where Kyle Lowry ranks or how the hell do you figure Deron Williams was better than Kyle Lowry? If you are in the first camp, this list is not for you. If you are in the second camp, let’s go ahead and jump into my methodology. Below is a list of the components I used and the points awarded for each:
Standard awards and achievements:
- Finals MVP – 5 points
- 1st team All-NBA selection – 4 points
- 2nd team All-NBA selection – 3 points
- 3rd team All-NBA selection – 2 points
- All-Star – 1 point
- Championship – 3 points if star on team, 2 points if major contributor, 1 point if just tagging along
- Defensive Player of the Year – 1 point
Advanced stats and data manipulation (this is where it gets a little tricky):
- Career MVP Shares multiplied by 9 to award players who received MVP votes and were thus truly exceptional for a given season (multiply by 9 to make an MVP season greater than an All-NBA season)
- Career Win Shares (WS) divided by 20 to award longevity and contribution to team success over a sustained period (divide by 20 to not allow Win Shares to overpower the other inputs)
- Win Shares per 48 minutes (WS/48) multiplied by 50 to award players who may have had shorter careers but were highly impactful in their limited time (multiply by 50 to give WS/48 relatively equal impact as total Win Shares)
In order to reduce the scope from every player that entered the league between 1982 and today, I decided the minimum requirement to be considered for the list was making either one All-NBA team or three All-Star teams. I figure that if you achieved either of those criteria then you were at the very least a memorable contributor to the league. I did, however, make two exceptions to the rule: Robert Horry (he won a ridiculous 7 championships) and Andre Iguodala (the only player over this period to win finals MVP but never make an All-NBA team). I should also mention that I made a couple of arbitrary adjustments to players’ scores. First, I cut the WS/48 minutes in half for both Dwight Howard and Andrew Bynum. Their scores were coming out way too high for their actual impact on winning, so I couldn’t in good conscious leave them as calculated. Second, I gave half of Andre Iguodala’s 2015 Finals MVP award to Stephen Curry because, as great as Iguodala was in that series, Curry is the main reason the Warriors won that title. This historic Warriors run will be remembered for Curry above anyone else, so he deserves to be rewarded for that.
A simple way to put the final scores in context is to think of 202.26 as the best a player can achieve (Michael Jordan’s score) and 8.85 as the lowest a player can achieve and still make the list (Antoine Walker’s score). Everybody else falls somewhere along that spectrum. The scores near the top tend to have more separation while the scores get more bunched together, with less separation, as you make your way down the list, which makes sense when you think about the Kevin Durant vs Kyle Lowry thought exercise I discussed earlier. I have updated the list through the 2019 All-Star selections and will update them again at the end of the season. So, without further ado, click on the next post to see the full list.
The Jello's Jiggling 