The Best 25 ( or so ) Players in the NBA 2018 and the 2018 NBA MVP

There is little doubt that advanced metrics have helped the Houston Rockets become the best team in the NBA so far in 2018.  In terms of how the team plays and was built, modern analytics have significantly contributed to their success.    In the spirit of celebrating NBA analytics I thought that I would compile as much advanced player evaluation data as I could to answer the un-answerable: Who is the best player in the NBA this year?

“Most Valuable” is such a loaded term these days.  Everybody has their own idea about what makes an MVP.  Some people think it’s the best player on the best team.  Other people focus on old-timey, box score statistics like who’s scored the most points or gotten the most rebounds.  I’ve heard people focus on the word valuable as in this good team would not be good without player x because he adds the most value…

I’ll leave that for message board warriors and x-jock t.v. analysis wanna-bee’s.    What I was looking for was who was having the best season based on advanced NBA analytics.  I only used stats like:

• Usage Rate
• Versatility Index
• Real Plus-Minus
• Win Share
• Wins Above Replacement Player (WARP)
• RPM Wins

I’m not going to give away all my secrets, but suffice to say that I mixed up these stats with a handful of others to rank 2018 NBA players.  I loaded my data in Pandas, wrote a little Python algorithm, and refined it a couple dozen times.  I normalized my data, and…  I got some very interesting results.  I quickly made some graphs and logged in to post…

The Top 25 (or so) players in the NBA 2018

 

The positions of the top 25 players in the NBA are fairly evenly distributed although there are almost 3 times the number of point guards then centers. This is consistent with how  The Association has changed over the years.

You might expect Golden State to have 3 of the top 27 players ( I said or so, I tried to cut it off at 25 but #26 & #27 were much closer to 25 than they were to 28…).  What you might not expect was the only other team with 3 of the top 27 players in the 2018 NBA was the Philadelphia 76’ers (Covington, Embiid, Simmons).  Washington, Houston, Minnesota, Toronto, OKC, and New Orleans were the only other teams with multiple players on the list with 2 a piece.

 

Ummm…  About LeBron’s 2018 NBA Season

Before i give you these results I repeat: I just used some math to mix up a bunch of advanced stats.  No opinions or agendas, just the maths. 

Additionally at the time of this posting there are a number of other lists ( see  http://www.espn.com/nba/statistics/rpm/_/sort/RPM Last Updated: April 8, 2018 2:00:02 PM PDT for one…)  Where Lebron James is not listed in the top 10.  Yes, he kills the box score stats – but he is a defensive liability at this stage of his career (by the numbers – -0.95 DRPM at the moment).  Additionally his offensive efficiency is at not nearly at the level of some other high usage players.   LeBron is still a very good basketball player.  There are ways that you could “prove” he’s still “the best”.  This experiment has him at 12th best in the NBA in 2018.  Still higher than ESPN’s RPM…

	triprank	name	team	pos
0	95.5731	James Harden	HOU	sg
1	76.9646	Chris Paul	HOU	pg
2	75.7872	Victor Oladipo	IND	sg
3	73.2784	Robert Covington	PHI	sf
4	72.1153	Kyle Lowry	TOR	pg
5	71.9810	Nikola Jokic	DEN	c
6	71.4736	Damian Lillard	POR	pg
7	70.5612	Anthony Davis	NO	pf
8	70.3846	Jimmy Butler	MIN	sg
9	70.2284	Russell Westbrook	OKC	pg
10	68.7456	Giannis Antetokounmpo	MIL	pf
11	65.2181	Otto Porter	WSH	sf
12	61.6626	Stephen Curry	GS	pg
13	61.1272	LeBron James	CLE	sf
14	50.3506	Joel Embiid	PHI	c
15	45.5868	Karl-Anthony Towns	MIN	c
16	44.1320	Kemba Walker	CHA	pg
17	38.5336	Al Horford	BOS	pf
18	37.4865	Ben Simmons	PHI	pg
19	35.6829	Draymond Green	GS	pf
20	35.0920	Jrue Holiday	NO	pg
21	33.0902	LaMarcus Aldridge	SA	pf
22	30.1530	Paul George	OKC	sf
23	27.5124	Kevin Durant	GS	sf
24	27.0793	Joe Ingles	UTAH	sf
25	17.7625	DeMar DeRozan	TOR	sg
26	15.2076	Bradley Beal	WSH	sg

As I was posting this and proofreading it, etc., it occurs to me that maybe this should be titled “NBA Player(s) Having the Best Season(s). It’s clear that (James Harden + CP3) > than the sum of it’s parts. They are both producing seasons that are off the charts and obviously benefit greatly playing together.

Robert Covington,  Nikola Jokic, and Victor Oladipo being ranked so high is surprising; however you can’t deny that they are having amazing seasons.    Of course people will argue against James Harden being the MVP.  He is the best player ( and if he’s not #2 is ) on the best team  at this point.  He is the most effective offensive player and his DRPM is better than, LeBron James, for example…