But few players in history have ever been as statistically impressive. Unlike with Stockton, Paul’s durability has also been an issue. We’ve often wondered why CP3-led teams can’t seem to get over the hump in the playoffs, and that is a fair criticism (although we are including playoff value in RAPTOR). I don’t think people realize that Paul has been named to the All-Defensive Team nine times in his career, and at the other end, he’s seldom had a season where his team didn’t average at least 1.2 points per possession on plays he personally was responsible for. Similar to Stockton (and Jason Kidd slightly lower down the list), Chris Paul shows up as a legend in RAPTOR for his mix of hyper-efficient shooting and passing and his standout defense. ![]() ![]() Maybe Stockton is just a player whose style would stand out more in the modern NBA, but it also seems likely that he was far more valuable than observers realized during his career.Ĭhris Paul, point god. 1 And Stockton was a very good defender, garnering All-Defense honors five times and finishing seventh all-time in steal rate. To the latter point, Stockton devoted more than 20 percent of his field-goal attempts to 3-pointers in the 1990s, a rate that (while low) wouldn’t be totally out of place for a point guard in 2019. He also excelled at many of the aspects of NBA offense that RAPTOR adores, including passing (he’s the all-time leader in assist rate), shooting efficiency (his career true shooting percentage ranks 14th) and floor-spacing. First, he was ridiculously durable, playing in 1,504 out of a possible 1,526 games in his career (98.6 percent). But there’s also reason to believe that traditional analyses don’t give Stockton anywhere near as much credit as he deserves. I’m not saying I fully buy this, either, and maybe the JAWS approach is still giving a little too much credit to Stockton’s extremely long career (19 seasons and 47,764 minutes). Many observers don’t even consider Stockton a top-three point guard, much less third on an overall list of players. 3? This is probably the most shocking item on the list. (Feel free to download our RAPTOR data and make your own ranking!) Let’s break down some of this list’s most eye-catching results, one by one: ![]() But it’s a starting point for conversation, and it gives us a general idea of the kinds of players RAPTOR likes. This is not a definitive ranking, or even necessarily the best way to balance between peak and career WAR. Most valuable NBA players since 1976-77 according to JAWS, which mixes career and peak value in RAPTOR WAR (including playoffs) If we do this with RAPTOR, here are the leaders since 1973-74: Who is the □ □ (since 1976)? To that end, I’m borrowing a page from baseball’s book and adopting the JAWS Hall of Fame metric, which averages together a player’s career WAR with his best seven (nonconsecutive) seasons to balance between total and peak value. Instead of simply adding up WAR, like we did for the six-year period we wrote about last week, we should make an adjustment to better handle the scope of entire careers. And as FiveThirtyEight editor-in-chief Nate Silver noted in his RAPTOR explainer, they raise an interesting philosophical conundrum: Does the act of retrofitting modern ratings to older players actually measure those players’ true, contemporary value … or does it simply find the historical players whose games would best fit into the modern NBA? (I don’t have a great answer for that the truth is probably somewhere in between.) These estimates were built by figuring out how the limited data kept in earlier eras (box score plus team data and RPM for 2001-2013, and just box score/team data from 1977-2000) relates to modern RAPTOR ratings. As part of that, we needed to create historical RAPTOR estimates for players who would show up as comparisons for current stars. ![]() Now that we’ve thoroughly broken down the best and worst - sorry again, Collin Sexton - players of the player-tracking era (since 2013), let’s zoom out to look at a larger slice of NBA history.Īs a refresher, we just introduced a new player rating metric, RAPTOR - the Robust Algorithm (using) Player Tracking (and) On/Off Ratings.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |