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. RAPTOR comparison for the best seven seasons (by WAR) of the careers of LeBron James and Michael Jordan Jordan routinely played many more minutes in his best seasons than James did, and he was usually more effective per possession as well - particularly on defense, where LeBron was never as good as Peak MJ and has fallen off quite a bit in recent seasons. ![]() (LeBron’s playoff performance that year was legendary even in defeat.) But of the top eight RAPTOR WAR seasons by either Michael Jordan or James, seven belong to MJ. And RAPTOR plus/minus thinks James was slightly better on a per-possession rate in 2008-09, his best career season, than Jordan was in 1990-91. ![]() MJ over LeBron? I want to make one thing clear: I have long been a LeBron James backer, even in The King’s darkest days. (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. Who, then, is the GOAT? LeBron? Jordan? Kobe? Someone else? So let’s take our historical RAPTOR ratings at face value and assume they function as solid contemporary measures of performance. 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.)īut they do give us a brand-new set of historical stats for every player in every season going back to the NBA-ABA merger in 1976. 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. Please see our data coverage page for details.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. WNBA all-time (since 1997) unless otherwise noted. Some stats were available earlier in the ABA. BPM, VORP, DRtg and Per 100 Poss stats since 1973-74. All box score stats are covered all-time (though not all stats were tracked for all of NBA history). Season data: since 1946-47 unless otherwise noted. Playoffs: PTS, FG, FT, FTA, 3P, 3PA complete all-time. All other box score stats (3PA, ORB, DRB, STL, BLK, TOV) complete back to 1983-84. FGA, TRB, AST, PF, GS over 99% complete back to 1975-76. Regular season: PTS, FG, FT, 3P complete all-time. Michael Jordan: Advanced Table Rkĭata coverage: Game data: since 1946-47 unless otherwise noted.
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