Ranking the Top 75ish NBA Players: a new series

Introducing the BEAST metric

Eric Apricot says: This is an original series written by a friend of DubNationHQ.com. This analyzes and ranks the Top 75ish NBA players of all time. Some of you will be angered, some will think you can do better, but hopefully everyone can find something to enjoy in this journey appreciating the great historical achievements by past and present players.

• The Top 75ish NBA Players series index with full details on the ranking process

We intend for the series pieces to come out each week, covering approximately 10 players per piece.

Dear Reader,

I spring forth in the depths of the NBA offseason to boldly share with you my creation. It began with the NBA’s Top 75, which so verily assaulted our basketball senses during arguably the greatest championship of this Golden State Warriors dynasty.

I retreated to my NBA dungeon to apply some method to the madness of trying to identify who the greatest basketball players to grace this wondrous league are.

You may well say the endeavor itself is doomed! And yea, that is true.

Is what results a perfect being in an imperfect world? The sirens that summon me to the asylum? Some overly hammy writing that attempts to have a bit of fun and reanimate your basketball-less summer, while perhaps making a semi-serious point that maybe this sort of list should come with a criteria? You decide.

Introducing the creature itself: BEAST points

So now you know what I have attempted, let’s expose our creature to the reality! We’re going to go ahead and call it BEAST (Basketball Excellence As Statistically Tested) points. Hey it’s 2024 after all. At least I’m not on the dystopian hellscape that is formerly known on Twitter.

There are three overarching categories which feed into our beast:

• First, “honors”. This comprises anything to do with winning a championship or reaching the finals; regular season awards and honors; and major honors in other leagues or competitions.

• Second, “career individual statistics”. This balances totals with per game to account for the tricky question of longevity vs peak, with a slight balance towards longevity. Where possible it’s regular season + playoffs combined, and then finals. Where not it’s regular season, playoffs and finals separately but weighted to postseason performance. Efficiency (TS%), win shares, and RAPM make up the rest here.

• Third, “individual records”. This awards points for records and bonus points for special achievements or impressive feats.

Of course any scoring system that balances so many elements is inevitably subjective. Which bits of statistical websites I have hacked off, which bits of elements count, which bits have been discarded as though they were a Russell Westbrook three-pointer all involve choices. I will have made some you disagree with. I will have made some I disagree with. There are some bits of the resulting creature that terrify and disgust its own creator (why oh why Dominique Wilkins could you not have made a conference finals once??). There are some other bits that are much closer to the received wisdom. 

But what I can say is this creature has been carefully calibrated. There is method to the madness within. Move one of the dials and something even weirder pops out.

To make the stitching of my creation visible to the naked eye, let’s delve deeper into some key principles.

Core principles of our BEAST

The complete details are available at the series index. Here is a brief summary.

Firstly, there’s a simple filter - to qualify, you have to have made at least one All Star team AND played in a conference finals in the NBA. 

Secondly, winning matters. There is one fundamental belief that beats at the heart of this creature. That for all the long and varied history of the game there is a thread uniting the true NBA greats. While the NBA has always been home to unbelievable feats of individual greatness, the ultimate goal of every player, every team, has been the same throughout - to win a championship. And to win championships requires much more than racking up the stats in the regular season. It requires a commitment to the things that win championships - defense, teamwork, and sacrifice. It is about being part of something bigger than oneself.

How this takes form is that:

• winning a championship as a top 3 player typically gets you more points than anything else, including winning an MVP. 

• Defense matters - it is half the game after all. Some defensive greats will definitely appear much higher up than on other lists. Buckle up if you hate defense.

• How a player performs under the bright lights matters most. The playoffs are a different season and get harder as you go along. 

• Sustaining greatness is one of the hardest things to do in the NBA. Repeating and threepeating as champions and/ or MVP deserve some extra recognition. Even reaching multiple consecutive finals is a real marathon so gets some points.

• Multi-dimensional play is rewarded. Bonus points are available for featuring in the leader charts for multiple categories. Bonus points are available for winning MVP AND Defensive Player of the Year.

• Team bonus points mean everyone who subjugated their ego to win gets some credit. Less of this “in my day we didn’t team up” old-player-turned talking-head machismo, and more of the “I could have averaged 30 but I’d rather play defense and win a ring” vibe.

• Efficiency on offense matters. The rationale being putting the ball in the basket efficiently is one of the most useful things you can do to help your team win. 

How do we handle players from different Eras?

In the belly of our beloved creature there is a vital element to consider. It would be foolish to ignore progress over such a long period of NBA history. For starters if there are more teams and more playoff rounds it’s clearly harder to win a ring. But beyond that the addition of the three-point line added a new element of skill, balancing out the game away from pure physical advantages. Advances and progress in sports science and nutrition mean that players now are typically more athletic, and able to play for longer. And the advent of a global league means that the NBA draws from a deeper talent pool, and international play outside the NBA has advanced leaps and bounds, particularly over the last 30 years. 

To account for this we need to weight some achievements according to era, for which we first need to define those eras. 

Early NBA: 1946/47 - 1965/66

This is pretty straightforward. We can trace the formation of the officially recognised NBA back to 1947 as the Basketball Association of America, before a merger with National Basketball League, which the internet assures me actually contained more talent (such as George Mikan), in 1949. For much of the period in question the league consisted of 8 or 9 teams. The main innovation was the advent of the shot clock in 1954.

Emerging NBA: 1966/67 - 1982/83

This banding is perhaps more controversial. There is an obvious demarcation point of the NBA-ABA merger in 1976. An earlier version of the creature used this seamline. But when you look at all the different things that happened in this period, I think it’s more reasonable to stretch it out over a mass era of “storming and forming” changes that transformed that early NBA so far away from the modern NBA into something that resembles the current NBA. 

This includes:

• A period of mass expansion which began in 66/67 adding a tenth team, to 12 the following season, to 14 between 1968-1970, to 17 in 1970-74, to 18 in 1974-76, to 22 in 1980, and then finally a 23rd team in 1983. Phew.

• The introduction of two full playoff rounds before the finals in 1967. The first round was introduced in 1975 but the top 3 seeds got byes. In 1977 that was changed so only division winners got byes. It wasn’t until the 1984 playoffs that all champions had to play three full rounds before the finals. This feels like a big demarcation point of champions before and after. 

• The NBA-ABA merger might have happened in 1976 but the three point line, the ABA’s biggest innovation, didn’t actually get introduced until the 1979/80 season.

• A whole host of new awards and statistics were introduced. Finals MVP and all-defense teams were introduced in 1968/69. Steals and blocks were only counted from the 1973/74 season onwards. Threes obviously from 1979/80. The first Defensive Player of the Year award was conferred in the 1982/83 season.

The modern NBA: 1983/84 - present day

The NBA from the mid-1980s is pretty recognisable to today. There were further tweaks, such as three all-NBA teams being introduced in 1988. There were some further waves of expansion, though nothing as chaotic as the period that came before.

There are two major changes over the course of this period of history. The most obvious is the advent of the three-pointer as potent weapon, really driven by the Phoenix Suns of Steve Nash and Mike D’Antoni (though Don Nelson’s Warriors teams were an early precursor). The fact that in this formula 3s count in all the statistical categories means that essentially this element of progress in skill over the 40 year period is effectively accounted for.

The second is the globalisation of the game. The last 6 MVP trophies have been won by an international player. Three of the last four NBA Finals have featured a team led by an international superstar. The global game is getting stronger. So points are available for international feats, including the Olympics and other international competitions. 

How do we handle advanced stats?

Finally, and I know this is guaranteed to disappoint a few of our esteemed community, but I am taking a steampunk view of the world as opposed to a cyberpunk view. That is to say catch-all advanced metrics are selected judiciously, and for specific reason. For each thing I included I asked myself what is the specific purpose of this statistic? What is it measuring? Does it allow me to track back through all of the league’s history? Can I access it freely and openly? (yeah I’m a cheap mad scientist - no-one’s giving me a research grant for this!) Does it rank James Harden above Steph Curry? If it does that last one then into the organ recycling bin for you! 

Thus there are some things not included. For example, DARKO / Daily Plus-Minus is regarded as the top advanced stat by many but is essentially a prediction model and therefore I’ve taken the view that it’s not much use for historical comparison. 

There are three metrics which do feature heavily. True shooting % is used for efficiency. Win Shares is also core part of the formula. As with all statistics there are pros and cons but this is a statistic that reaches back in the time series and crucially attempts to assign the value of individual performance to actual team success. So it felt very relevant to include. 

The other advanced statistic used is regularised adjusted plus-minus (RAPM to us mere mortals). RAPM models are the basis of many other catch-all metrics. This is essentially a plus-minus measure to understand a player’s impact beyond the box score but then makes various adjustments to control for a range of factors.

The single biggest problem with including RAPM is that it only has 1997- 2024 data so disadvantages historic players, and some who straddle this period. For example only 2 of Michael Jordan’s prime seasons are included but his Wizards years that no one really wants to remember are. That said, the “modern era” from 1983/84 spans 40 years so having a demarcation point in the middle to reflect continued progress doesn’t feel too unreasonable. And it is a very useful data set that throws up some interesting results and puts a lens not otherwise available on the fundamental question we’re exploring through our creature. 

The full formula will be published in the index page for the hardcore amongst you to dive into at some point. 

Some final notes on presentation

So then let us turn to how it’s presented. Basically there is a pretty major gap between those scoring over 100 points and those under, with only one borderline case and a couple of current players close to the cutoff. That gives us slightly more than 75 but better to reflect the actual results rather than cut off arbitrarily. Related to that we will break this beast down into tiers based on scores rather than an arbitrary top 10/20/50 or whatever. They’re close enough but there’s some clear gaps that emerge that should be respected to be true to our creature’s natural form.

One final, final note - this is a record of achievement so is cumulative. Therefore a current player’s ranking is not necessarily where they will end up but where they stack up against their historical peers right now. Rankings can and will change over time as new achievements occur. 

A big thank you to Apricot for indulging this mania and allowing me to unleash my precious creation upon the savviest, most reasonable basketball community on the internet. Let’s hope it doesn’t terrorize the villagers too much!

With that said all that remains is to crank that handle and bring this thing to life!

The rest of the series will be the listing and celebration of the Top 75ish players as determined by BEAST!