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Recently I made a thread on the best offensive teams here.

Here we have on-court offensive ratings (ORtg) for the best offensive players since the 1996-97 season, both raw and relative ratings. Note that Shaq is the exception and I have his playoff data since 1994 because I tracked all of it personally. Harvey Pollack did regular season plus minus from 1994-1996 but unfortunately we don't have offense/defense splits.

I also computed 10-year prime averages for each player since those are useful to compare.

Enjoy!

Stephen Curry ON Court ORtg (rORtg) Regular Season / Playoffs



Lebron James ON Court ORtg (rORtg) Regular Season / Playoffs



Nikola Jokic ON Court ORtg (rORtg) Regular Season / Playoffs



Chris Paul ON Court ORtg (rORtg) Regular Season / Playoffs



Steve Nash ON Court ORtg (rORtg) Regular Season / Playoffs



Dirk Nowitzki ON Court ORtg (rORtg) Regular Season / Playoffs



Kevin Durant ON Court ORtg (rORtg) Regular Season / Playoffs



James Harden ON Court ORtg (rORtg) Regular Season / Playoffs



Shaquille O'Neal ON Court ORtg (rORtg) Regular Season / Playoffs



Kobe Bryant ON Court ORtg (rORtg) Regular Season / Playoffs



Shai Gilgeous-Alexander ON Court ORtg (rORtg) Regular Season / Playoffs

A RAPM-style adjustment would be nice to account for teammate strength and opposition quality. Is that possible for only on-court rating?

Nash is probably the most underrated player of all time by the mainstream sports media. His MVPs are so disrespected.

LeBron 2012-2017 is incredible. +10.6 and weighed down by a finals performance against one of the better modern defenses we have ever seen, with J.R. Smith as a 2nd option and Matthew Dellavedova as a secondary playmaker.

Kobe having incredible synergy with Pau and Shaq and then being slightly above average supports a lot of my thoughts about him being excellent, synergizing with a big man, and also not being an elite central hub without the perfect secondary option.

Jokic peaking at +7.4 and +7.6 as a post-season anchor means he has a lot of ground to make up on the other ATG offensive centerpieces of the data ball era.

Nash, with the best 3-year peak at +36.7, followed closely by LeBron at +36.4, tracks well with what many people think are the two best offensive players of the 21st Century.

Djoker wrote:2013-2023 Average: +8.1/+9.1

How are you calculating the average? 73.8/9 is 8.2, yet you have +9.1 for the post-season. Thanks!

LeBronSpaghetti wrote:Nash is probably the most underrated player of all time by the mainstream sports media. His MVPs are so disrespected.

Shhh. They'll come for you.

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ReggiesKnicks wrote:How are you calculating the average? 73.8/9 is 8.2, yet you have +9.1 for the post-season. Thanks!

It's a weighted average by the number of games.

LeBronSpaghetti wrote:Nash is probably the most underrated player of all time by the mainstream sports media. His MVPs are so disrespected.

Nash was especially good in the playoffs from memory. I think a lot of that gets lost.

Sorry to be a fanboy but I'm curious how Manu measures out, he usually had high ortg (though obviously with the caveat of his low minutes and fga)

Nash teams were oriented especially into offence. Change Amare or Dirk into Green and numbers would look differently

SpreeS wrote:Nash teams were oriented especially into offence. Change Amare or Dirk into Green and numbers would look differently

There was no amare one of those years in his peak 3 seasons. No problem.

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FWIW, I did similar analysis a while back, but gave playoff possessions 3x weight and used PBPstats to get all the data. For the playoffs, I used the opponent’s regular season DRTG to get the relative ORTG, but I think you’ve done that here too, so that’s probably not a point of difference.

Anyways, here’s what I got for the several players I looked at, looking at 10-year spans:

On-Court rORTG (Playoff possessions given 3x weight)

- Steve Nash 2002-2011: +10.26
- LeBron James 2009-2018: +8.32
- Stephen Curry 2014-2023: +7.97
- Nikola Jokic 2016-2025 (so far, for 2025): +7.07
- Chris Paul 2013-2022: +6.14

I didn’t look at as many players as you did, but given the similarity of the analysis, it’s easy to eyeball your results for other players and get a very good sense of where they’d end up in my analysis.

For what it’s worth, I also calculated things for Luka from 2020-2024. It’s only 5 years and I haven’t incorporated this year into it, but at the time he was at +5.48.

Anyways, of course this data is significantly dependent on teammates—for instance, Jokic was at +5.94 overall in the 2021-22 year, but had basically no help so that is way more impressive than the number looks. But even considering all that, the thing that sticks out to me in this kind of analysis is Steve Nash just being out there on is own well above everyone. He did tend to have offensively-slanted rosters, but it’s still extremely impressive IMO.

I get it the hate on Nash's MVPs comes from you fav player did not get it instead, but that does not change how big of an impact he had on his team and the game. Without the SSOL Suns we would not have the modern NBA like we have now.
if this is good or bad, is another story

I don't have to look into what this stat is to tell you off the bat it doesn't pass the sniff test.

The guy with the highest playoff rating had 0 finals games played let alone rings. Next

Nice work OP, thank you

sashaturiaf wrote:I don't have to look into what this stat is to tell you off the bat it doesn't pass the sniff test.

The guy with the highest playoff rating had 0 finals games played let alone rings. Next

Not knowing what the stat measures while also criticizing it is willful ignorance

SpreeS wrote:Nash teams were oriented especially into offence. Change Amare or Dirk into Green and numbers would look differently

Green is like Boris Diaw in some ways, though not the same self creator on offense, but the Nash team with Diaw was pretty good wasn't it?

sashaturiaf wrote:I don't have to look into what this stat is to tell you off the bat it doesn't pass the sniff test.

The guy with the highest playoff rating had 0 finals games played let alone rings. Next

Well since the OP said offensive rating, and there's something else that happens in basketball instead of offense, I'm not sure what your point is.

sashaturiaf wrote:I don't have to look into what this stat is to tell you off the bat it doesn't pass the sniff test.

The guy with the highest playoff rating had 0 finals games played let alone rings. Next

My sniffer says your counter is actually a case for this. Defense wins championships right?

Nash has always been criminally underrated.

SpreeS wrote:Nash teams were oriented especially into offence. Change Amare or Dirk into Green and numbers would look differently

There’s some truth to this, but I think there’s three important things worth noting here:

1. There’s a difference between being offensively-slanted and actually being offensively better. Nash was definitely on some offensively slanted rosters. But does that reflect that they were particularly good offensively compared to other players’ supporting casts, or just that they were bad defensively? He did have Dirk, so that was definitely a truly great offensive teammate in the Mavs years. But on the Suns, it’s really not clear to me that guys like Amare, Marion, Bell, etc. are better offensively than what other guys have had. Do we really think that having guys like that is better offensively than having Wade and Bosh, or Kyrie and Love? Do we think it’s better than having Durant and Klay? Is Amare better offensively than Blake Griffin? Is it better than having Kobe or Penny? Going beyond the scope of what we have this data for, do we really think it’s better than Magic having Kareem and Worthy? I think people sometimes miss the forest for the trees with this kind of argument. Those Suns teams definitely had offensive talent in Amare’s years there, but the idea that they were such a great supporting cast offensively that we’d expect Nash to tower over other great offensive players (who had great teammates of their own) in a measure like this just seems wrong to me.

2. Nash’s teams had years where they clearly were not all that offensively talented. And yet the offensive results were still great. For instance, let’s look at 2006, a year where Amare was out, and Nash’s best offensive teammate was Shawn Marion. In my version of this that puts 3x weight on playoff possessions, Nash’s on-court rORTG in the 2006 regular season & playoffs was +9.31. Amongst the guys I looked at (LeBron, Curry, Jokic, Chris Paul, and Luka), that is still amongst the best seasons, despite the relative lack of offensive talent on Nash’s team that year. To take another year, in the 2011 season, a 36-year-old Nash had a pretty weak team that was riddled with injuries and still had an on-court rORTG of +6.71. For reference, that’s similar to Steph in 2015 and LeBron in 2010, and it’s notably higher than years like Steph in 2022 and LeBron in 2018.

3. In the year where Nash had the most offensive talent on his team—with the 2005 Suns—his on-court rORTG was the highest of anyone I’ve seen. In my version that puts 3x weight on playoff possessions, Nash had an on-court rORTG of +15.54. The next best I found was Steph in 2017, with a +14.78. Beyond that, the next best was LeBron in 2017, who was pretty far off with +12.70. Having Amare, Joe Johnson, and Marion is a very good offensive supporting cast, but it doesn’t strike me as correct to think it’s better than what those guys had in those years. Jokic is in the middle of having a year with similar numbers to LeBron in 2017, and I wouldn’t say his supporting cast is as good offensively as the others, but there’s plenty of the year left, so there’s a good chance that falls, and even now it’s well below Nash’s 2005 number.

To me, prime Nash is the best offensive player ever. And I thought this even just watching him at the time. The problem for him is that he was also a significant negative defensively, while other truly great offensive players generally are at least average defensively (and in some cases are really good defenders).

sashaturiaf wrote:I don't have to look into what this stat is to tell you off the bat it doesn't pass the sniff test.

The guy with the highest playoff rating had 0 finals games played let alone rings. Next

The eye test literally confirmed how good Nash was in the playoffs.

In 2005 he led a young Suns team without Joe Johnson to the conference finals and lost to the champion Spurs - Nash averaged 24ppg, 11apg and 5rpg on 52%fg, 39%3fg, 92%ft, absolutely ridiculous. Remember when the Suns beat the Mavs that playoffs and Nash averaged 30ppg, 12apg and 7rpg on 55%fg, 42%3fg and 96%ft????

In 2006 he led the Suns again to the conference finals without Amare and was absolutely phenomenal in the playoffs - Nash averaged 20ppg, 10apg, 4rpg on 50%fg, 36%3fg, 92%ft, again phenomenal.

In 2007 the Suns lost a controversial series to the champion Spurs after Diaw and Amare were unjustly suspended for game 5 - Nash averaged 19ppg, 13apg on 46%fg, 49%3fg, 89%ft...again just ridiculous.