Top 25 peaks of the 2001-25: #15-#16 Spots

[lessthanjake]

1. Luka (2022)
2. Nash (2007, 05, 06)
3. Harden (2019)
4. Butler (2023)

HM: T-Mac, AD, Tatum, Dwight

In terms of Luka, the argument is pretty clear. The guy basically carried a fairly solid-ish support cast to the finals, and only lost because his team was totally outgunned (and because he was hurt). If Luka had been healthier in 2024 I’d have that as the year to vote for him, but he was sufficiently banged up in the playoffs for it to be a demerit. I’ll take the younger and springier Luka from 2022, who “only” got them to the WCFs.

In terms of skillset, Luka is way above guys like Kobe. He runs an offense, which Kobe can’t, and he can score and set up guys in a way that is levels above Kobe, a guy who bizarrely got in already. Ok, Luka’s defence isn’t good, but you can get away with that when you’re point guard. Kobe’s D was overrated and average after 2004 anyway.

Looking at numbers, it’s not even close.

Luka 22 RS: 40/13/12 per 100, on 571 TS%
Kobe RS 09: 38/7/7 per 100, on 561 TS%

Luka 22 PS: 45/14/9 per 100, on 577 TS%
Kobe PS 09: 39/7/7 per 100, on 564 TS%

It’s not even close. Luka is a guy who will elevate a bad team more, and raise the ceiling of a good team higher as well.

The other 3 are fairly straightforward. Like Luka, Nash and Harden are heliocentric offensive players, who elevate your offense to an elite level, which is one of the most important skills in basketball (alongside anchoring an elite defence). It probably sounds strange to call Nash heliocentric, given he didn’t “score” in volume, and he is different to Harden and Luka, but he still controlled the Suns offense, and their horrific record in his absence shows how much he was elevating them.

Harden’s stats drop in the playoffs, but they merely drop from his absurd level. His playoff numbers are still better than guys who already got in, like Kobe. Take Harden’s insane 2019 season, which won’t be a common choice because the team around him wasn’t as good, but that wasn’t his choice.

Harden 2019 RS: 48/9/10 per 100, on 616 TS%
Harden 2019 PS: 41/9/9 per 100, on 567 TS%

Kobe wishes he had numbers like that. The Rockets were often carried by Harden with some pretty meh support casts too. His impact on their success was obvious. Take the 2015 Rockets. Their starters next to Harden were Ariza, Montiejunas, Dwight (only played 41 games), and Pat Bev (only played 56 games), with Terrence Jones sucking up the missed time from Dwight. That is a team that had no business winning 56 games.

As for Jimmy, he is giving you enough of Kobe’s scoring, on better efficiency, but is supplementing that with elite D, and a vastly better floor game, that just leads to more winning. I’m not entirely sure why we’d focus on things like “ppg” in 1 series is a sensible response.

Sometimes stats aren’t everything, because volume stats can’t always capture the impact a guy is having. That said, when you look at say Jimmy Butler’s 2022 playoffs it looks better than Kobe’s 09 playoffs.

Butler 22 PS per 100: 38/10/6, on 604 TS%
Kobe 09 PS per 100: 39/7/7, on 564 TS%

Even raw numbers, which don’t capture Butler’s D and floor game, seem to favour him.

Butler’s absurd carry jobs are being too quickly forgotten. All three of his playoff runs, in 20, 22, and 23, were absurd. He took a starting group of Gabe Vincent, Max Struss, old Kevin Love, and Bam, to the finals. That’s ridiculous.

Butler’s impact on those teams is borne out by the win loss record also. From 20-23 the Heat were 144-81 with Butler, and only 37-41 without him. I’m going with 2023 Butler to account for injuries, even though he was a bit banged up by the finals, just because 64/82 games is enough, given all he did in the playoffs. His 2020 health is better than you think too, given there was a shorter season, he actually played 58/73 games.

Butler’s stats don’t jump off the page as some do, although as I noted above he sure looks comparable to someone like Kobe per 100, but his impact does. Stats don’t always capture stuff like your floor game, or defence, or the little things like intangibles, but it was very clear Jimmy had all those.

I genuinely laughed at the fact that your voting post in this thread still mentioned Kobe a dozen times.

Anyways, aside from the Kobe comedy, I will say that your mentions of Butler in these threads have got me thinking about him more, and I think he will eventually make my ballot in this project, and he probably wouldn’t have otherwise been on my radar that much. I don’t actually even think it’s absurd to vote for him in this thread, though I’m leaning against doing so myself.

[lessthanjake]

Another thing I just want to put a point on regarding Nash in the 2005 playoffs specifically is that his raw numbers became insanely good in the playoffs after the first round (which was a sweep where the Suns barely had to break a sweat). Against the Mavericks and the Spurs (both serious title contenders), Nash averaged:

27.1 PPG
11.4 APG
5.3 RPG
+10.0 rTS%

We should remember that these numbers came in a lower-scoring, lower-pace era. In era-inflation-adjusted terms (adjusting for both lower scoring efficiency back then and the fact that those series were played at lower pace than NBA basketball generally is now), you’d probably need to add like 10-15% to those PPG/APG/RPG numbers in today’s era to get at what they meant back then. These really were incredible numbers.

And, in putting up those numbers, the Suns had a ludicrous +14.71 rORTG with Nash on the floor against the Mavericks and an even-more-ludicrous +17.16 rORTG with Nash on the floor against the Spurs.

So 2005 Nash faced two major title contenders and just like absolutely nuked them offensively, both in terms of Nash’s own box data and the actual offense produced by his team. It really was an incredible display, and I just don’t know how anyone could suggest he was anything but amazing in those playoffs.

[Doctor MJ]

Haven’t seen a lot of discussion on Westbrook yet. He’s someone that’s going to make my ballot here and I think he peaked higher than Nash who’s getting all the credit at the moment. Let’s compare then in xRAPM over their best years:

Nash (‘05 - ‘07): 3.7, 3.8, 4.9

Russ (‘15 - ‘17): 4.9, 5.9, 5.0

Obviously Westbrook has a massive box score edge and is at least a somewhat better prime defender. Why does everyone default to Nash?

I’m not a hater on Nash compared to the general public or anything, but I’m still not sure why he gets SO much love here or with Thinking Basketball. He has the worst box signals of any player under consideration (including Draymond!) and even his impact signals seem mediocre compared to a lot of the other top players.

I know in the past analyses favoring Nash have relied heavily on team ORtg (ignoring what a liability he is on defense), but here I haven’t seen that much of a case period. It’s just kinda like “well, he’s a little better than (other guy) for a reason (different guy still) would do better than both of them”.

So, when you say "massive box score edge", I get why you say that, but there we're just talking about how the various production stuff get added up into arbitrary all-in-one metrics, not talking about Nash failing to do something.

Certainly fine generally to argue for players based on defense over Nash, but the box score you're referring to here is mostly about offensive production, and again, the idea that Nash is failing to do something offensively is just a non-starter to me.

On the biggest scale for me in this Russ comparison the thing is that Russ guarantees bad decisions that ruin possessions, while Nash is probably the most effective decision maker in the history of the game. Like, these things are not remotely close in my assessment. Fine for others to disagree, but just saying, this isn't like some tiebreaker scenario for me. I literally wouldn't want Westbrook to be the primary decision maker on my contender if I could possibly help it.

Yeah, I actually find it to be a bit of a mystery/puzzle why box-score metrics are so low on Nash. It’s not something that you’d expect from looking at the raw box score numbers themselves. For instance, in the 2005 playoffs, Nash put up 23.9 PPG, 11.3 APG, and 4.8 RPG with +9.0 rTS%. Those look like great numbers (especially in a low-pace and low-efficiency era where even the Suns only had a 94.1 pace in those playoffs)! It’s really not immediately obvious at all that someone with those numbers would have relatively weak box-metric numbers (note: his BPM in those playoffs was a relatively modest 4.7). Indeed, those box numbers would fit right in with peak CP3 years, which grade out super highly by box metrics. So how could Nash put up those numbers and have box metrics like BPM grade him out at only like half of what we see when other guys put up similar numbers? I think there’s two things happening here, as well as a third issue that makes even those raw box numbers I just listed understate Nash’s impact:

1. If I had to guess, I’d say one thing I think the models are seeing is Nash having abnormally low number of steals. I think they’re punishing him a lot for that. Which, on one hand, is actually getting at something negative about his game. It is actually reflective of his relatively weak defense. But I’ll note that he took quite a lot of charges—like amongst the highest in the league, and around 0.5 more per game than a normal player—which I don’t think ends up factored into the vast majority of box-score metrics (someone can feel free to correct me on that, to the extent I’m wrong about some particular box metric or box component, but I know it’s not factored into things like BPM, WS, and PER). The result is that RAPM parsed out by factor actually has him as a neutral or only very slight negative (and more like neutral in his peak years) in terms of his impact on opponent’s turnovers—similar to someone like Tyrese Haliburton. I think box metrics will generally assume he’s a bigger negative there than he is. This steals thing also ends up bleeding into offensive box measures—for instance, steals are factored into OBPM. Which makes some sense, since steals lead to easy transition opportunities the other way (which is something the charges he took didn’t do, so that doesn’t mitigate this issue). But Nash had no problem producing a ton of transition for his team regardless. Anyways, yeah, overall, I think this is one of the factors the models are seeing, and it’s a legitimate one to ding him for, but he’s probably dinged a little bit too much for it when we realize that few of these models are accounting for taking charges and Nash was genuinely doing that way more than virtually any other player.

2. Another big thing I think these models are seeing is that Nash has a fairly large amount of turnovers himself. And limiting turnovers is important, so this does matter! But Nash had the ball a huge amount and the offensive system his team ran basically had him taking all the team’s risks (this is especially so given how uniquely often he kept his dribble after driving to the basket). Consequently, if we look at RAPM that parses impact out by different factors, Nash comes out as a genuinely positive-impact player when it comes to limiting his team’s turnovers. He’s not quite Chris Paul in that regard, but he’s actually legitimately in a similar ballpark, despite having a lot more turnovers. This is a factor where I think there’s just going to be a huge delta between what a box metric sees and what the actual reality is in terms of impact. Box metrics are going to think Nash is a negative in terms of turnovers, when he was actually a significant positive.

3. Finally, given the disparity between box metrics and RAPM, one major thing worth thinking about is what area we think RAPM is higher than box-score data on Nash and whether we think the box score can adequately understand Nash’s impact in that regard. If it can’t, then that’d give us good reason to think box metrics (and even the raw stats I listed at the beginning of this post) are underrating him. Given that we have six-factor RAPM, we can actually be pretty sure where RAPM has Nash deriving his huge impact. It is in his team’s TS%. Nash has massive RAPM impact in that regard. Indeed, I can’t find anyone with RAPM impact as high as Nash in terms of impact on the team’s TS%. Steph and LeBron get close, but even they don’t get as high as Nash. And guys like Harden, Luka, Wade, and Jokic are a step below that. Meanwhile, other high-assist PGs like CP3 and Stockton are even below that. Part of this impact comes in the player’s own TS%—which obviously affects the team’s overall number. Box data does know that Nash was a really efficient scorer. But so much of this is about shot quality produced (especially for a relatively low-volume scorer like Nash), which is really just far too complex for box-score data to account for. The box score does know Nash had a lot of assists, but it doesn’t know that he’s impacting his team’s TS% more than anyone else—including guys with similar assist numbers to him. More complicated box-score measures may be able to pick up on the fact that Nash has outlier-levels of rim assists, but even that is a bit of a blunt instrument that wouldn’t really allow the model to be able to truly account for Nash’s TS% impact. After all, guys like CP3 and Stockton—who at least approach Nash’s level of rim assists—really don’t approach his impact on TS%, so if you put a lot of weight on rim assists such that you’re actually getting at Nash’s TS% impact, you’d way overrate those other guys. So basically, TS% impact is a massive factor for Nash that I really don’t think box metrics can account for without throwing the model out of whack for like everyone else.

_________

I think issue #3 is probably the biggest issue for box data when it comes to assessing Nash. Box data can’t really get at shot quality created. It can try to approximate it by using data like assists, but if you scaled up the value that a model put on assists such that it was giving Nash credit for how much he was improving his team’s TS%, you’d end up wildly overrating like every other high-assist guy. So the models don’t do that, because they’re designed to provide a line-of-best-fit in general. And that leaves Nash underrated. This is significantly exacerbated by the fact that box score models can’t quite understand that Nash was taking an abnormally high percent of his team’s risks and therefore he had a notably positive impact on his team’s turnovers despite having a lot of turnovers himself. And it’s also probably at least slightly exacerbated by the fact that box metrics generally aren’t seeing that he was taking like 0.5 charges a game more than a normal player.

Of course, one response to this might be for someone to say that they think the box models *are* adequately accounting for Nash’s TS% impact and that RAPM is simply overrating it. And I guess my response to that is that I just really don’t think you’d come to that conclusion if you watched a lot of him at the time. He was just an absolute alien in terms of producing good quality shots for his team.

Good stuff!

Just generally, I think the question of "If stat X is biased in some way with a particular player compared to my own sense of the player's goodness, how is it occurring?" to be extremely useful.

With regards to +/- based stats, this is where we run into situations like Nick Collison, who has impact data that makes him look like a star while getting played like a bench player. What's up with that? (My answer would be: Some noise, but also, probably the coach cherry-picking the situations he puts the player into.)

I think you summarized the situations with Nash really well. All-in-one box overrates steals and turnovers, and this causes Chris Paul to get seen as way ahead of Nash. I wouldn't actually say it's clear cut that these stats overrate Paul, because I think you can argue that for him they are essentially counteracting the underrating that pass-first point guards tend to have in more primitive all-in-ones.

I'm really glad you pointed out #3 as I think seeing these factor regressions tells us quite a bit. I'll reference from the nbarapm 4-year study I did. The top performers by each of the 3 Offensive categories by 4-year peaks:

TS Val:
1. Steve Nash 7.8
2. Steph Curry 7.5
3. LeBron James 7.2
4. Joel Embiid 6.4
5. James Harden 6.2

TOV Val:
1. Chris Paul 2.8
2. Mike Conley 2.5
3. Tracy McGrady 2.4
4. Kobe Bryant 2.2
(tie) DeMar DeRozan 2.2

Reb Val:
1. Steven Adams 4.1
2. Enes Kanter 3.5
3. Mitchell Robinson 2.9
4. Andre Drummond 2.7
(tie) Kevon Looney 2.7
(tie) Zach Randolph 2.7

I'd note on this that the scaling nbarapm in here in translating direct effect on TS or TOV or Reb into value is something that had to involve choices and there's no reason to think they did it perfectly, but just taking it as a starting point, maybe the first thing we see here is that Chris Paul is indeed the king of reducing turnovers just like his reputation says, but the value of this is quite small compared to TS value - and in fact Paul's TS value number is 50% bigger than his TOV value.

By this study, reducing turnovers is what Paul is best at, but it's not where most of his offensive value comes from.

Also of note, Paul's rank by TS value in this study is 18th, where Nash's rank by TOV value is 13th (1.9), so this is basically saying that from a more percentile-type ranking perspective, the gap is bigger in TS (where Nash has the edge) than in TOV (where Paul has the edge) even before we grapple with the fact that the TS category is about 3 times more important.

Closing by taking this back to the box score, this is why I emphasize that it just doesn't make sense to me to point to a part of the box score and say "Ah, see this is where Nash is falling down as a floor general." If you can have the highest TS value we've seen on record while leading the most dominant extended team ORtg run we've ever seen, and you're also excellent - if not quite the absolute best - at turnover reduction, then there's really not a problem with your floor generalship.

Could another player be more valuable overall on offense overall because of his rebounding? Yes.
Could another player be more valuable overall because of defense? Yes.
Could another player be more valuable overall because of minutes? Yes.

But this is not the same there being a real "hole" in Nash's impact running the offensive attack.

[Djoker]

Impact stats are very low on AD and I think some of it is him being a playoff riser. I think regular season AD legitimately isn't that great. Like I could make an argument that he's never top 5 and only a fringe top 10 player in the league if we focus on RS only but then he more than makes up for it in the PS. In 2020, I think even with a pessimistic evaluation, it's hard to pick anyone except Lebron, Giannis, Jokic, Luka, Harden over AD given how great he was in that PS run. And conversely, the most optimistic outlook on him puts him at #1 in 2020. Dirk-like shooting/scoring with DPOY-level defense, a freakish mix of versatility, quickness and rim protection. Dude was a machine in that postseason. Some argue the shooting is an outlier but he does the same in 2023 in another lengthy run.

But then again, it is a bit weird how low he's finishing. RAPM that homecourtloss posted (NBArapm.com) sees both his offense and defense as weak. It sees his offense as like 200th best in the league in the middle of his prime. I don't know. I can't take that 100% seriously. But we shouldn't completely ignore it either. Looking back at it, I wouldn't have him above Dirk anymore though I still think push comes to shove, I'd take him over Embiid who is a total playoff flop and he'll make my ballot here. But he might slot in behind Nash on my ballot instead of in front of him. I need to think some more because I didn't realize just how bad his impact stats look. And not just that RAPM set. 2020 AD in 4th in xRAPM, 6th in MAMBA, 5th in RAPTOR, 11th in DARKO and 8th in LEBRON. That is indeed underwhelming for a top 15 player of the 21st century even knowing that he takes it up a couple of notches in the PS. Those who emphasize the RS can have AD a lot lower than me and it's not weird.

[Top10alltime]

OK, I see how RealGM is. Not voting the clear best on the court, 2021-24 Embiid (take your pick).

I also rebutted the playoffs take, but they ignore facts, and focus on hating Embiid because they want to push their homeboy.

We can't be talking about Nash right now either, Nash joined the GOAT offensive cast of all-time, and when his PnR playmaking was exposed in the 05 Spurs series, he was cooked. That's OFC, ignoring the other side of the ball, where Nash is arguably the worst defender in NBA history.

[lessthanjake]

I think a vote for Anthony Davis has to be really premised on how good he was in the 2020 playoffs. In the regular-season, he put up great box numbers that year, but the multi-year RAPM stuff makes me pretty skeptical about taking his RS box numbers at face value. However, I think he really was extraordinary in the 2020 playoffs. In terms of the guys I’m considering for the last spot on my ballot this time, it really feels to me like AD’s playoffs was the best of anyone. In fact, I think his 2020 playoffs were better than some guys I’ve already voted for. But he’s way below other guys in general impact. So it’s a question of how to weigh that. If I wanted to be really pessimistic, I might conclude that if he had mediocre impact with great box numbers in the regular season, then that’s probably what happened in the 2020 playoffs too. However, that’s just not how I see what happened, and I do think there’s some reason for that beyond just the eye test telling me that. For one thing, the fact that he was providing real serious three-point spacing in those playoffs gave him some floor spacing and gravity value that I don’t think he normally has. I think that drove some serious non-box-score value in the playoffs. As another thing, the fact that the eye test saying he was far better than normal in those playoffs does actually line up with his playoff on-off that year. Single-playoff on-off is extremely noisy and not worth much, so I’m certainly not basing my conclusion on that, but it still feels better that that data aligns with the consensus about how much he upped his game in the playoffs, rather than if it just looked like the same ho-hum on-off numbers he typically has. Anyways, I am not sure if I’m going to vote for AD this thread or not, but I will note that I’ve already been penalizing him for his mediocre impact numbers—if his multi-year impact numbers had been in line with the other guys, I think he’d probably have already made my ballot.

Related to all this, I’ll note that the question of whether he’s just a playoff riser in general or merely was great in the 2020 playoffs specifically is something I don’t feel strongly about. I do think 2020 was his best playoffs, but I have seen some arguments about 2020 not being an outlier for him in terms of playoff performances. To me, that question would matter for purposes of assessing AD’s career, but in terms of assessing his 2020 playoffs, it doesn’t matter much to me. Anthony Davis played how he played in the 2020 playoffs, and he gets credit for that from me regardless of whether it was just a product of variance or is actually pretty in line with what his normal playoff level is. I know others differ from me on this sort of thing though, so I’m not saying it’s not worth discussion.

Also, while I don’t think AD was a super impactful guy normally, I do want to note again that the net rating data without LeBron in 2020 is heavily influenced by the fact that his minutes without LeBron were disproportionately with Lakers bench units. Like two-thirds of his minutes without LeBron were with 0 or 1 other Lakers starter. And even if you just looked at non-LeBron minutes where at least one other Lakers starter was on the floor with AD, he does have a positive net rating in the regular season (and he was just significantly positive without LeBron in the 2020 playoffs without parsing out any starter-state stuff).

Related to the above, I do wonder whether him being played a lot with pretty pure bench units plays into his abnormally low RAPM. Maybe he’s being put out there with bad-fitting bench crews and it’s making models think he’s not providing much value in the starter-heavy lineups. I have no idea if data really bears out that that’s a viable theory though, and for it to be right the lineup strategies would’ve had to be like this on more of his teams than just the 2020 Lakers. So I think it’s a possible theory, but I suspect if I took the time to really dig into it I’d probably end up not particularly convinced about it.

[Owly]

I took a quick look at players who have been voted in and/or are currently being discussed right now

Spoiler:

LeBron, Duncan, Jokic, Curry, KG, Giannis, Shaq, Wade, Kawhi, Kobe, Dirk, SGA, CP3, KD, Embiid, Draymond, Manu, Tatum, AD

to see how they did without the other best player on the team and as you would imagine, they all did well with the exception of one player. I also took at look at each player’s best 2 yr, 3 yr, and 5 yr RAPM stretches, and every player, except one, had at least a top 5 finish finish somewhere, with most at least a top 5 in a 2 yr stretch. Now, this wouldn’t necessarily exclude AD from a top 20 single year peak, but he’s a very glaring exception here.

AD’s rank of 15th in his best 2 yr RAPM among this group of players, is a massive outlier statistical outlier by the IQR method, the standard Z-score method, and the modified z-score method. 16 players discussed so far have a 2yr RAPM stretch that was either the highest or 2nd highest in the league.

He’s also the only player discussed so far who was a negative on court without the team’s other best player in a season discussed as a peak, i.e., 2020 (and 2018 for that matter).

Highest 2 yr RAPM rank Occurrences



Peaks without second best player and best 2yr/3yr/5yr RAPM ranks

2009 LeBron
+17.1 without Andy V.
+13.5 without Mo
+12.0 without Big Ben
2012 LeBron
+5.6 without Wade
2013 LeBron
+9.3 without Wade
2016 LeBron
+13.3 without Kyrie
*2020 LeBron (for reference)
+10.3 without AD

Best two year RAPM stretch: 1st
Best three year RAPM stretch: 1st
Best five year RAPM stretch: 1st

2003 Duncan
+6.4 without DRob
+9.3 without Manu

Best two year RAPM stretch: 1st
Best three year RAPM stretch: 1st
Best five year RAPM stretch: 1st

2023 Jokic
+13.3 without Murray

Best two year RAPM stretch: 1st
Best three year RAPM stretch: 1st
Best five year RAPM stretch: 1st

2017 Curry
+14.6 without KD

2016 Curry
+3.4 without Draymond

Best two year RAPM stretch: 1st
Best three year RAPM stretch: 1st
Best five year RAPM stretch: 1st

2001 Shaq
+4.7 without Kobe

Best two year RAPM stretch: 1st
Best three year RAPM stretch: 1st
Best five year RAPM stretch: 2nd

2004 KG
+3.7 without Cassel

Best two year RAPM stretch: 1st
Best three year RAPM stretch: 1st
Best five year RAPM stretch: 1st

2021 Giannis
+5.8 without JRue
+8.3 without Middleton

Best two year RAPM stretch: 2nd
Best three year RAPM stretch: 3rd
Best five year RAPM stretch: 2nd

2006 Wade
+6.5 without Shaq
2009 Wade
All teammates trash

Best two year RAPM stretch: 2nd
Best three year RAPM stretch: 3rd
Best five year RAPM stretch: 3rd

2017 Kawhi
+6.6 without Green
+13.6 without LMA
2019 Kawhi
+6 without Lowry (Lowry without Kawhi was a wild +13.6)
-7 without Green

Best two year RAPM stretch: 2nd
Best three year RAPM stretch: 1st
Best five year RAPM stretch: 1st

2025 SGA
+17.6 without Chet

Best two year RAPM stretch: 2nd
Best three year RAPM stretch: 2nd
Best five year RAPM stretch: 9th (this will very, very likely change)

2011 Dirk
+14 without Kidd
+9 without Chandler

Best two year RAPM stretch: 1st
Best three year RAPM stretch: 1st
Best five year RAPM stretch: 3rd

2009 Kobe
+2.1 without Odom
2008 Kobe
+7.1 without Gasol

Best two year RAPM stretch: 6th
Best three year RAPM stretch: 5th
Best five year RAPM stretch: 5th

2015 CP3
+9.9 without Griffin

Best two year RAPM stretch: 1st
Best three year RAPM stretch: 2nd
Best five year RAPM stretch: 1st

2018 Harden
+8.6 without Paul

Best two year RAPM stretch: 7th
Best three year RAPM stretch: 9th
Best five year RAPM stretch: 5th

2014 KD
+8.7 without Russ
2016 KD
+8 without Russ

Best two year RAPM stretch: 5th
Best three year RAPM stretch: 3rd
Best five year RAPM stretch: 5th

2016 Draymond
+10.8 without Curry

Best two year RAPM stretch: 2nd
Best three year RAPM stretch: 3rd
Best five year RAPM stretch: 4th

2005 Manu
+9.9 without Duncan

Best two year RAPM stretch: 1st
Best three year RAPM stretch: 1st
Best five year RAPM stretch: 2nd

2005 Nash
+7.1 without Amar’e
-.2 without Marion in 300 minutes
2007 Nash
+12.5 without Amar’e

Best two year RAPM stretch: 2nd
Best three year RAPM stretch: 2nd
Best five year RAPM stretch: 3rd

2019 Embiid
+7.6 without Butler
+8.5 without RoCo
+7.7 without Simmons

Best two year RAPM stretch: 1st
Best three year RAPM stretch: 2nd
Best five year RAPM stretch: 3rd

2020 AD
-2.4 without LeBron
2018 AD
-.6 without Jrue

Best two year RAPM stretch: 15th
Best three year RAPM stretch: 26th
Best five year RAPM stretch: 24th

2024 Tatum
+15.4 without Jrue
+15.7 without Brown

Best two year RAPM stretch: 5th
Best three year RAPM stretch: 2nd
Best five year RAPM stretch: 5th

Just on one side of the evidence offered here...

Without one other player seems fairly arbitrary. It's likely to be a pretty limited sample in most cases. As a "control", even in the abstract (before knowing what it does in practice to a given sample) it's quite possibly a very different thing in each context depending on the quality of player, how central they are to the build/construction etc.

And I think most would grant '15 and '19 are better regular seasons on a rate basis at least ('19 has fewer minutes in raw terms even before accounting for Covid-shortened season [LAL play 71 RS games]) looking at, at least by first glance, better boxscore and impact-side. Some of this could be contextual but ... at first glance I think you're probably saying "I penalize no/brief playoff sample, I prioritize playoffs" to at least some degree in taking '20 Davis. Not that '20 RS is "bad", the box is still very good ... but certainly holes can be picked. So I think it comes down to, "are you leaning deeply towards the playoffs (and playoff team success). And to the extent that is a heavy priority without specifically comparing to the field ... there are obvious reasons why '20 Davis has appeal.

[lessthanjake]

OK, I see how RealGM is. Not voting the clear best on the court, 2021-24 Embiid (take your pick).

I also rebutted the playoffs take, but they ignore facts, and focus on hating Embiid because they want to push their homeboy.

We can't be talking about Nash right now either, Nash joined the GOAT offensive cast of all-time, and when his PnR playmaking was exposed in the 05 Spurs series, he was cooked. That's OFC, ignoring the other side of the ball, where Nash is arguably the worst defender in NBA history.

Okay, I assume you’re mostly trolling, but: (1) that “GOAT offensive cast of all-time” that Nash joined had a -1.5 rORTG the year before he joined them, and from 2005-2010 had a -1.57 rORTG in 26 games without Nash; and (2) it’s obviously nonsensical to say Nash’s “PnR playmaking was exposed in the 05 Spurs series” when the Suns had an absolutely massive +17.16 rORTG with Nash on the court in that series.

[f4p]

Another thing I just want to put a point on regarding Nash in the 2005 playoffs specifically is that his raw numbers became insanely good in the playoffs after the first round (which was a sweep where the Suns barely had to break a sweat). Against the Mavericks and the Spurs (both serious title contenders), Nash averaged:

27.1 PPG
11.4 APG
5.3 RPG
+10.0 rTS%

We should remember that these numbers came in a lower-scoring, lower-pace era. In era-inflation-adjusted terms (adjusting for both lower scoring efficiency back then and the fact that those series were played at lower pace than NBA basketball generally is now), you’d probably need to add like 10-15% to those PPG/APG/RPG numbers in today’s era to get at what they meant back then. These really were incredible numbers.

And, in putting up those numbers, the Suns had a ludicrous +14.71 rORTG with Nash on the floor against the Mavericks and an even-more-ludicrous +17.16 rORTG with Nash on the floor against the Spurs.

So 2005 Nash faced two major title contenders and just like absolutely nuked them offensively, both in terms of Nash’s own box data and the actual offense produced by his team. It really was an incredible display, and I just don’t know how anyone could suggest he was anything but amazing in those playoffs.

well i don't think anyone said he wasn't great. since we're bringing up box score stuff, all of the pace and league environment stuff is already baked into the big 3 stats from BBRef. Nash looks good but still not spectacular.

23.4 PER
0.164 WS48
4.7 BPM

WS48 is somewhat telling in that WS loves efficiency and nash was incredibly efficient and yet ended up with the same WS48 as 2018 harden, who had one of his lowest efficiency playoffs (54.8 TS%) playing the #1 regular season defense (Utah) for 5 games and the #1 playoff defense (Golden State) for 7 games. and yet, presumably because defense and other factors, harden still basically tied Nash in WS48 (0.163). and crushed him in BPM (8.1).

in terms of overall career, Nash's numbers would rank as follow in harden's career (only 9+ game playoffs counted for harden):

PER: 6th
WS48: 7th (9th with shorter runs included)
BPM: 8th (11th with shorter runs included)


Although I feel like there's an upper limit to how good we can consider Dallas since they're also the team that lost Nash so both they and Nash can't be simultaneously amazing, even if we bumped up his numbers a little for the 2 series you mentioned to 24.9 PER, 0.193 WS48, 7.0 BPM (purposely goal-seeked number, see below), it would be:

PER: 3rd (2018 harden's number behind 2019 and 2020)
WS48: 5th (2011 harden's number behind 2015, 2019, 2020, and 2021)
BPM: 6th (2017 harden's number behind 2015, 2016, 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2021)

[LA Bird]

Not super high on Harden but I do think he should be above KD and AD. The issue with Harden is supposedly his playoffs resiliency but 14 Durant who just got voted in last round dropped off even more. Davis' reputation hinges upon the postseason more than anyone but in his very peak run when he faced off against Harden, their two teams were a dead even 233-233 outside of the two blowout games. And that's with Davis playing next to the #1 guy in this project. Team success (ie, the Lakers destroying the Rockets by 59 points per 48 when both were on the bench) shouldn't be used as an argument for Davis over Harden. After all, is there any question which team would win if we swapped 2020 LeBron and Westbrook?

[LA Bird]

Best individual PO series is an interesting thought. Dray choking out the Rockets in '16 is a personal favorite among guys still eligible. I've never looked at a best relD series list before, but I'd bet that one would rank pretty well.

-19.2 rDRtg
+7.7 rORtg

Massive stuff.

By the way, it's one of Draymond's ten different series in which he was -10 rDRtg or better. Six of these were -13 or better.

Depends on the minutes cutoff but unless I forgot someone, 22 Giannis has the best rDRtg at -21.4 against the Bulls.

Caruso has three -22 (or better) series though so if we ignore his low per game minutes, his total would be the best of anyone.

[f4p]

What model did you come up with?

Model would be a strong word. But it turned out if you just took my age 22-31 (i.e. prime) box score metric, which I've posted somewhere here before, which was weighted 75/25 to the playoffs, multiplied by longevity of prime (admittedly subjectively determined by me but I don't think many would argue that LeBron and Kareem had long primes and i doubt there would be more than a year or two of disagreement on anybody) and then added championships multiplied by some factor and FMVPs by another factor, you got a 0.8 R^2.

And if you take box score multiplied by length of prime, it's literally just cumulative career box score production. And championships and FMVPs is basically just "ringz, erneh". So weirdly, it turned out doing things in the box score and winning lots of titles was doing most of the heavy lifting, despite the fact most voters would have probably said they were looking beyond those things and would consider those more "general board" things.

FMVPs didn't actually help much more than just using championships because most titles won by the top 30 were FMVPs.

I actually "model" is very much an appropriate word and applaud the use of such a technique, but I'd note the saying,

"All models are wrong, but some are useful"

As in, it's not a question of if there's something wrong with the model, but what is wrong with it, because all models have something wrong.

In this case, if I'm understanding your explanation, you were able to take a bunch of factors and train them - which might not have been a formal process - to correlate with one set of voter preferences pretty well, but then when tested on a new sample, it doesn't correlate well.

What conclusion would I generally draw from that? Sounds like classic overfitting. Correlation is not causation. You used a set of factors that voters were not actually using exclusively, or even directly, and it worked except when it didn't.

well, we're talking about voting over 75 years of nba history and amongst a somewhat diverse group of voters. and we got an R^2 of 0.8 with basically 2 factors. if i had to throw in 7 other factors, i could envision overfitting. but it was basically just the 2 most common things people look at, and it worked extremely well.

of course, we will probably draw different conclusions. my conclusion is that either a) people looked at this stuff way more than they wanted to admit while trying be "serious" practitioners of looking at impact numbers and not honing in on rings and stats or, what i would say, b) it turns out that production and winning actually produce a very strong signal for the top level players (i wouldn't use the box score to evaluate PJ Tucker) and that whatever direction you try to go in your evaluation, you actually can't deviate too much from the box score and winning because players look good in those factors for the same reason they look good in impact and the eye test and everything else. also worth noting that i think it also ended up doing a very good prediction for future voted in guys like kawhi, stockton, miller, and ray allen.

But I will say, it's certainly not random that the guy who didn't correlate that you noticed first was Nash, because Nash's box score isn't why he won the MVPs, perceived impact was. And that was incredibly controversial at the time and led to all sorts of debates which included dismissals of what Phoenix was doing as a gimmick.

well KD being underrated (by 10 spots) is who i noticed first, but when it became apparent nash was going to go in the early 20's, it was on my radar and the fact he was orders of magnitude more out of line than anyone else was obviously noticeable. it's not like he was slightly more ahead of the prediction, he was almost 3 times more favored than anyone else. now, we can't use impact numbers for a lot of the guys in the top 30, but while we've been discussing peak RAPM's for nash in this project looking good, Nash certainly does not look good by the career RAPM data compared to other guys. he's something like 40th in regular season and 59th in the playoffs. and Cheema I think maybe has him a little higher in the regular season but also not good in the playoffs. and of course, that's just in the last 30 years or so. so i don't think impact would have been likely to have changed Nash's predicted ranking all that much, again noting that we could not even use it for probably half or more of the players. i guess it would help vs wade since RAPM doesn't like him, but most other guys would, if anything, gain on Nash.

But as we started getting access to more and more precise data we could associate with impact (+/- with regression), it largely supported the perception of those who advocated for Nash, and thus the question of "How is the box score biased relative to actual impact?" came front and center.

In other words, your model isn't pointing something out that's unexpected and hard to explain, it's just re-affirming the divergence between box-based analysis and impact indicators and my guess would be that wherever we'd see that divergence, if we had a specific debate about those players, it would break down similarly.

but Nash does not seem to be amazing in the career RAPM stuff I've seen. Is there other career long stuff where he looks amazing for the purposes of something like the Top 100?

[Cavsfansince84]

Not super high on Harden but I do think he should be above KD and AD. The issue with Harden is supposedly his playoffs resiliency but 14 Durant who just got voted in last round dropped off even more. Davis' reputation hinges upon the postseason more than anyone but in his very peak run when he faced off against Harden, their two teams were a dead even 233-233 outside of the two blowout games. And that's with Davis playing next to the #1 guy in this project. Team success (ie, the Lakers destroying the Rockets by 59 points per 48 when both were on the bench) shouldn't be used as an argument for Davis over Harden. After all, is there any question which team would win if we swapped 2020 LeBron and Westbrook?

Playoff resiliency is part of it. It's more a combo of his 3 pt shooting abandoning him too often(which he relies on a lot), lack of midrange game to compensate, defense and being turnover prone(which has resulted in a lot of 7+to games in his playoff career). A lot of criticism with AD seems to boil down to floor raising imo yet he still led teams in NO that got out of the 1st rd once or twice and I think in a peak's project winning counts for a lot(even if we want to say LeBron was better that year but honestly not by that much). It's like AD is having to overcome a rep of his own making though which is understandable which also applies to Harden to some degree. In 2020 though he was a very big part of a very dominant team. That's why I seem to be higher on him than most others currently voting.

[f4p]

Not super high on Harden but I do think he should be above KD and AD. The issue with Harden is supposedly his playoffs resiliency but 14 Durant who just got voted in last round dropped off even more. Davis' reputation hinges upon the postseason more than anyone but in his very peak run when he faced off against Harden, their two teams were a dead even 233-233 outside of the two blowout games. And that's with Davis playing next to the #1 guy in this project. Team success (ie, the Lakers destroying the Rockets by 59 points per 48 when both were on the bench) shouldn't be used as an argument for Davis over Harden. After all, is there any question which team would win if we swapped 2020 LeBron and Westbrook?

yeah people ding harden for playoff resiliency (i say rightly so), then act like guys like steph and KD and nash and giannis aren't sitting there right next to him in resiliency. and i know it's a peak project, but Davis just feels like zero'ing in way too much on 2020 when he had a mid-range shooting performance that was basically as outlier as outlier gets. and he got the lebron security blanket to make everything easier.

[f4p]

Not super high on Harden but I do think he should be above KD and AD. The issue with Harden is supposedly his playoffs resiliency but 14 Durant who just got voted in last round dropped off even more. Davis' reputation hinges upon the postseason more than anyone but in his very peak run when he faced off against Harden, their two teams were a dead even 233-233 outside of the two blowout games. And that's with Davis playing next to the #1 guy in this project. Team success (ie, the Lakers destroying the Rockets by 59 points per 48 when both were on the bench) shouldn't be used as an argument for Davis over Harden. After all, is there any question which team would win if we swapped 2020 LeBron and Westbrook?

Playoff resiliency is part of it. It's more a combo of his 3 pt shooting abandoning him too often(which he relies on a lot), lack of midrange game to compensate, defense and being turnover prone(which has resulted in a lot of 7+to games in his playoff career).

i mean if harden was that bad at all those things, it wouldn't explain why his prime playoff stats look just like steph and KD's. or why his resiliency is just like their's (and others). or why he played 8 series from 2018 to 2021 and led both teams in game score 7 times, a stretch that, if I knew how to look it up for everyone, has probably been done by only 10-12 players ever. and that included 2 series against steph/KD, one against lebron/AD, 1 against butler, and 2 against donovan mitchell, all of whom at times are considered great playoff performers while harden isn't. and included another series with KD as a teammate and 5 series with cp3 as a teammate. or why the steph/KD warriors could mop the floor with #1 peak lebron (and everyone else) but couldn't do anything but play even basketball with harden, especially notable in 2019 given the state of cp3.

[Cavsfansince84]

Not super high on Harden but I do think he should be above KD and AD. The issue with Harden is supposedly his playoffs resiliency but 14 Durant who just got voted in last round dropped off even more. Davis' reputation hinges upon the postseason more than anyone but in his very peak run when he faced off against Harden, their two teams were a dead even 233-233 outside of the two blowout games. And that's with Davis playing next to the #1 guy in this project. Team success (ie, the Lakers destroying the Rockets by 59 points per 48 when both were on the bench) shouldn't be used as an argument for Davis over Harden. After all, is there any question which team would win if we swapped 2020 LeBron and Westbrook?

yeah people ding harden for playoff resiliency (i say rightly so), then act like guys like steph and KD and nash and giannis aren't sitting there right next to him in resiliency. and i know it's a peak project, but Davis just feels like zero'ing in way too much on 2020 when he had a mid-range shooting performance that was basically as outlier as outlier gets. and he got the lebron security blanket to make everything easier.

Ya, but he was also dpoy level on defense while being compared to a few guys who are all considered bad to very bad defenders(Harden, Nash & Luka). So two way impact like that, while winning a ring and having 4 very strong series in a row while doing it. Even if you want to say it's a bit of an outlier shooting wise he still did it. So I think it speaks for itself.

[eminence]

Obviously a better defender than the perimeter guys, but I'd stop short of calling AD DPOY level. The '20 defensive cast was absolutely loaded, and in '21 he missed half the season and they were still the #1 defense. No noteworthy defenses in New Orleans.

[Doctor MJ]

Model would be a strong word. But it turned out if you just took my age 22-31 (i.e. prime) box score metric, which I've posted somewhere here before, which was weighted 75/25 to the playoffs, multiplied by longevity of prime (admittedly subjectively determined by me but I don't think many would argue that LeBron and Kareem had long primes and i doubt there would be more than a year or two of disagreement on anybody) and then added championships multiplied by some factor and FMVPs by another factor, you got a 0.8 R^2.

And if you take box score multiplied by length of prime, it's literally just cumulative career box score production. And championships and FMVPs is basically just "ringz, erneh". So weirdly, it turned out doing things in the box score and winning lots of titles was doing most of the heavy lifting, despite the fact most voters would have probably said they were looking beyond those things and would consider those more "general board" things.

FMVPs didn't actually help much more than just using championships because most titles won by the top 30 were FMVPs.

I actually "model" is very much an appropriate word and applaud the use of such a technique, but I'd note the saying,

"All models are wrong, but some are useful"

As in, it's not a question of if there's something wrong with the model, but what is wrong with it, because all models have something wrong.

In this case, if I'm understanding your explanation, you were able to take a bunch of factors and train them - which might not have been a formal process - to correlate with one set of voter preferences pretty well, but then when tested on a new sample, it doesn't correlate well.

What conclusion would I generally draw from that? Sounds like classic overfitting. Correlation is not causation. You used a set of factors that voters were not actually using exclusively, or even directly, and it worked except when it didn't.

well, we're talking about voting over 75 years of nba history and amongst a somewhat diverse group of voters. and we got an R^2 of 0.8 with basically 2 factors. if i had to throw in 7 other factors, i could envision overfitting. but it was basically just the 2 most common things people look at, and it worked extremely well.

of course, we will probably draw different conclusions. my conclusion is that either a) people looked at this stuff way more than they wanted to admit while trying be "serious" practitioners of looking at impact numbers and not honing in on rings and stats or, what i would say, b) it turns out that production and winning actually produce a very strong signal for the top level players (i wouldn't use the box score to evaluate PJ Tucker) and that whatever direction you try to go in your evaluation, you actually can't deviate too much from the box score and winning because players look good in those factors for the same reason they look good in impact and the eye test and everything else. also worth noting that i think it also ended up doing a very good prediction for future voted in guys like kawhi, stockton, miller, and ray allen.

So, perhaps I shouldn't have used the term "overfitting" as it implies too much fine-tuning. It's just the thing that comes to mine when you have a model that work for a good chunk of data that you had in mind when you were building the model, but then doesn't work on some of the new data you didn't have in mind.

On your conclusions:

(a) I think it is very possible that people anchor their assessment on the standard stuff more than they realize. As I've said, I'm continually finding further ways in which winning bias infects my analysis long after I started seeing "winning bias" as an issue.

(b) "can't deviate too much from box score and winning". So let me be clear here:

It would be my expectation that generally the simple measures the public uses work pretty well, and so where there's deviation, that's where things get interesting. I'm really not alarmed if my process happens to end up agreeing with the majority in any given study.

But my process is my process. I'm not trying to make it match or deviate from norms, norm am I trying make it look like I'm "serious" - all this stuff is just a hobby for me. My temperament may be such that people label me as "serious", but I'm just trying to understand things.

But I will say, it's certainly not random that the guy who didn't correlate that you noticed first was Nash, because Nash's box score isn't why he won the MVPs, perceived impact was. And that was incredibly controversial at the time and led to all sorts of debates which included dismissals of what Phoenix was doing as a gimmick.

well KD being underrated (by 10 spots) is who i noticed first, but when it became apparent nash was going to go in the early 20's, it was on my radar and the fact he was orders of magnitude more out of line than anyone else was obviously noticeable. it's not like he was slightly more ahead of the prediction, he was almost 3 times more favored than anyone else. now, we can't use impact numbers for a lot of the guys in the top 3, but while we've been discussing peak RAPM's for nash in this project looking good, Nash certainly does not look good by the career RAPM data compared to other guys. he's something like 40th in regular season and 59th in the playoffs. and Cheema I think maybe has him a little higher in the regular season but also not good in the playoffs. and of course, that's just in the last 30 years or so. so i don't think impact would have been likely to have changed Nash's predicted ranking all that much, again noting that we could not even use it for probably half or more of the players. i guess it would help vs wade since RAPM doesn't like him, but most other guys would, if anything, gain on Nash.

But as we started getting access to more and more precise data we could associate with impact (+/- with regression), it largely supported the perception of those who advocated for Nash, and thus the question of "How is the box score biased relative to actual impact?" came front and center.

In other words, your model isn't pointing something out that's unexpected and hard to explain, it's just re-affirming the divergence between box-based analysis and impact indicators and my guess would be that wherever we'd see that divergence, if we had a specific debate about those players, it would break down similarly.

but Nash does not seem to be amazing in the career RAPM stuff I've seen. Is there other career long stuff where he looks amazing for the purposes of something like the Top 100?

So, let me say, KD went lower in this project than I expected, and that's interesting.

Re: Nash looks worse by career RAPM. I don't think there's any mystery here. Nash doesn't start having MVP level impact until he gets back to Phoenix in his age 30 season. This is a known phenomenon and has everything to do with why many have been skeptical that he was actually an MVP level player.

But also to be clear, in my projected RAPM VORP based on Englemann's career RAPM he ranks 18th, and he'd rank higher if I wasn't projecting based on pre-PBP era minutes for guys like Stockton, Shaq & Jordan.

The 21st century players not already voted in that rank ahead of him are:

Paul Pierce
Jason Kidd
James Harden
Vince Carter
Ray Allen

We can discuss any of those guys. Back in the day Kidd vs Nash was a very hot topic, and Harden still is. Not sure if many would be looking to advocate for Pierce, Carter or Allen - but in a nutshell these were guys seen as big-time draft prospects who were given the chance to shine immediately and then had excellent longevity, and that's the recipe for having a career total that beats a higher peak.

[Cavsfansince84]

Obviously a better defender than the perimeter guys, but I'd stop short of calling AD DPOY level. The '20 defensive cast was absolutely loaded, and in '21 he missed half the season and they were still the #1 defense. No noteworthy defenses in New Orleans.

They had picked up Marc Gasol though and had good defensive pieces. The ORtg also goes way down with him missing games though 2021 in general was a cluster**** for the Lakers. So the new pieces were definitely more defense oriented than offensively. Having questions about AD's defense based on NO DRtg's is somewhat fair though(while also playing next to Jrue). We did hear all year long in 2020 though how he maybe deserved dpoy and it's hard to think a big who finishes top 4 in dpoy voting 4 times isn't actually dpoy caliber. I'm sure there's other metrics which might help get to the bottom of it but I can't look that up right now. So you can make the case he got his top 5 dpoy votes based off his name or something but what about the years where he wasn't top 5? I think AD gets in some ways unfair amounts of hate tbh. Maybe its warranted but I think people should reconsider what he actually did in 2020 when he seemed completely focused on winning(which I don't think he was as much after 2020). Even if 2020 is an outlier in some ways it still happened where he played up to his potential which is what a peak is all about.

[iggymcfrack]

Impact stats are very low on AD and I think some of it is him being a playoff riser. I think regular season AD legitimately isn't that great. Like I could make an argument that he's never top 5 and only a fringe top 10 player in the league if we focus on RS only but then he more than makes up for it in the PS. In 2020, I think even with a pessimistic evaluation, it's hard to pick anyone except Lebron, Giannis, Jokic, Luka, Harden over AD given how great he was in that PS run. And conversely, the most optimistic outlook on him puts him at #1 in 2020. Dirk-like shooting/scoring with DPOY-level defense, a freakish mix of versatility, quickness and rim protection. Dude was a machine in that postseason. Some argue the shooting is an outlier but he does the same in 2023 in another lengthy run.

But then again, it is a bit weird how low he's finishing. RAPM that homecourtloss posted (NBArapm.com) sees both his offense and defense as weak. It sees his offense as like 200th best in the league in the middle of his prime. I don't know. I can't take that 100% seriously. But we shouldn't completely ignore it either. Looking back at it, I wouldn't have him above Dirk anymore though I still think push comes to shove, I'd take him over Embiid who is a total playoff flop and he'll make my ballot here. But he might slot in behind Nash on my ballot instead of in front of him. I need to think some more because I didn't realize just how bad his impact stats look. And not just that RAPM set. 2020 AD in 4th in xRAPM, 6th in MAMBA, 5th in RAPTOR, 11th in DARKO and 8th in LEBRON. That is indeed underwhelming for a top 15 player of the 21st century even knowing that he takes it up a couple of notches in the PS. Those who emphasize the RS can have AD a lot lower than me and it's not weird.

I would just like to point out that AD’s xRAPM while 4th in 2020 against stiff competition is still a pretty good value overall at 6.3. Here’s where it compares to other contenders’ best xRAPM season right now whether that year is their peak or not:

Draymond 7.2
Harden 6.9
Manu 6.4
Davis 6.3
Luka 6.3
Dwight 6.0
Westbrook 5.9
Tatum 5.8
Nash 4.9