2013-14 Player of the Year Discussion Thread

[Dr Positivity]

Re: RWB. He's a great player but he single handily makes OKC more erratic and "chaos, not order" in the postseason, which I have a hard time getting behind top 5, since to me in the PS you want the order, halfcourt, Spurs-y team. I'd prefer OKC's title chances if they had Parker in RWB's place personally, and possibly guys like Conley and Dragic. People blame Scotty for not having more of an offensive system but maybe he's working towards RWB's strengths and away from his weaknesses, which may not happen with a different point

[bondom34]

Re: RWB. He's a great player but he single handily makes OKC more erratic and "chaos, not order" in the postseason, which I have a hard time getting behind top 5, since to me in the PS you want the order, halfcourt, Spurs-y team. I'd prefer OKC's title chances if they had Parker in RWB's place personally, and possibly guys like Conley and Dragic. People blame Scotty for not having more of an offensive system but maybe he's working towards RWB's strengths and away from his weaknesses, which may not happen with a different point

After watching just about every OKC game, I can say w/ a ton of confidence this isn't true. ElGee's explanation of the chaos he creates just can't be replicated. Its why I always hate the "Westbrook for Rubio/Pek" trades. Granted, he's gotta calm down a bit, but if he consistently plays like he did in the PO, OKC is insanely difficult to defend if you add one solid SG to that team. From someone who is as into analytics as anyone, there's something to WB that isn't statisically defined, but he impacts for OKC that another point can't bring.

[PaulieWal]

Re: RWB. He's a great player but he single handily makes OKC more erratic and "chaos, not order" in the postseason, which I have a hard time getting behind top 5, since to me in the PS you want the order, halfcourt, Spurs-y team. I'd prefer OKC's title chances if they had Parker in RWB's place personally, and possibly guys like Conley and Dragic. People blame Scotty for not having more of an offensive system but maybe he's working towards RWB's strengths and away from his weaknesses, which may not happen with a different point

After watching just about every OKC game, I can say w/ a ton of confidence this isn't true. ElGee's explanation of the chaos he creates just can't be replicated. Its why I always hate the "Westbrook for Rubio/Pek" trades. Granted, he's gotta calm down a bit, but if he consistently plays like he did in the PO, OKC is insanely difficult to defend if you add one solid SG to that team. From someone who is as into analytics as anyone, there's something to WB that isn't statisically defined, but he impacts for OKC that another point can't bring.

What stats don't and never will capture is the energy RW brings to OKC. He energizes the entire team. When he is flying around on the court you can see the entire team get engaged. I love analyzing stats like you but there is something to be said for a guy who is always engaged.

Edit: It's easier said than done but if he can minimize his reckless moments and some questionable shot selection he will become even more dominant.

[JordansBulls]

I'm surprised they didn't put him on the All defensive 1st team.

[RSCD3_]

I'm surprised they didn't put him on the All defensive 1st team.

Probably because of missed games

[Jaivl]

I'm surprised they didn't put him on the All defensive 1st team.

Probably because of missed games

And what about Paul? Making All-D teams the Kobe Bryant way.

[Doctor MJ]

I think the top-5 are:
LBJ
Durant
Paul
Curry
Westbrook

Can you elaborate on Westbrook as you see him in general here?

Also, what's your take on the whole Durant-Westbrook-Brooks love triangle? Do you think this is a smart offense?

I've spoken on Westbrook over the years but it's certainly been quiet compared to other topics. I think the bashing he gets in completely misguided. To me, it would be very similar to bashing Rose. As far as I can tell, the two main issues against RW are his volume and efficiency (another way of saying "shot selection" or "ball-dominance"/"hoggery").

Let's assume he's a 51-54% TS guy. Like Rose. What makes these guys so effectively offensively is their creation/disruption of the defense. (Let's leave defense alone for a second.) By itself, the disruption can make a good positive offensive player. See Jason Kidd. When you add the benefit of high volume scoring, you potentially add more. Of course, RW isn't a 57-60% guy, so the tendency is to say "Iverson!" But Westbrook would have to be hurting his creation with too many silly shots for this to be a problem, and I don't see evidence for that at all.

This leads to meta-game. This is an issue with guys like Kidd, Rose, Westbrook, even Kobe, etc. It's not necessarily an issue if you can't pass, are a black hole and have no semblance of a floor game. Meta-game is simply the effect that your own shots have on future possessions. Do I think RW has the perfect balance between his own pull-up and something else? No way -- he can pound the ball a lot. But some of his distribution success comes from his own self-creation. If you're saying "he's not Nash," no, Nash basically had perfect balance. But I'd rather have:

20 shots (@ 1.04 pps) that open up 10 Opportunities Created for teammates than
8 shots (@ 1.10 pps) that open up 3 Opportunities Created for teammates

There is an optimal balance curve in that equation and I don't think RW has found it at all. He's still exerting a massive positive force on offense. (You don't have to find this balance perfectly to be great offensively -- Kobe/Michael.)

In addition to that, RW has the ability to self-create, which can come in handy in situations just like in OKC where the team has a poorly run offense and few offensive weapons/structure outside Durant. To me, this is why OKC had no chance last year and why Westbrook sort of stood out for people this year. When the tire hits the pavement, he's an important offensive player. Really important in their case. Is he Chris Paul? Absolutely not.

Interestingly, RAPM has had him as a top offensive player, with this year being his best offensively and defensively. Would he be even better if he shored up his shot selection? Yes. But the current product is really damn good.

Thanks for expounding.

It feels to me like you're saying I'm quibbling with the imperfection rather than appreciating the brilliance, and there's truth in that certainly.

Here's what I see though;
-Westbrook making bad decisions and mistakes.
-Durant being too passive.
-Westbrook failing to get Durant as involved as we'd like, which doesn't absolve Durant, but it's important context.
-OKC's offense not actually working that well.

It's the last thing that makes it seem impossible to rationalize the others to me.

Oklahoma City was a +3.8 ORTG offense this year despite Westbrook's absence who underperformed in every playoff series they were in relative to the expectations relative to degree of difficulty.

And before we start talking about that just being how it goes when Durant is so hard to get involved against tough defenses, let's remember 2012:

In 2012, OKC was a +5.2 ORTG who made each of their final 3 opponent's defenses allow +10 ORTG more than they did in the regular season. They just blew the doors off the toughest defenses around back then.

Unless one wants to attribute all this to being a fluke, OKC has a very clear problem that needs addressing that seems to have began the moment Harden left. And while I think that problem has a lot to do with coaching, the issue with Westbrook is that he often looks his most Westbrook-y while the problem is most apparent. It's not so much that I blame Westbrook for this as I want to avoid praising him for things that are actually a symptom of a problem.

There are a host of articles right now anointing Westbrook while smirking at Durant, and when I look at the situation I just see the same data in terms of a system breaking down.

Last note on the RAPM: Westbrook played half the season this year and on raw +/-, the team did about as well when he was off the court as when he was on it, and the NPI RAPM data we had for Durant this year (until it stopped being updated) was extremely good as he impressed us in Westbrook's presence. Are you sure the data you're looking at isn't using a prior?

[ronnymac2]

I'm happy people are finally getting the memo about Westbrook. If Russell Westbrook has the ball from 30 feet out and only 2 eyeballs are watching him, he will lay the ball up 2 seconds later. Any any given time when he has the ball, an entire side of the court needs to pay attention to him. He's relentless. That right there distorts a defense.

Add in production that only maybe 3-5 players can put up, along with decent efficiency (he's not bad...hasn't been for a few years now), and you've got yourself a top-5 player in terms of ability. He's been this way for at least 3 years now.

[bondom34]

Glad to see Westbrook getting credit as well. I'm of the thought of liking to see some offball offense in OKC, but have some holdbacks on much change, and the more I think of it, I'd almost rather a strong assistant in OKC to help the offense. An interesting read:
http://www.hickory-high.com/okcs-backdo ... implicity/

Just a few thoughts on OKC's simplistic offense, as it does have some advantages as well.

[rcontador]

Here's what I see though;
-Westbrook making bad decisions and mistakes.
-Durant being too passive.
-Westbrook failing to get Durant as involved as we'd like, which doesn't absolve Durant, but it's important context.
-OKC's offense not actually working that well.

It's the last thing that makes it seem impossible to rationalize the others to me.

Oklahoma City was a +3.8 ORTG offense this year despite Westbrook's absence who underperformed in every playoff series they were in relative to the expectations relative to degree of difficulty.

And before we start talking about that just being how it goes when Durant is so hard to get involved against tough defenses, let's remember 2012:

In 2012, OKC was a +5.2 ORTG who made each of their final 3 opponent's defenses allow +10 ORTG more than they did in the regular season. They just blew the doors off the toughest defenses around back then.

Unless one wants to attribute all this to being a fluke, OKC has a very clear problem that needs addressing that seems to have began the moment Harden left.

(Bold is mine.)

This -- the opinion in bold, that the two-star Thunder offense doesn't work in the playoffs -- seems to be the consensus right now, and I think it's all wrong. It's important to realize that the only time we've seen an intact Thunder struggle in the playoffs is this year. That could mean they have systematic problems with playoff defense, but there are other explanations.

My preferred explanation is: Durant burnt himself out in the regular season and was playing about three tiers below his normal level in the playoffs. The "three tiers below normal level" is indisputable -- Durant's PER dropped from 30 in the regular season to 23 in the playoffs. The question is, did that happen because of coaching? Because of an exploitable hole in Durant's game? Because of statistical bad luck? Or because he was systematically playing worse than normal for internal reasons, i.e. fatigue?

It clearly wasn't statistical bad luck -- the drop was too extreme. I don't think it was coaching, or a weakness in his game, because we've never seen evidence of that before. Until Westbrook went down last year, Durant had a clear record of overperforming in the playoffs vs the regular season. Even after Westbrook went down, Durant overperformed last year -- until the last two games against the Grizzlies, when he was absurdly, anomalously bad.

That leaves fatigue. And when I watched Durant play in this year's playoffs, he looked fatigued. His jumper wasn't consistently falling, and he was noticeably lazier than usual on both offense and defense. More compelling, his free throw conversion rate dropped 6 percentage points from the regular season. And he was noticeably underperforming for the last month of the regular season, as well.

I would go so far as to say that Durant's fatigue was the only real problem with the Thunder's play in the postseason. The Thunder did about as well as I'd expect a team with an in-form Westbrook, a solid all star (fatigued Durant), and a good set of role players to do.

But the fatigue theory hasn't gotten much talk. I am astonished at the number of people who are looking at Durant's 7-PER-point drop from the regular season and saying, "Maybe he's just not as good as we thought." (And even more astonished at the people who think it's mostly or entirely due to coaching.) 7 points over 19 games is almost unprecedented! And this is a player who has never been seriously affected by playoff defenses before. (Again, he was very bad in the last two games of last year's Grizzlies series, but of course I attribute that to fatigue as well.)

Here's what the Thunder actually need to do to play well in next year's playoffs: stay healthy the whole year, and play Durant less than 38 MPG in the regular season.

[kabstah]

Here's what I see though;
-Westbrook making bad decisions and mistakes.
-Durant being too passive.
-Westbrook failing to get Durant as involved as we'd like, which doesn't absolve Durant, but it's important context.
-OKC's offense not actually working that well.

It's the last thing that makes it seem impossible to rationalize the others to me.

Oklahoma City was a +3.8 ORTG offense this year despite Westbrook's absence who underperformed in every playoff series they were in relative to the expectations relative to degree of difficulty.

And before we start talking about that just being how it goes when Durant is so hard to get involved against tough defenses, let's remember 2012:

In 2012, OKC was a +5.2 ORTG who made each of their final 3 opponent's defenses allow +10 ORTG more than they did in the regular season. They just blew the doors off the toughest defenses around back then.

Unless one wants to attribute all this to being a fluke, OKC has a very clear problem that needs addressing that seems to have began the moment Harden left.

(Bold is mine.)

This -- the opinion in bold, that the two-star Thunder offense doesn't work in the playoffs -- seems to be the consensus right now, and I think it's all wrong. It's important to realize that the only time we've seen an intact Thunder struggle in the playoffs is this year. That could mean they have systematic problems with playoff defense, but there are other explanations.

My preferred explanation is: Durant burnt himself out in the regular season and was playing about three tiers below his normal level in the playoffs. The "three tiers below normal level" is indisputable -- Durant's PER dropped from 30 in the regular season to 23 in the playoffs. The question is, did that happen because of coaching? Because of an exploitable hole in Durant's game? Because of statistical bad luck? Or because he was systematically playing worse than normal for internal reasons, i.e. fatigue?

It clearly wasn't statistical bad luck -- the drop was too extreme. I don't think it was coaching, or a weakness in his game, because we've never seen evidence of that before. Until Westbrook went down last year, Durant had a clear record of overperforming in the playoffs vs the regular season. Even after Westbrook went down, Durant overperformed last year -- until the last two games against the Grizzlies, when he was absurdly, anomalously bad.

That leaves fatigue. And when I watched Durant play in this year's playoffs, he looked fatigued. His jumper wasn't consistently falling, and he was noticeably lazier than usual on both offense and defense. More compelling, his free throw conversion rate dropped 6 percentage points from the regular season. And he was noticeably underperforming for the last month of the regular season, as well.

I would go so far as to say that Durant's fatigue was the only real problem with the Thunder's play in the postseason. The Thunder did about as well as I'd expect a team with an in-form Westbrook, a solid all star (fatigued Durant), and a good set of role players to do.

But the fatigue theory hasn't gotten much talk. I am astonished at the number of people who are looking at Durant's 7-PER-point drop from the regular season and saying, "Maybe he's just not as good as we thought." (And even more astonished at the people who think it's mostly or entirely due to coaching.) 7 points over 19 games is almost unprecedented! And this is a player who has never been seriously affected by playoff defenses before. (Again, he was very bad in the last two games of last year's Grizzlies series, but of course I attribute that to fatigue as well.)

Here's what the Thunder actually need to do to play well in next year's playoffs: stay healthy the whole year, and play Durant less than 38 MPG in the regular season.

The explanation is really simple: Durant played better teams in the playoffs. Compare his aggregate 12 RS games against the Grizzlies, Clippers, and Spurs to his PS run and you'll see no anomaly.

[rcontador]

The explanation is really simple: Durant played better teams in the playoffs. Compare his aggregate 12 RS games against the Grizzlies, Clippers, and Spurs to his PS run and you'll see no anomaly.

How can I find Durant's regular season PER against those teams? (I don't know how to use bball reference )

[mysticbb]

snap

All those words and the most important thing completely overlooked: OPPONENTS! Durant played at a similar level against those same opponents in the regular season as he played now in the playoffs. The Thunder played at an expected level offensively against better defensive opponents than their average RS schedule had. Sure, if a player has to play more minutes, he rarely can sustain the highest level (also, because the matchups can't be picked the same fashion anymore), but when we look at the numbers from the RS against the Grizzlies, Clippers and Spurs, Durant showed only a small drop of about 5% of his playing level. The biggest part of that drop from his RS average numbers and the playoff numbers can be explained by the opponents played.

Overall, Durant didn't play as well against better teams as he played against worse teams. His RS numbers are inflated by the fact that he beat up on below average teams. That is the main reason for faulty expectations about his performance level in the playoffs.

I think another good example for something similar is LaMarcus Aldridge. Compare his numbers vs. the Rockets with those against the Spurs, and you may realise that numbers are affected by matchups; and if someone like Aldridge gets a favourable matchup situation like he had against the Rockets, he can easily end up with 30/11 on 55 TS%, but against the Spurs that was down to 22/10 on 46 TS%.

Both examples should show a flaw in the evaluation process, if someone changes the ranking of players based on more emphasis on the raw playoff numbers. Those numbers have to be put into context, and at that both, the RS and PS numbers. Really, I had James, Paul, Durant and Love as my Top4 before the playoffs, in that order, I still have them in that order, because nothing in the playoffs showed to be that extreme for either player to change anything about it (although, James was able to increase the lead over Paul, while Durant came a bit closer to Love). The 5th place was close all season long and some players went ahead or below, but only 1 player really made a substantial jump in terms of per 100 poss impact; Westbrook, for whom we had a smaller sample and he played in that smaller sample while not being at 100%. But for no other player (talking about top-level starters) the playoffs made a really substantial difference.

I suggest to everyone, who has changed their opinion on players greatly based on 1 or 2 playoff series, that she/he is really thinking about their player evaluation process much more than about some individual players, because some 5 to 10 games are not a good sample to judge a player on.

[mysticbb]

The explanation is really simple: Durant played better teams in the playoffs. Compare his aggregate 12 RS games against the Grizzlies, Clippers, and Spurs to his PS run and you'll see no anomaly.

How can I find Durant's regular season PER against those teams? (I don't know how to use bball reference :()

Not PER, but GameScore (doesn't make much of a difference here): Durant in the RS vs. Memphis, Clippers and Spurs: 30/6/6, 58 TS%, 4.5 TOV, 20.4 GmScore in 40 mpg. The pace was 96.1 for his minutes in average.
He had a GameScore of 20.8 per 42.9 mpg in the playoffs. The pace was 93.8 for his minutes in average.

GameScore per 75 poss in the RS vs. those teams: 19.1
GameScore per 75 poss in the PS vs. those teams: 18.7

Really, that is not much of a difference here ...

Edit: Expressed in terms of PER (using an algorithm based on the linear regression of PER vs. boxscore entries and using league average ORtg/Drtg as adjustment)

In RS vs. those teams: 23.0
In PS vs. those teams: 22.7

Edit2: LaMarcus Aldridge in the playoffs:

vs. Rockets: 27.2 PER
vs. Spurs: 12.9 PER

[kabstah]

The explanation is really simple: Durant played better teams in the playoffs. Compare his aggregate 12 RS games against the Grizzlies, Clippers, and Spurs to his PS run and you'll see no anomaly.

How can I find Durant's regular season PER against those teams? (I don't know how to use bball reference )

Don't know about PER, but you can find GameScore using the Game Finder tool on Durant's page. GameScore is similar to PER except that it's not normalized against league average or adjusted for minutes, which shouldn't be a problem if our points of comparison are the same player against the same team, just at different times of the season.

I took the liberty of looking it up for you:

Opponent / RS score / PS score
Spurs / 14.7 / 17.8
LAC / 24.2 / 24.9
MEM / 22.4 / 19.7

Edit: beaten to the punch

[Doctor MJ]

Here's what I see though;
-Westbrook making bad decisions and mistakes.
-Durant being too passive.
-Westbrook failing to get Durant as involved as we'd like, which doesn't absolve Durant, but it's important context.
-OKC's offense not actually working that well.

It's the last thing that makes it seem impossible to rationalize the others to me.

Oklahoma City was a +3.8 ORTG offense this year despite Westbrook's absence who underperformed in every playoff series they were in relative to the expectations relative to degree of difficulty.

And before we start talking about that just being how it goes when Durant is so hard to get involved against tough defenses, let's remember 2012:

In 2012, OKC was a +5.2 ORTG who made each of their final 3 opponent's defenses allow +10 ORTG more than they did in the regular season. They just blew the doors off the toughest defenses around back then.

Unless one wants to attribute all this to being a fluke, OKC has a very clear problem that needs addressing that seems to have began the moment Harden left.

(Bold is mine.)

This -- the opinion in bold, that the two-star Thunder offense doesn't work in the playoffs -- seems to be the consensus right now, and I think it's all wrong. It's important to realize that the only time we've seen an intact Thunder struggle in the playoffs is this year. That could mean they have systematic problems with playoff defense, but there are other explanations.

My preferred explanation is: Durant burnt himself out in the regular season and was playing about three tiers below his normal level in the playoffs. The "three tiers below normal level" is indisputable -- Durant's PER dropped from 30 in the regular season to 23 in the playoffs. The question is, did that happen because of coaching? Because of an exploitable hole in Durant's game? Because of statistical bad luck? Or because he was systematically playing worse than normal for internal reasons, i.e. fatigue?

It clearly wasn't statistical bad luck -- the drop was too extreme. I don't think it was coaching, or a weakness in his game, because we've never seen evidence of that before. Until Westbrook went down last year, Durant had a clear record of overperforming in the playoffs vs the regular season. Even after Westbrook went down, Durant overperformed last year -- until the last two games against the Grizzlies, when he was absurdly, anomalously bad.

That leaves fatigue. And when I watched Durant play in this year's playoffs, he looked fatigued. His jumper wasn't consistently falling, and he was noticeably lazier than usual on both offense and defense. More compelling, his free throw conversion rate dropped 6 percentage points from the regular season. And he was noticeably underperforming for the last month of the regular season, as well.

I would go so far as to say that Durant's fatigue was the only real problem with the Thunder's play in the postseason. The Thunder did about as well as I'd expect a team with an in-form Westbrook, a solid all star (fatigued Durant), and a good set of role players to do.

But the fatigue theory hasn't gotten much talk. I am astonished at the number of people who are looking at Durant's 7-PER-point drop from the regular season and saying, "Maybe he's just not as good as we thought." (And even more astonished at the people who think it's mostly or entirely due to coaching.) 7 points over 19 games is almost unprecedented! And this is a player who has never been seriously affected by playoff defenses before. (Again, he was very bad in the last two games of last year's Grizzlies series, but of course I attribute that to fatigue as well.)

Here's what the Thunder actually need to do to play well in next year's playoffs: stay healthy the whole year, and play Durant less than 38 MPG in the regular season.

Well I'm not saying that these two-stars can't do something better in the future, I'm just saying they can't be satisfied with more of the same. It's obvious there's a lot of waste in the current set up, and it's statistically clear that the offense performed better back when the waste was not so obvious. I just can't imagine looking at that and not thinking a change was due.

And just to circle back to the topic here: It's very difficult for me to champion a guy for POY contention when I think his natural tendencies have everything to do with why a firmer grip on the wheel is needed by the coach.

To your point on fatigue, that's a legit point that I don't mean to brush aside, but at the same time Durant isn't actually playing extreme minutes. He's not playing minutes north of what other 25 year old superstars tend to play. Sure he may not handle the minutes as well as some, but I'd be careful not to overblow things here.

When you talk about that big dip in PER being too big to be anything but fatigue, I'd be point out that lots of guys get fatigued over the course of a season. For the very reason that the PER drop was big I think it makes a lot of sense to avoid any attempt to categorize the issue of being just one thing. There are a number of reasons that make sense why OKC struggled here, and I'd submit that there's truth in all of them.

[SideshowBob]

@mystic:

Would you be willing to share playoff-only RAPM? I'm interested in seeing how well the actual shifts in play line up with my own evaluations.

[Dr Positivity]

I like the Durant/RWB/OKC posts going on here recently. To me OKC's offense struggling more in the PS than the RS isn't that hard to figure out. OKC's offensive weaknesses can be exploited more in a playoff series than the regular season. Their 5th-9th highest MP players in the postseason were Butler, Perkins, Adams, Fisher and Thabo, and Butler and Fisher were hitting a bad 3P% compared to the regular season for no specific reason (playoff minutes made them more tired maybe???). That's just too much junk to be carrying around offensively against defenses like the Grizzlies and Spurs. The Perkins contract is easily one of the most influential bad contracts I've seen, not only did it all but cause the Harden trade but it's still choking their depth

[bondom34]

I like the Durant/RWB/OKC posts going on here recently. To me OKC's offense struggling more in the PS than the RS isn't that hard to figure out. OKC's offensive weaknesses can be exploited more in a playoff series than the regular season. Their 5th-9th highest MP players in the postseason were Butler, Perkins, Adams, Fisher and Thabo, and Butler and Fisher were hitting a bad 3P% compared to the regular season for no specific reason (playoff minutes made them more tired maybe???). That's just too much junk to be carrying around offensively against defenses like the Grizzlies and Spurs. The Perkins contract is easily one of the most influential bad contracts I've seen, not only did it all but cause the Harden trade but it's still choking their depth

To me, there is a lot to this, especially the bold. I remember reading an article a while back (I want to say it was SB Nation, but can't remember now), that had a basic premise that made a ton of sense. The NBA is largely star-oriented, but the teams that win the title in the end are those who just don't carry around dead weight players and contracts. OKC's issue isn't in KD/WB/Ibaka, its in Butler/Perkins/Butler, etc. Adams I would argue isn't part of the problem either, as he was essentially doing what was asked of him. But, looking at payrolls, the title winners (Miami, SAS, Dallas in 2011) don't have really any dead weight contracts on the roster, they get some form of production from everyone who's on the court and on the payroll. OKC flat out didn't, they've got about 14 mil of dead weight (Perk, Fisher/Butler, and to a lesser extent Sefolosha). The others had (and I'm considering guys who were below 0.100 WS/48 in the PO and got more than 100 minutes):
2013 Heat: Battier, Chalmers (only Chalmers played really big minutes) - total around 7 million
2012 Heat: Battier, Turiaf, Cole - around 4 million
2011 Mavs: Marion, Peja, Stevenson - around 12 million (also had 85 mil in contracts to OKC's 71 currently)
2010 Lakers: Fisher, MWP, Farmar, Brown - around 14 million (around 88 million total salary to OKC's 71)

So the Thunder are using around 20 percent of their money on zero production. That's the issue at hand I think at least to an extent.

[SideshowBob]

Just did a rough calculation for ESPN's RPM for playoffs only (note I could only focus on the first page of data, the internet archive would not let me see the next few pages).

James +11.9
Paul +11.2
Curry +8.6
Ginobili +6.6
Aldridge +6.4
Griffin +5.6
Durant +5.5
Westbrook +4.9
Collison +4.7
Nowitzki +4.6
Garnett +4.2
Duncan +3.9