As we head into the dog days of this long NBA campaign, our attention turns to Spring flowers, the NCAA tournament, NBA playoff races, and oh yeah, individual achievement awards. Let’s take a look at the big four – scoring, rebounding, defensive player of the year, and league MVP.

Scoring

At this point there are really only two contenders - Kobe Bryant at 35.2 per game and Allen Iverson at 33.4. Kobe has 61 games in the books while Iverson has four games in hand more to play. Assuming Kobe continues to score at the same rate (perhaps generous given the boost the 81 point game gave his average), Iverson has to average 38.2 over the last 25 games to make it over the top. Unless Kobe tanks, give the scoring title to him now and get it over with.

Note that if you take out Kobe’s 81 point game and only give him credit for his 61 game average (35.2) for that game, then Iverson only would need to average 35.3 the rest of the way to wrest the title away, nearly three points fewer.




Rebounding

Barring injury the title will go to either Shawn Marion (12.4 RPG), Kevin Garnett (12.3 RPG), Dwight Howard (12.2 RPG) or our own Ben Wallace (12.0 RPG). Tim Duncan is in fifth place in the current ranking at 11.2 RPG and effectively out of the running.

Big Ben’s four rebound effort against Washington dropped him from a virtual tie with Howard to a clear fourth. With 61 in the books, Ben would need to average nearly 13.6 a game to beat out Marion assuming Shawn continues to rebound at the same pace. Despite the Charlotte game, it ain’t gonna happen for the big guy this year. Likewise, Howard would need 12.6 each and every game from now on to edge out Marion.

Garnett needs to average 12.7 the rest of the way to take it all. The T-Wolves do shoot a lower percentage than the Suns, so there are more boards to go around. If Marion sits some towards the end of the season to get rested up for the playoffs Garnett could easily slip in and take the title. (Each board is worth 0.0122 to the average for the full season.) KG might go for it to try and salvage something from this season.




Defense

Taking into account rebounds, blocks, and steals, the short list based on stats for defensive player of the year includes in alphabetical order Elton Brand, Tim Duncan, Kevin Garnett, Dwight Howard, Shawn Marion, and Ben Wallace. Honorable mentions go to Marcus Camby and Andrei Kirilenko who would be right in the running if injuries hadn’t kept them out of so many games.

Beyond that it all comes down to how you weight the four possible categories (defensive rebounds, offensive rebounds, steals, and blocks) and how you weight defensive qualities that don’t get measured by simple stats. Pretty much any weighting puts Shawn Marion and Ben at the top and very close.

• Marion is 14th in blocks per game / Ben 10th
• Marion is 7th in offensive rebounds / Ben 1st
• Marion is 3rd in defensive rebounds / Ben 6th
• Marion is 1st in total rebounds / Ben 4th
• Marion is 5th in steals per game / Ben 12th

Ben is playing 36.1 minutes a night (exactly the same as last year) while Marion is fifth in the league in minutes, putting in 41.3 per contest, nearly five more per game. On a 48 minutes basis Ben lead Marion in blocks and boards and is dead even in steals. In the 82games over / under Ben leads in team production on/off court +11.5 to +3.5 for Marion. Compared to last year, Ben is pretty solid, boards and blocks very slightly down and steals very slightly up.

Maybe if Artest had played the whole year there would be a contest, but since Ben is pretty much matching last year’s productivity…


[break=MVP Calculations]

Most Valuable Player

Here’s the scoring method. Weight and combine the following to create a measure of total basketball productivity.

1. Two point field goals made and missed
2. Three point field goals made and missed
3. Free throws made and missed
4. Offensive and defensive rebounds
5. Assists
6. Steals
7. Turnovers
8. Blocks
9. Personal fouls and technicals

Do this for each player and for their teams in total. Create three key measures that will be combined to score players…

1. Rank of productivity points per game – what the player is doing themselves
2. Rank of player share of team productivity – how important the player is to their team
3. Rank of team winning percentage – i.e., does it matter if the player is productive or not

Beyond that, it’s a matter of how important you think each of the key measures is in determining the value of a player. Here are some options…

Weight each equally – top five players are…

1. Elton Brand
2. Lebron James
3. Shawn Marion
4. Dwayne Wade
5. Jason Kidd

(Chauncey is 12th.)

Weight winning highly: personal productivity at 0.25, share of productivity at 0.25, winning percent at 0.50 – top five players are…

1. Elton Brand
2. Lebron James
3. Shawn Marion
4. Dwayne Wade
5. Dirk Nowitzki

(Chauncey is 8th, behind Nash and Duncan.)

Weight winning much less: personal productivity at 0.4, share of productivity at 0.4, winning percent at 0.2 - top five players are…

1. Elton Brand
2. Lebron James
3. Kevin Garnett
4. Dwayne Wade
5. Shawn Marion

(Chauncey is 13th.)

Drop winning: personal productivity at 0.5, share of productivity at 0.5 - top five players are…

1. Kevin Garnett
2. Elton Brand
3. Lebron James
4. Dwayne Wade
5. Jason Kidd

(Chauncey is 15th.)

Drop personal productivity: share of productivity at 0.5, winning percent at 0.5 - top five players are…

• Lebron James / Elton Brand tied
• Dwayne Wade
• Jason Kidd, Pau Gasol, Dirk Nowitzki tied

Big thing you should see by now is that it’s hard to knock Elton Brand and Lebron James off the top of the list. You have to drop winning as a criteria to get some other guys up there, and that makes no sense to me. How can you be valuable if your team doesn’t win? So, what else can we make use of? For me, some notion that the player is getting better is also required. Here’s how that looks…

Minutes – Lebron is down a minute per game this year, Elton is up 3.6 minutes per game

Productivity per game – Lebron is down 0.3% from last year, Elton is up 26%

Team winning percent –

• Cavs are 0.562 this year, finished last year at 0.512 -- up 10%
• Clips are 0.590 this year, finished last year at 0.451 -- up 31%

Put it all together, including that he is a viable candidate for Defensive Player of the Year, and Elton Brand rules the league.


(As usual, thanks to www.82games.com and www.dougstats.com for putting all sorts of useful information out there for folks like me to play around with.)

Nice objective analysis Sprockets..good work.

I agree. This is good. Nice work.

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Can't disagree with any of your choices based on the numbers. Nice job.

However, I would be curious to know how Nash ranked in your NBA analysis though.

- Mo

Excellent predictions on an excellent thread, what more can I say... Looking forward to revisiting this when the season officially ends and seeing just how accurate you likely are. Good to see it's still good quality posts around these parts, but what else is new...

Varies a bit based on the weighting, but always in the top ten, usually around the 7 or 8 slot. Assists are down about 0.5 a game from last year, and turnovers are up by about the same margin though he is scoring more.

One thing that hurts him in my ranking is his share of total team productivity. He is scoring more, but the Suns overall score more, so his share doesn't go up much. He ranks 14th in team share with about 22% of the Suns' total productivity (Chauncey ranks 16th with 20.5%, Ben at 20.2%). Garnett is first with 31%, James second at 30% and Brand third with 27%. Kidd and Gasol round out the top five.

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"But first, are you experienced? Or have you you ever been experienced? Well, I have."
Jimi

Sprockets, you're making me think too much. Time to get the Ibrupropen.

Scotch helps too.