A guide to having constructive “best player in the NBA” debates

People like ranking things. It’s a way of imposing order on a world that can often be chaotic. Nowhere is that more apparent than in sports, where a simple “is Matthew Dellavedova better than Michael Jordan?” question can have fans debating for weeks at a time. The evidence isn’t all that compelling…

…is what they’re trying to trick you into believing (see Exhibits A, and B for yourself).

Okay, but seriously though, I love a good debate because it helps all of us learn and forces me to reconsider why my opinions are the way they are. Unfortunately, our airwaves in recent history have been increasingly dominated by talking heads seemingly shouting at each other just to shout at each other. Some of this development is no doubt financially-motivated: People yelling at each other pulls in great ratings (doesn’t matter to ESPN whether you watch First Take for real or if you hate-watch, it’s all the same for their numbers).

However, there might be another factor that contributes to why people are arguing so much: They’re not even in agreement about what question they’re answering. An example of this phenomenon takes place any time people debate who the best player in the NBA is.

Too often, what happens in these debates is people have a player in mind that they’d like to argue for as the best, and then they back-solve for the criteria that they use in their arguments. First, that’s bad form: You’re supposed to look at the evidence, then see what conclusions you can draw from it (not the other way around).

Second, it means that the debaters are completely missing each other and if you’re a listener, it’s frustrating because no one is really answering the question directly. For example, when posed the question, one person responds by saying that Player A is best because he’s the leader of the league’s best team, while the other says that Player B is best because he’s the guy you’d take if you had to win one game right now. They’re answering different questions — of course they’re going to have different answers!

“Best player” is hard to define, which is why most people resort to answering simpler questions like “best player on best team” and “if you had to win one game.” There’s nothing wrong with that, we should just admit what simpler question we want to answer instead so we don’t talk past each other. Let’s discuss some of the criteria and/or simpler questions that people sometimes use to argue for their guy:

Question 1: If you had to win one game right now, which player would you want most on your team?

Possible response: The player you’re looking for here is probably someone who is very consistently great and has played in plenty of do-or-die situations before. LeBron James is the easiest answer. A potential weakness of this question is that you might not factor in player durability because you’re building a team for a hypothetical one-game showdown (although LeBron has that covered too).

Question 2: If you were starting a franchise right now, which player would you want most on your team?

Possible response: With this question, now you have to factor in youth and perhaps whether some positions on the court are more valuable on the court (e.g., point guard, center), much like how in football, you should almost always build a team around a quarterback. Kristaps Porzingis and Karl-Anthony Towns come to mind, as does possibly Giannis Antetokounmpo and a young Chris Paul. Positional value is a tricky thing to navigate because maybe you just care about how good someone is relative to his peers at the same position — for example, there are arguments to be made that Jerry Rice is the best football player ever, even though he doesn’t play the most valuable position on the field. Speaking of value…

Question 3: Who is the most “valuable” player in the league?

Possible response: The league gives an award out for this particular one, and we still debate every year what it actually means. A lot of times, it defaults to the best player on the best team (will get into that in the next one), but there are some other possibilities. Probably the most popular alternative is the player that is most impactful to his particular team’s success (i.e., the “if you replaced him with an average player at his position, how far would the team fall off” question). I heard it argued once that a young Tony Parker should’ve won league MVP one year because of his role as perhaps the only player who could run the Spurs’ offense so smoothly (it was likened to a souped-up sports car that only one person knew how to drive optimally). At this current point in the season, maybe you could say it’s James Harden conducting the D’Antoni offensive symphony, or perhaps Anthony Davis given that he’s one of only two Pelicans that actually scares you (the other being the mascot, who I’m pretty sure was in The Conjuring)

Question 4: Who is the best player on the league’s best team?

Possible response: Well, now you first have to determine the league’s best team, but that’s perhaps a bit easier to define (relative to “best player”) because we can look at point differential, win-loss record, etc. and other easily understandable global stats. This season, that team is very likely the Golden State Warriors, and the best player on that team is probably Kevin Durant. This particular question, in my opinion, is somewhat weak because the “best player” question is presumably an individual thing, which means that which team a player happens to play for should be irrelevant. Also, you’re really just asking the same vague “best player” question except with a smaller pool of player choices.

Sometimes, you’ll have people who substitute different adjectives for “best,” which clears things up a little bit, but often results in narrow definitions that aren’t particularly useful. Some of these adjectives are:

· “Dominant”: People usually think of physically-imposing big men (e.g., Shaquille O’Neal, Wilt Chamberlain)

· “Dynamic”: The guard/wing version of “dominant” (e.g., Russell Westbrook, prime Derrick Rose), usually a player with otherworldly quickness and hops

· “Complete”: Players that hit an arbitrary threshold of skill on an arbitrary number of skills and are positionally versatile (e.g., Kawhi Leonard, apex Scottie Pippen)

One of the worst simpler questions is “who would you want to take the last shot?” It’s possibly a useful question, but it ignores so many facets of the game (e.g., defense, passing, rebounding, dribbling) that can contribute to a player being considered the best. But perhaps the worst simpler question is “HOW MANY RINGZ HE GOT,” a surprisingly popular question that people use to judge players’ greatness. The notion here is that you can rank every NBA player ever knowing only how many championship teams they’ve played on. Not only does the question completely ignore career stages, eras, luck, the fact that basketball is a team sport, etc., you can answer it while possessing almost no knowledge of basketball (that’s a red flag to me).

My objective here is just to outline all of the “simpler questions” that people often answer in place of the one that’s usually asked (who’s the best player), not necessarily to state which one is most appropriate. Each question has weaknesses that keep it from being all-encompassing, but they’re also all at least a bit more specific and non-vague than the “best player” question. Don’t settle for vague questions.