With the Playoffs over (Congrats Raptors), and tonight being NBA Awards show, with Giannis and Harden vying for the MVP title, the discussion of how to define “valuable” has raced to the forefront of the NBA media and online discussion. Stats? Defense? Eye Test? Team Record? All of the above?
In April @yayadubin wrote a great article on the MVP race. He brought up a great point which has embodied many MVP debates across sports:
“Really, though, the argument between the two players is less about who had the better season and more about the definition of “valuable.” Is it just the best player in the league? Is it the best player on the best team? Is it the player whose performance was most outstanding, whatever you decide that means? Is it the player whose team needs him the most? Is it some combination of all of those things, as well as a few others? Different players, coaches, executives, fans and media members have different definitions.”
Jared then asks one of my favorite questions, what happens if we take “valuable” literally? I enjoy taking things literally in these types of conversations so this appealed to me. Jared asks what happens if we “tried to identify the player who provided his team with the greatest bang for its buck throughout this season?” He goes on to define a methodology that is, adjusted salary per RPM win over salary paid. Here is the relevant parts of the methodology from the article:
“The first step to answering this question is to quantify the dollar value of a win in the NBA. There were 1,230 games played this season, which means there were 1,230 wins up for grabs. According to Basketball-Reference.com, NBA teams handed out more than $3.6 billion in salary this year. Dividing that figure by 1,230 means that a single win was valued at $2,949,908.82.
We can then turn to ESPN’s Real-Plus Minus and specifically RPM wins, a stat that uses a player’s RPM and his possessions played to estimate his contribution to the number of his team’s wins. Not all players qualified for the RPM leaderboard, so there was a slight shortfall of wins produced by the 514 players who did qualify. We applied a multiplier to each of those player’s totals in order to account for the shortfall. Then, we multiplied the dollar value of a win by the number of adjusted RPM wins each player produced to pinpoint the dollar value of that player’s production. Subtracting his actual 2018–19 salary from that number yields a surplus, meeting our goal of identifying the best bang-for-buck player in the league this season.”
Using this methodology Jared calculates the Most Valuable, again defined as providing value over salary paid, Player for the 2018/2019 season. This is Pascal Siakam, who Jared calculates providing ~$35,000,000 value above his 2018/2019 salary.
After reading this I was curious if I could replicate the same results, and how many years back we can go. This would allow me to calculate the Most Valuable Player, Least Valuable Player, and Most Improved Player. So I gathered a bunch of data on players, used some Google Sheets magic, and figured out, per 538’s definition, who was the most and least valuable player for each of the last 6 years (the years ESPN has RPM data for).
Here are the Most Valuable Players for each year going back to the 2013/2014 Season.
2013/2014 Season
NBA MVP: Kevin Durant, Real MVP: LeBron James
LeBron James manages to deliver both more nominal and more real value to his team. But Kevin Durant wins the MVP Award (MVP Fatigue?)
- In case anyone was curious, 13/14 LeBron, Curry, and KD were massively underpaid. This despite LeBron having a salary in the top 10 of players in 13/14. And KD having a top 20 salary.
- Rubio and Lowry round out the valuable leaderboard demonstrating even 5 years ago what, in Lowry’s case, what we would come to realize this year on the Raptors path to the Championship.
2014/2015 Season
NBA MVP: Steph Curry, Real MVP: Steph Curry
Steph Curry just manages to be the best no matter how you measure it.
- Despite Curry’s massive value in the ‘13/14 season he puts up even more value here on the Warriors path to winning a championship. He even increases about $8,000,000 worth.
- Draymond, Harden, AD, and Middleton have massive increases in their surplus value.
2015/2016 Season
NBA MVP: Steph Curry, Real MVP: Draymond Green
Draymond manages to pull this one out at the end delivering about 100k more in value than Steph. But at the end of the day this should also highlight how impressive that 2–1 victory by the Cavs was.
- LeBron manages to deliver the second most nominal value in this list, but because he is already in his 3rd prime he’s paid like a superstar bringing down is surplus value.
- Draymond and Steph as the top two players is a little unfair.
2016/2017 Season
NBA MVP: Russell Westbrook, Real MVP: Rudy Gobert
As a Jazz Fan this is my favorite one, thanks Rudy! Westbrook comes in at 17 delivering roughly $15 million in surplus value to his team.
- Rudy really delivers here with more than 35 million in surplus value. Aren’t rookie superstars great?
- Steph and Draymond remain in the top 5, which gets more impressive the more years they are here as their contracts just keep increasing.
- Jokic and Giannis deliver in a huge way on their rookie contracts as well. Just not quite as much as Gobert.
2017/2018 Season
NBA MVP: James Harden, Real MVP: Nikola Jokic
Jokic delivers so much value here it is insane. This is the highest surplus value on in the data, by about $6 million. That represents roughly a 17% increase over any other surplus value delivered (inflation adjusted). Moving forward we’ll have to see if that holds. Does Zion or RJ beat it? That’s for next year.
- There are a lot of players on rookie contracts on this list. Jokic, KAT, Simmons all deliver massive surplus value before they can get paid.
- Kemba Walker and Covington have monstrous seasons and only lose out because of the salary difference.
2018/2019 Season
NBA MVP: Giannis Antetokounmpo (expected), Real MVP: Pascal Siakam
Pascal an incredible performance of nearly ~$30 million in surplus value. Giannis, because he’s not on a rookie contract, and a super-star can only deliver so much. He clocks in at 9th with ~$18 million in surplus value.
- Paul George delivers a massive $55 million nominal value. This blows everything else out of the water. The next closest across all the data is LeBron in 2017 who delivers ~$52 million (inflation adjusted).
Most Valuable Player Across Any Season
I thought it would be interesting, after having gathered all this data, to see who was the most valuable in any given season. So I grabbed the top 5 inflation adjusted surplus value seasons, and turns out, it was Jokic. But Curry is on the list twice.
Conclusion
Rookie superstars obviously deliver the greatest bang for your buck, but even established superstars can have seasons where they deliver enormous surplus value for a team. Curry, Harden, Paul George, LeBron, Robert Covington all had seasons in the last 6 that came top 5. It’s definitely possible. You might just have to be a generational or all time talent, or Robert Covington?
Here is a link to the full data set for visualization and let me know if you find anything else interesting. The rest of the series is linked below.
