Best Individual NBA Season Ever
As a 23 year old basketball fan I never had the chance to watch Michael Jordan live. His new documentary series, “The Last Dance” got me thinking how Jordan’s best seasons stack up next to the other all time great seasons.
To determine the best NBA season ever, I looked at regular season statistics from 1980–2020. I only looked back to 1980 because the three-point line was introduced in 1979, and prior to this, the game was vastly different. The minimum minutes played requirement was set at 400 minutes. This would mean a player averaged only about five minutes per game for an entire season, or a star player playing 35 minutes a night only played in 11 games. The purpose of this was to exclude players that played extremely few games in a year, but I was interested if there was a player whose numbers were so exceptional in his 400 minutes that it could be considered an all time season.
Instead of using individual statistics I used all encompassing statistics because the goal of these measures is to rank the best player in each season. For example, this season Giannis Antetokounmpo ranks #1 in Player Efficiency Rating (PER), Box Plus Minus (BPM) and Win Shares Per 48 Minutes (WS/48) and ranks #2 in Value Over Replacement Player (VORP). When the season paused on March 11, Giannis was virtually on top of every MVP ranking as well as being a heavy favourite according to Vegas betting odds. Additionally, in the 1980 season, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar ranked #1 or #2 in all four statistics and beat out Julius Irving for MVP 147 to 31 points. This gave me confidence that using PER, BMP, WS/48 and VORP would provide an accurate representation of who the best season ever belongs too.
In order to combine all the statistics into an accurate final ranking I used a Z-Score technique. A Z-Score accounts for the magnitude difference between players’ statistics. This is a much better system than a ranking system, because ranking assumes a linear distribution. In other words, a standard ranking system assumes the difference from the 1st to 2nd ranked player is the same as the 100th to 101st ranked player, which is obviously flawed logic.
After converting each player’s PER, BMP, WS/48 and VORP into a Z-Score, I summed them to provide a final “score” for each player every season. As expected, Lebron James and Michael Jordan were featured the most in the top 20 seasons ever.
Jordan accounted for seven and Lebron accounted for four of the 20 seasons. The number one season ever was Michael Jordan in 1988. Jordan was 24 years old at the time and achieved his highest PER of any season at 31.7, reached a 0.3 WS/48 which he only did three times, and accomplished his highest BPM and VORP. It was also in this year that Jordan took home one of his five MVP honours and his only defensive player of the year honour. Looking at basic statistics, this season was by all accounts amazing, but does not appear to stand out compared to his other amazing seasons. He took only 0.6 threes per game shooting 13%, had one of his worst rebounding seasons, and averaged 3.1 turnovers (his 4th worst). However, he did score 35 points a game, had an effective field goal percentage of 54%, averaged 5.9 assists and 3.2 steals which were all amongst the best of his career.
So why is this season the best ever? PER, BMP, WS/48, and VORP all account for how the rest of the players in the NBA performed that given season. Michael Jordan’s 88’ season “score” according to my ranking was 20.9 points. To give context, the 100th best ranked season “score” was 12.6. Larry Bird and Magic Johnson placed second and third in MVP voting in the 1987–1988 season. Larry Bird’s 88’ season ranked 48th all time and “scored” 14.4 points. Magic Johnson’s 88’ season ranked 274th all time and “scored” 9.5 points.
Jordan’s season was so much better than his counter parts making his 1987–1988 the greatest single regular season performance of all time.
