RegressedHoops

I put together a list of the greatest offensive players of all time using Daniel Myers' latest version of Offensive Box Plus Minus. I am just taking into account regular season production to keep it simple am using Hall Rating as I did in the All-Time list. Here it is:

Daniel Myers, the creator of Box Plus/Minus (BPM), has recently released a new and updated version of BPM. This, along with the completion of the 2015 playoffs, led me to updating the BPM All Time list. The new version included big improvements to defense and underrates perimeter defenders far less. For the methodology, I kept it far simpler, and used hall rating, which is derived from baseball. Basically, it takes into account longevity (wins over replacement) and peak (wins over average). I computed this for the regular season and playoffs for each player and added them to get a player's total hall rating. Although I suppose one could give playoff hall rating higher weight, it is unclear what the weight should exactly be -- so I didn't bother trying to do that for now.



For players for whom BPM was not available (seasons before 1978), I used an approximation of BPM based on a formula provided by Neil Paine of Fivethirtyeight.com -- 0.15*(PER - 15) + 30.5 *(WS/48 - 0.1). Also, Lebron has made the jump to 2nd all time and is now the greatest playoff performer ever. It will be interesting if he can catch Jordan and will largely depend on how much longer he plays along with how many elite years he has left.

As part of my on-going series on the construction of all-time lists based on various advanced metrics, I bring to you the all-time list for the highly popular statistic, PER. PER, which was created by John Hollinger, is perhaps the most well known advanced statistic today. In order to convert PER (a rate stat) to actual production, we can rely on Hollinger's estimated wins added (EWA), which computes the number of wins a player added to a team based on their PER, position, and minutes played.

The methodology for computing a player's all time score from their EWA was simple. First I computed their regular season EWA. Next, I computed their EWA in each round of the playoffs and gave higher weight to successive rounds (e.g. conference finals matter more than the opening round). Finally, I simply summed the player's regular season EWA and weighted playoff EWA.