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Nylon Calculus: Giannis Antetokounmpo might be Most Improved and Most Valuable Player

By Andre Snellings

Dec 30, 2016; Minneapolis, MN, USA; Milwaukee Bucks forward Giannis Antetokounmpo (34) dribbles in the first quarter against the Minnesota Timberwolves at Target Center. Mandatory Credit: Brad Rempel-USA TODAY Sports
Dec 30, 2016; Minneapolis, MN, USA; Milwaukee Bucks forward Giannis Antetokounmpo (34) dribbles in the first quarter against the Minnesota Timberwolves at Target Center. Mandatory Credit: Brad Rempel-USA TODAY Sports /
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I’ve been writing and talking quite a bit about Giannis Antetokounmpo lately. It began a couple of weeks ago when the Bucks played the Timberwolves, and the question was raised on TYTSports: Which young duo would be preferable for the future, Giannis and Jabari Parker or Karl-Anthony Towns and Andrew Wiggins? As follow-ups, I wrote about this comparison from a fantasy basketball perspective and debated it again on Rotowire.

Despite the exciting potential of Parker and Wiggins, all of the conversations eventually came down to Giannis versus Towns. And this led to me taking a closer look at Giannis as a standalone player, and more specifically…how did he get so good, so fast?

It’s easy to forget that when Giannis was drafted in 2013, he was looked upon as a stash candidate that might just now be ready to come to the NBA after some more seasoning in Europe. Or that in 2014, after his first year in the league, he was still playing in the Las Vegas Summer league with the rookies. Or that as recently as this offseason, there was a legitimate question as to whether this Giannis-as-a-point-guard experiment had any chance of working. All of the questions and doubts are easy to forget in the face of how dominant he has been this season, but it really hasn’t been all that long since those rumbles were heard.

Read More: Karl-Anthony Towns, Joel Embiid and Nikola Jokic are guards in disguise

This all led me to a different question…how unusual is it for a player to improve as rapidly as Giannis has this season? The answer: EXTREMELY unusual. As in, completely outside of any type of norm.

Giannis Antetokounmpo vs Most Improved Players of last decade

To estimate just how unusual Giannis’ improvement arc is, I decided to compare his improvement from 2016 to 2017 with the players voted NBA Most Improved Player (MIP) in each year for the past decade:

Monta Ellis, 2007
Hedo Turkoglu, 2008
Danny Granger, 2009
Aaron Brooks, 2010
Kevin Love, 2011
Ryan Anderson, 2012
Paul George, 2013
Goran Dragic, 2014
Jimmy Butler, 2015
C.J. McCollum, 2016

As one-stat estimates for a player’s output, PER (highly influenced by volume scoring and efficiency) and Boxscore Plus Minus (BPM, calculated to be an estimate of a player’s impact based upon box score stats) were used here as reasonably diverse measures. So, how does Giannis fit in with this group of Most Improved Players? Let’s start by looking at each player, the year before winning the award:

figure-1-giannis_bpm_per_year_before_labeled
figure-1-giannis_bpm_per_year_before_labeled /

Giannis in 2016 would have fit in towards the upper end of these players in the year before they won the award, but he was clearly on the continuum. There were multiple players among this group that measured out a bit better than Giannis in both of the composite boxscore stats used here.

But, wait for it.

Now, let’s look at a comparison of these same two stats, but for Giannis in the 2017 season and each of the other players in the year that they actually won the Most Improved Player award:

figure-2-giannis_bpm_per_mip_labeled
figure-2-giannis_bpm_per_mip_labeled /

Not only has Giannis demonstrated more improvement to date than the others…his levels of improvement are so far outside of the norm that his current level no longer even appears to be on the same chart as the levels of the Most Improved Players. To really zoom in on the degree of improvement, let’s now look at the difference from the year before to the MIP season (or 2016 to 2017 for Giannis) for each of these players:

figure-3-giannis_bpm_per_mip_changes_labeled
figure-3-giannis_bpm_per_mip_changes_labeled /

Again, Giannis’ improvement is so far out of scale with any of the other “Most Improved Players” that he no longer fits on the same chart as them. While the improvement in PER is large…a single-season improvement of over nine on a scale in which the league average player is set to a value of 15 is massive…the improvement in BPM is even more impressive. As mentioned above, BPM is calculated to estimate how much a player’s game should improve his team’s scoring margin by. Thus, league average is zero and most seasons the league leader is around 10. So for Giannis to improve by more than SEVEN POINTS on that scale is nigh unheard of.

And lest anyone believe that Giannis is somehow posting empty boxscore stats, his plus-minus scores are up thus far in the season as well. His Real Plus-Minus score from ESPN, which is influenced by boxscores but has a large plus-minus component as well, is currently +6.6 which is good for fourth in the NBA. This is WAY up from his 2016 RPM of +1.11, which was good for 98th in the NBA.

Giannis Antetokounmpo vs every MVP winner since 2005

All of this leads to the point that Giannis’ performance thus far this season has shot him right past the Most Improved Player conversation, and right into a much bigger award. Let’s now look at how Giannis’ current season stacks up to every NBA Most Valuable Player winner since 2005, using the same PER and BPM measures as above:

figure-4-giannis_bpm_per_mvp_labeled
figure-4-giannis_bpm_per_mvp_labeled /

Outside of the inhuman level at which LeBron James peaked, that Stephen Curry touched last season when he was stuck in video game cheat mode all season, Giannis’ 2017 season measures out very favorably on this scale with any other MVP winner of the last 12 seasons.

Granted, this is just over a couple of boxscore composite statistics, and thus not meant to be a rigorous comparison of overall impact. Also, it should be noted that there are other players this season that are also turning in seasons that measure out even better on this particular scale than Giannis does. But neither of those should in any way diminish the fact that Giannis is in the midst of a season that is very clearly of a caliber to be worthy of MVP consideration.

The player that, just four years ago, was considered to be about three years away from even being ready to play in the NBA…

The player that, just this summer was not a sure thing to be able to thrive at a completely new position…

The player that just turned 22 years old in December…

Next: Isaiah Thomas is a giant

Yeah, THAT player, has improved by MUCH more in a single season than any player to win Most Improved Player in the past decade. That player, Giannis Antetokounmpo, is giving Milwaukee Bucks fans…and NBA fans in general…a lot of reason to be extremely excited about what the present AND future have in store.

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