Nylon Calculus: The best players in the 2018 playoffs are out West
The 2017-18 NBA season hasn’t been short on narrative and drama. Between the spirited Rookie of the Year Race, a rash of injuries, J.R. Smith being, well, J.R. Smith, and about a million other storylines in between, the league has truly proven itself out as a 24/7 cyclical machine the last several months.
Before a single game was even played, there was one main thought on everyone’s minds — wow, did the Western Conference get stacked. Paul George finally cut ties with Indiana and left to join the Brodie in Oklahoma City. Paul Millsap went from the trending-down Atlanta Hawks to the young, rising Denver Nuggets. Jimmy Butler got in on the act too. And so did a handful of other impactful players. FiveThirtyEight detailed in the preseason that “the West is hogging all the talent.”
Nylon’s own Positive Residual also posted about the exodus of talent, which was overwhelming despite Gordon Hayward’s move to Boston in the countering direction. He found that the total (+79) as well as the net (+37) RPM Wins that shifted to the Western Conference was the highest in any offseason since RPM was first created. Now granted, some transactions (looking at you, Victor Oladipo) have aged much better than expected with the benefit of hindsight, and there were also midseason moves like Jerry West’s decision to exile Blake Griffin to Detroit, but the overarching point going in was powerfully clear: the Western Conference owns the NBA.
Looking back, the conference abolition cries haven’t been quite as loud as in years past, but going into Saturday’s slate of games, the winner of the West is still the odds-on favorite to take home all the hardware at the end. The playoffs are, in many ways, about enjoying the journey and simply appreciating all the exciting talent on display. It’s just that as foretold last offseason, a lot of that exciting talent is going to be concentrated in the West.
One way to visualize that is to compare the overall strength of the top players on each team. For this exercise, I simply sorted by total minutes played in most cases (with some subjective exceptions for injuries and the like) and used Box Plus-Minus as the comparison metric. To the data visualization historians out there, you may recognize this as a stylistic replication of the famous Burtin antibiotic effectiveness graph.
It’s immediately pretty clear that there’s a larger and more consistent “burst” on the Western Conference side. Eleven of the 18 players have a BPM of at least plus-4 or greater, as compared to only five in the East. Led by the incendiary abilities of MVP front-runner James Harden, Steph Curry, and Russell Westbrook, the West claims three players with a BPM over plus-8, as opposed to only one in the East, from the Cavaliers (no bonus points for guessing who that player might be, though I can safely assure you that it isn’t Cedi Osman).
The remarkable split is made even more apparent when we realize that every single team in the West is led by at least one All-NBA candidate: James Harden, Steph Curry, Damian Lillard, Russell Westbrook, Rudy Gobert, Anthony Davis, LaMarcus Aldridge, and Karl-Anthony Towns. That’s without even getting to the fact that Nikola Jokic and the Denver Nuggets are watching from home.
But in fairness to the East, the cupboard isn’t completely bare. It helps that the two runaway leaders in one of the most contested Rookie of the Year races in recent memory are split between the two conferences. Ben Simmons will have a chance to display his preternatural vision and defense on the biggest stage against Erik Spoelstra’s Miami Heat, while Donovan Mitchell will look to fill it up against Russell Westbrook and the Thunder. Simmons’ passing acumen and defensive versatility are already at an incredibly advanced level (his Defensive BPM of 3.6 leads the 76ers, as does his 37.4 percent assist rate), whereas Mitchell has drawn comparisons to a young Dwyane Wade with his shot-making and clutch scoring (leading the Jazz with 29.1 percent usage and 30.7 points per 100 possessions). They headline a promising rookie class, joined in the playoffs by peers like Jayson Tatum, OG Anunoby, and Bam Adebayo (all three of whom are in the East).
However, while the playoffs might be simply about unfurling their wings for the rookies, it’s about defining legacies and redemption for many others. James Harden and Chris Paul are on the best team that either of them has ever had in their careers, with a title-or-bust mentality reinforced by their buzzsaw run through the regular season. Anthony Davis is back in the playoffs for the first time since 2015, helping carry the Pelicans improbably into the postseason despite a season-ending injury to DeMarcus Cousins. Victor swapped places with Paul George and bloomed into a bona fide All Star in Indiana. Kyle Lowry and DeMar Derozan may as well be the spiritual equivalents to Harden and Paul, with how much their legacies are staked in a successful postseason run.
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And that’s all without even talking about LeBron James, or the player who could be his heir in Giannis Antetokounmpo. There may be an imbalance of talent in the NBA, but one thing is apparent above all else: there’s also simply more and more diverse talent in the NBA currently than in a long time. Over the next few months, legends will be made, legacies will be molded, and hearts will be broken. The playoffs are about the journey as much as the destination, and the shining lights of the NBA are here to ensure that the journey will be as exciting as ever. The NBA has campaigned on the slogan “This is Why We Play.” So let’s turn the phrase a bit: isn’t this why we watch?
*All data courtesy of Basketball Reference