Good morning. Let’s basketball.

The First Class Carriage; Honore Daumier; 1864

Before the Celtics obliterated the Mavericks in the NBA Finals, there was increasing buzz that Luka Doncic might be ready to pass Nikola Jokic as the Best Player Alive. Different analysts frame this differently — Bill Simmons calls it the “championship belt” — but essentially my read on the conversations around the fandom are that at any given time, there is a player who is considered to be the best in the world, and there is a tier of some size “chasing” them for the honor. This list can be mentally updated night-to-night or on a slower cadence completely dependent on the proclivities of the person making the assessment.

But what if instead of individual or small group (sub-fandom) declarations that “so-and-so has passed so-and-so” or “obviously so-and-so is now top-5” or whatever, we used actual measurable consensus to make these determinations?

Introducing the Consensus Best Player Alive (BPA) Metric

The good news is that we do have some consensus opinions available to us, even though it’s never a universal consensus. I’m talking about NBA award voting.

There are multiple awards that are essentially stand-ins to honor the “best players alive.” The NBA Most Valuable Player Award, voted on by about 100 vetted members of the NBA media, is aimed at selecting the, uh, most valuable player in a given NBA season. The All-NBA teams, again voted on by those same 100ish media members, honor 15 players who excel in a given season. The All-Star teams are selected differently, with starters getting picked by a combination of fans, players and the media, and reserves getting picked by coaches and the league office. Then you have selections from a more restrictive pool: the conference finals and Finals MVPs, picked by a small pool of media from the combatants in each of those series.

For MVP and All-NBA, you also have additional data beyond just the final list. We can use vote share data to differentiate between a player who wins No. 1 by acclamation vs. a player who wins No. 1 by a few votes. We can also note that a player just outside of the third team All-NBA is considered by the consensus to be better than a player who doesn’t register in All-NBA voting at all.

We’re ignoring all of the other awards in this exercise. Why? Those are more restrictive. The MVP, All-NBA and to a lesser degree All-Star honors incorporate defensive impact already. You shouldn’t get bonus points in this Best Player Alive race for separately getting honored for one side of the ball — it’s already built-in. (The same could be said for the playoff honors. We’ll get to that.)

The other questions that arise when trying to build a consensus Best Player Alive list based on awards voting:

Should it be a 1-year snapshot, or a weighted reflection over multiple years?

For this, I went with a three-year weighted reflection. Why three? One year seems … pointless? Just look at the MVP and All-NBA voting. There’s your snapshot. Done.

Five years seems way too long. To wit, these names made All-NBA five years ago in 2019-20: Ben Simmons, Russell Westbrook and Chris Paul. A three-year window allows us to remain fairly current — especially when you weight the most recent year highest, and downgrade the weight for prior seasons — while still maintaining the need for consistent excellence to register very high.

My version of the Consensus BPA formula weights the most recent season at 100%, the second-most recent season at 66% and the third-most recent season at 33%. You could make arguments for other weights or changing the number of years included. But this feels right to me. (Specifically, I tried out 100% for the most recent, 50% for previous season and 25% for season before that — it felt a little too heavily weighted on the most current season.)

How should the various awards be weighted?

This is similarly subjective. Here’s how I thought about it.

MVP is the big prize. This is a direct stand-in for the media’s assessment of who performed best in a given NBA regular season. Past performance — including past playoff performance — probably impacts it a good deal. So I made the MVP award worth a maximum of 50 points. If you’re voted a unanimous MVP, there’s 50. Otherwise, it’s based on the share of total MVP votes you received with the NBA’s own ballot weighting in effect. I used Basketball-Reference for this.

For example, in 2023-24 Jokic received 926 of a maximum possible 990 points for the MVP ballot — 79 firsts, 18 seconds, 2 thirds. He hit 93.5% of the total possible points. With MVP weighted at 50 points, he ends up getting credited 46.75 points in the Consensus BPA metric. Shai Gilgeous-Alexander finished with 640 points, which translates to 32.3 MVP points in the Consensus BPA. Luka was a close third with 566 voting points; this becomes 28.6 MVP points in Consensus BPA. And so all the way down the ballot. Yes, even that weird Domantas Sabonis vote gets included (it resulted in 0.15 points in Consensus BPA).

All-NBA has a larger ballot — three times as large. But instead of making MVP three times the weight of All-NBA, given that players who make the MVP ballot always land on All-NBA, and almost always on first team, I simply just made MVP twice as valuable as All-NBA. The same voting scheme applies here: a unanimous first team All-NBA selection gets 25 points in Consensus BPA; beyond that, you get points equal to your share of the maximum total votes times 25. Jokic and Shai got max points this season; Luka had 24.9 (one voter put him second team), Giannis Antetokounmpo tallied 23.9 (11 second-team votes) and Jayson Tatum ended up with 21.575 (34 second-team votes). Sabonis, who made third team pretty comfortably, ended up with 5.25 Consensus BPA votes from All-NBA. DeMar DeRozan, with a single third-team vote, earned 0.05 Consensus BPA points.

With All-Star, we don’t have the same vote breakdowns available to us. So I made this a binary question: 10 points if you’re selected a starter, 5 points if you’re elected as a reserve. You don’t get the bonus five points if you’re selected as a reserve and promoted to a starter due to injury. This weighting seems appropriate to points available for MVP and All-NBA. Something novel this season is that it also makes BPA points available to players who don’t reach the 65-game minimum to be eligible for postseason awards. Donovan Mitchell, Joel Embiid and Julius Randle, for example, picked up some Consensus BPA points due to All-Star.

I predict the most controversial inclusion in my version of Consensus BPA is the conference finals MVP and Finals MVP bonuses. I’m giving 10 points for Finals MVP and five points for conference finals MVP. Many don’t like these awards in the first place. I tend to agree with arguments that an “All-Postseason Team” would be better. (The NBA has actually flirted with this through the In-Season Tournament team and the Bubble Team.) But we don’t have it, and while playoff success does factor into MVP and All-NBA voting, I thought including a distinct bonus for performing well at the most important points of the season was worth including. I’ll include a version without it as well.

And Now, The 2024 Consensus BPA Rankings

Without further ado, here is the NBA’s top 30 players according to Consensus BPA.

1. Nikola Jokic (158 points)

2. Giannis Antetokounmpo (108)

3. Luka Doncic (101)

4. Shai Gilgeous-Alexander (86)

5. Joel Embiid (81)

6. Jayson Tatum (78)

7. Kevin Durant (40)

8. Stephen Curry (37)

9. LeBron James (34)

10. Jalen Brunson (32)

11. Jaylen Brown (31)

12. Donovan Mitchell (26)

13. Anthony Edwards (24)

14. Devin Booker (22)

15. Anthony Davis (19)

16. Damian Lillard (18)

17. Kawhi Leonard (18)

18. Tyrese Haliburton (17)

19. Domantas Sabonis (14)

20. Ja Morant (13)

21. Julius Randle (12)

22. Jimmy Butler (12)

23. Trae Young (10)

24. DeMar DeRozan (10)

25. Karl-Anthony Towns (10

26. Paul George (9)

27. De’Aaron Fox (9)

28. Zion Williamson (7)

29. Kyrie Irving (7)

30. Tyrese Maxey (6)

If you remove the postseason awards from the mix, the only changes to the top 30 are that Steph and LeBron flip spots, Jaylen Brown drops from No. 11 to No. 18 (with everyone he falls below bumping up a spot), and Jimmy Butler drops to No. 27 (with everyone he falls below bumping up a spot). Jokic’s lead over Giannis for No. 1 also shrinks from 50 points to 40 (wow), and Luka falls a little further behind Giannis for No. 2.

I prefer including the postseason awards.

The strength of Consensus BPA is in differentiating at the top of the league — there’s a clear and almost unequivocal No. 1 in the world right now (Jokic), two strong contenders for No. 2 (Giannis and Luka) and a set of three players chasing behind (Shai, Embiid and Tatum) … and then everyone else, with a mix of young and old players competing for top-10 status.

Obviously, including the last three seasons has pros and cons. It keeps Embiid and Morant, who were down in 2023-24 for various reasons, in the mix, albeit well below their peak status. (The same quietly applies to Booker, who it feels is in a lot of top-10 conversations but hasn’t received a single MVP vote in two seasons. Consensus BPA gives him credit for low-end All-NBA support, All-Star nods and a big 2021-22 season.)

Share

The weighted three-year metric also leads to a slower rise for players like Brunson and Edwards. Brunson earned minimal points prior to this season, so having a top-6 campaign in the league could only push him so high. Repeating it next year will put him the Tier 3 conversation with Shai and Tatum. (No one knows where Embiid goes from here.) Edwards racked up some points this season and a few last season, but much of his increased value in the popular discourse comes from a postseason in which he didn’t win any Consensus BPA points. That should be baked into support for All-Star starter next season, plus whatever gains he can make in MVP and All-NBA voting.

I acknowledge that Consensus BPA isn’t too helpful once you get past the highly contested top 10 or 15 names. I’d put Paul George higher than several of these players, but he hasn’t really been registering on the award circuit. I wouldn’t use this to identify rising stars or anything. (Fun fact: Victor Wembanyama lands at No. 50 by virtue of his low-end All-NBA support this season. That’s ahead of four other players who earned Consensus BPA points within the past three seasons: Mikal Bridges, Kristaps Porzingis, Brook Lopez and Desmond Bane, who holds 0.0165 Consensus BPA points. Bane received a single third team All-NBA vote in 2021-22.)

This metric is really about what it says on the box: identifying the Best Players Alive, as determined by the consensus of award voting. In that respect, it does the trick by determining that Jokic is by far the best player alive according to NBA award voters of the past three years, and Giannis and Luka are neck-and-neck for No. 2. What will next season bring?

Thoughts? Let’s hear them.

Leave a comment

Be excellent to each other.