25 Most Successful NBA Stars Since Michael Jordan

25 Most Successful NBA Stars Since Jordan

Introduction

I am a big fan of the NBA and the discussions that the sport breeds, but one thing that has always bothered me about these types of discussions is how open-ended they tend to be. When arguing over a term like "Greatest of All Time", it hardly ever goes anywhere because people can interpret that in many different ways and be justified in doing so.

So with this post, I wanted to start a discussion that, while based on opinion, can be backed up with some concrete numbers. Yes, the numbers I chose to use and the way I chose to used them were of my own value system, but I like to think that you all will find this more interesting than if I just decided to give you a countdown based off of my "gut".

A few ground rules: 

I do not count Jordan's Wizards days as ever happening. I would like to just ignore that for the rest of my life, thank you. So when I say "Since Jordan", I mean that the sample size I used dates back to the 1998-99 NBA season (The season after Jordan's second and, to me, real retirement). 

Also, I did not observe this current 2013-14 NBA because it is not complete and, therefore, all the numbers I would have used would have been subject to change. Frankly, I didn't want to deal with that. 

Lastly, only players who made it onto All NBA First or Second Team in that time frame qualify. I did this for two reasons: the first being that if you were never, in those 15 years, considered one of the top two players at your position at least once, you probably weren't ever a star. The second is that I just didn't feel like crunching EVERYONE'S numbers.

Everything else, I believe, can be explained with these four categories:

Regular Season Score

Season by season, a player was given a score based on their minutes per game, games played, and final record of their team. I figured any other stats (Points, Rebounds, etc.) would have been too subjective and were, therefore, irrelevant. At the end of the day, we can't quantify the importance of a rebound in a game and we also can't quantify the importance of a player capable of getting rebounds on a given team. The bottom line is that if a player was on the floor a lot, he probably was important to his team and, the more minutes he played, the more essential he was to his team's success.

So the formula ended up looking like this:

Minutes Per Game*Games Played*Winning Percentage

But I wanted to give the numbers some meaning. So I took the best score possible, which would be 48*82*1 (or 48*50*1 for the 1998-99 season and 48*66*1 for the 2011-12 season), and divided it by 100. I then took every player's Regular Season Score and divided by the resulting number accordingly. Meaning the final formula was:

(Minutes Per Game*Games Played*Winning Percentage)/(48 Minutes*Max Possible Games*100% Winning Percentage/100)

This gave each Regular Season Score a range of 0 to 100.

Playoffs Score

A player's Playoff Score is set up very similarly to their Regular Season Scores. The main difference is that instead of Winning Percentage, I used Total Wins (Because, in the end, it doesn't matter how many losses you took along the way. All that matters is how far you got.). Also, since there isn't a set number of games played by every team in the playoffs, I had to divide the amount of games a player played in a given post-season by the amount of games his team played. Meaning that if a player missed some games and only played 8 games while his team played 11, his Playoff Score would get dinged that year. Anyways that all resulted in this:

Minutes Per Game*(Games Played/Games Team Played)*Wins

Again, I wanted to give these scores meaning and a recognizable range of 0 to 100. So I did the same thing I did with the Regular Season Score and took the best possible score, 48*1*16 (or 48*1*15 for the seasons before the 2003 NBA playoffs, when they changed the first round from the best of 5 to the best of 7), divided it by 100, and then divided each player's Playoff Score by that resulting number. So our final formula here is:

[Minutes Per Game*(Games Played/Games Team Played)*Wins]/(48 Minutes*100% Games Played*Max Possible Wins/100)

Championship Score

The Championship Score is pretty simple because it is a combination of the previous two scores. I believe that a player who had a significant role in the regular season of a championship year is just as important as a player who had a significant role in the playoffs of that year. So I made it of equal importance in the formula:

Regular Season Minutes Per Game*(Season Games Played/Possible Season Games Played)*Playoff Minutes Per Game*(Playoff Games Played/Possible Playoff Games Played)*Championships Won That Season

Obviously that last number in this equation was either a 1 (They won that year) or a 0 (They didn't). So if a player did not win a championship, they got a big, fat zero as their championship score for that year. This gave a big boost to those who won championships, but that's how it should be, right?

Again, to make the range 0 to 100, I divided all scores by 1/100th of the best possible score. Which made the final formula here:

[Regular Season MPG*(Season Games Played/Possible Season Games Played)*Playoff MPG*(Playoff Games Played/Possible Playoff Games Played)*Championships Won That Season]/(48 Season MPG*100% Season Games Played*48 Playoff MPG*100% Playoff Games Played*1 Championship)

Peaks Vs. Longevity

The last thing I addressed was valuing a player's peak. Because I wanted to reward both players like Dikembe Mutombo (11 decent seasons without a spectacular one) and Tracy McGrady (5 standout seasons and a lot more seasons lost), I broke up each player's Regular Season Score into two categories: A) Total Regular Season Score - the sum of all the Regular Season Scores the player received from 1998-99 to 2012-13 and B) Peak Regular Season Score - the sum of the three best Regular Season Scores the player received in that time frame.

I did the same for each player's Playoff Score as well. The only difference is that for the Peak Playoff Score, I only used the 1 best score each player had (I felt like a single significant playoff run is all a player needs to make us remember).

That being said, I found myself with 5 final scores for each individual player:

1) Total Regular Season Score

2) Peak Regular Season Score

3) Total Playoff Score

4) Peak Playoff Score

5) Total Championship Score (The sum of all the Championship Scores a Player received)

To make sure each set of numbers was weighed equally, I used the basic statistics trick of finding the Z-score of all the data (X - Mean of set / Standard Deviation of set) and, finally put it all together.

This was the final formula I used:

[(Total Regular Season Z-Score + Peak Regular Season Z-Score)/2 + (Total Playoff Z-Score + Peak Playoff Z-Score)/2 + Total Championship Z-Score]/3

To give you some perspective, out of the 45 eligible players, any score below 0 would be considered below average, any score above 0 would be considered above average, and scores above 3 and below -3 would be considered outliers.

Now, without further ado, here are the top 25:

#25 - Russell Westbrook (Score: -0.33)

Westbrook might come as a surprise to some of you, especially when considering those he topped (Derrick Rose, Deron Williams, and even Chris Paul). But here are a few things to consider:
1) Of the 5 seasons he's played in that I am observing, he's missed 0 regular season games (and, up until the 9 last year, 0 playoff games).
2) After his rookie season, his MPG (in regular season or playoffs) never dropped below 34.
3) He has made it to the NBA finals, totaling 13 wins and 38.4 MPG that post-season.

So while many of us may consider Paul the better player, Westbrook has experienced more success and been a undeniably large part of all of it.

#24 - Chris Webber (Score: -0.27)

Webber gets most of his score from a 5 year span with the Sacramento Kings from the 1999-00 season to the 2003-04 season. Unfortunately, missed games really brought his score down (most notably in the 2003 post-season and the 2003-04 regular season where his team had success, but he was a less significant part of it due to his absence. 

His biggest success: the 2002 post-season where his Kings won 10 games, he didn't miss a game, and he played 41.7 MPG

#23 - Vince Carter (Score: -0.26)

Surprisingly enough, Carter's most successful post-season was not on the Raptors or Nets, but in 2010 with the Orlando Magic, where they got to the Eastern Conference Finals while playing Carter 34.3 MPG. Obviously many feel as though Carter squandered his prime (My last statement probably supports that), did not experience much real success, and maybe does not deserve a spot on this list. But I think when you recognize the context (His rookie season was 1998-99. Meaning his career alines perfectly with this project, not getting cut off halfway through like Malone or Payton, but also getting points for all 15 observable seasons unlike Westbrook and Durant), you can see that being only two spots higher than Westbrook is pretty sad.

#22 - Amar'e Stoudemire (Score: -0.23)

Its a bummer that Amar'e's recent struggles in New York have maybe made us forget how good he used to be, because the man had some very strong years in Phoenix. Most notably, his 2004-05 season where he played 36.1 MPG for a 62-win Suns squad and then jumped up to 40.1 MPG in the playoffs, while helping his team to the Western Conference Finals. In reality, his New York days aren't even what hurt him the most. In 2005-06, the Suns won 54 regular season games and got all the way to game 7 of the Western Conference Finals... without Amar'e.
Amar'e played 3 regular season games that entire campaign, that's it. Who knows where he'd be ranked if he had played that season.

#21 - Peja Stojaković (Score: -0.16)

Out of everything, Peja being ranked this high initially shocked me the most. But the more I thought about it, the more it made sense. Of course he would be ranked near Webber, since most of their success was experienced on the same team. And sure, maybe Webber played slightly more MPG because he was slightly more important to their team, but Peja never really missed games for an extended period of time like Webber did (expect in that 2002 WCF run where Peja missed 6 out of the 16 games). Plus, Peja had a pretty decent season post-Kings with the Hornets in 2007-08 when he played 35 MPG and 77 total games for a 56 win team (followed by 37.9 MPG, no missed games, and 7 total wins that post-season). Add that all together and Peja has had a pretty nice career. Too bad some of us tend to overlook it.

#20 - Kevin Durant (Score: -0.12)

Much like Westbrook at #25, I think it says a lot about this guy that he's already this far up the list because we all know that as time goes on, he is only going to climb. And yes, that climb may be more difficult as long as he doesn't have a ring (something all the top 15 of this list have), but he is still only 25 years old and his team's winning percentage has improved every year he has been in the league, which tells me that the future looks bright for this young man. in 2009-10 his team made a jump to legitimate playoff presence, hasn't looked back since, and I don't think that's changing any time soon.
His greatest success? In 2012, Durant's Thunder got to the Finals and won 13 games while he played 41.9 MPG and didn't miss a game. Which is such a strong performance that it actually gave him a better Playoff Score than Dwyane Wade's 2013 playoff run (Even though Wade won that year).