Which NBA player has won the Playoffs so far?
One advanced stat underscores the gap between Jokic and Embiid.
One of my favorite NBA stats doesn’t show up in most box scores or game recaps. Many casual fans haven’t heard of it, and even diehards rarely cite it.
But game score — a calculation conceived by NBA analyst John Hollinger to measure productivity in a single game — can help answer a simple question: how great is the performance we just saw?
I love game score because it’s built around a simple formula that involves summing up the good metrics — points, rebounds, assists, steals and so on — and then subtracting the plays that detracted from a player’s performance, like missed free throws and turnovers.
Game score isn’t perfect — it doesn’t account for staunch defense, so-called hockey assists and other good things that don’t show up in the stat sheet. But it generally makes sense, and I enjoy checking the Basketball-Reference daily leaderboard to see which players tallied the best game scores the night before.
And I got curious — especially as I watched a Boston-Philly Game 7 become a boring blowout on Sunday — which players have racked up the best game score each day of the NBA Playoffs so far?1
How many days has the Celtics’ Jayson Tatum really starred? On the flip side, how many days did the 76ers’ Joel Embiid disappoint?
To put it another way, which individual player “won” each day of the past month? And who’s “won” the most times?
The player with the most game score wins, so far: Devin Booker.
Booker, who played 11 games before the Phoenix Suns were eliminated last week, was the top player across the entire NBA on four of those days, according to game score.
But Booker’s hold on this ranking is tenuous, given that the Suns’ season is finished. He’ll likely be passed by one of the players in a three-way tie for second place: the Denver Nuggets’ Nikola Jokic, the Los Angeles Lakers’ Anthony Davis and Tatum, who have each “won” three days of the NBA Playoffs and whose teams are now in the conference finals.
Of course, focusing on the game score “winner” can be misleading.2 The margins between game scores, at times, are so small as to be irrelevant.
For example, the Miami Heat’s Jimmy Butler “won” May 8 with a game score of 27.9. But the Knicks’ Jalen Brunson and the Golden State Warriors’ Steph Curry both had game scores of 27.8 that day — a meaningless difference. If Brunson or Curry had missed one fewer free throw, for instance, they would have won the day over Butler.
So maybe a more revealing question than “who won the day” is “who had a top-3 performance on any given day.” I posted that list here and think of it like who won the gold, silver and bronze medals across the NBA on any given day — for the sake of this Substack, let’s call it “podium performances.”
The winner in ‘podium performances’ so far: Nikola Jokic
The Nuggets center has had nine podium performances in the 11 games he’s played. To put that another way: Jokic was almost always one of the top three players across the entire NBA Playoffs on the days he stepped on the court.
Two other players are tied with seven podium performances so far — Booker and Butler.
Then there are five stars tied with four podium performances in the Playoffs: the Lakers’ LeBron James, Curry, Brunson, Tatum and Davis.
The fact that Tatum and Davis are all the way down here, despite “winning” three days of the Playoffs, is a sign of the boom-or-bust games that they’ve racked up. When Tatum and Davis played well, they dominated, but they’ve often been missing in action, and each had only one other game that counted as a podium performance.
Looking at “podium performances” can help capture the narratives of the playoffs. For instance, that great game between the Suns and Nuggets where Booker, Jokic and Durant spent a quarter dueling for supremacy?
They were the top three players in game score across the NBA that night, edging out the stars in the Celtics-76ers series, and showing that advanced stats can back up the eye test.
The list is fun to peruse for statistical quirks. The Los Angeles Clippers’ Kawhi Leonard put up podium performances in all3 of the playoff games he appeared, the only player to accomplish that feat. The Minnesota Timberwolves’ Anthony Edwards, who was eliminated in the first round, had three podium performances in his five playoff games, a nearly Jokian-level of dominance.
Meanwhile, the Sacramento Kings’ Malik Monk, a bench player, had two podium performances — a better showing than star guards like the Warriors’ Klay Thompson (one) or the Memphis Grizzlies’ Ja Morant (one).
There’s also a name conspicuously absent from most of the list: The Philadelphia 76ers’ Embiid. The newly named MVP put up just one podium performance in his nine playoff games, trailing teammates James Harden (two) and Tobias Harris (two).
Embiid’s fans didn’t need my Substack post to remind them that the last few weeks have been a disaster. But it’s another measure of how much the newly named MVP underwhelmed in these Playoffs, even as his rival Jokic soared to the conference finals — and racked up dominant game scores, too.
Look, I don’t just write about covid. I have hobbies!
Whose dumb idea was it to focus on game score “winners” again?
Unfortunately, Leonard appeared in just two games before missing the rest of the Playoffs with an injury.