Real Player Rating Standards by Position for NBA Teams and the One Way Carmelo Anthony Could Win the Quest for the Ring

The Lakers have just been run out of the gym in Oklahoma exactly as we feared. The Nuggets have been predictably badly beaten in the playoffs by the Utah Jazz and their gold standard Coach: Jerry Sloan. And now Quest for the Ring is going to tell you about the latest scandal involving a star basketball player's girl friend.

Well, no, the last one isn't true, thank God. But nor do we have time at the moment to advise Phil Jackson on what to do to make sure the Lakers don't get embarrassed by the upstart Thunder (hint: not much other than getting pissed at a bunch of players which he already has done.) As for the Nuggets, hell will freeze over before they ever do anything we recommend. They absent-mindedly and merrily do whatever captures their fancy from year to year and blame the referees and lady luck when they get bounced in the playoffs.

So how we are spending precious time at the moment? Why, on one of the most important posts ever: the first ever basketball standards grid. Specifically, we are making the Real Player Rating system and Team Grids more valuable by publishing a combination of the two: "Real Player Rating Standards by Position for NBA Teams". By using the charts, you can see how good the average player is given many different combinations of circumstances.

Take a look at the grids (which like everything else will be tweaked in the future in our never ending Quest for perfection). Then read on below for an introduction on how to use this powerful tool. Listen up Minnesota and New Jersey especially! You and all the other rebuilding teams need this more than most, unless you want to be rebuilding indefinitely.

Note: if you can not see a chart (spreadsheet) just below here, copy and paste the web address that you do see into your browser address bar in order to view it.



INTRODUCTION TO HOW TO USE REAL PLAYER RATING STANDARDS BY POSITION
Suppose you are an NBA manager looking around for a new point guard. You have only so much money to spend and there are only a few point guards available and you know exactly how good they are because you put faith in the Real Player Rating system and you simply get the ratings off the Quest for the Ring site. (You found the site despite Google not showing it much in search results and you bookmarked it, because you are one smart and smooth operator, laugh out loud.)

Up until now at Quest, you could see who the better point guards were in recent years. But did you know how good a starting point guard you need if you want to, say, reach the final four of the NBA? Or at least the final eight (all teams that win in round one)? No, you didn't know that, until now.

You are looking for a starting point guard so you need to use the middle chart (Average for Starters). The first row is for point guards. Looking at the column headers, you look for and find "Final 8 teams" and right next to that, "Final 4 Teams". Now read where the row and column meet and you can find out:

--The average point guard on a team that is among the final eight teams has a Real Player Rating of .893.

--The average point guard on a team that is among the final four teams has a Real Player Rating of .951.

If winning one or more playoff series is out of reach right now and if you don't have a lot of money and if you just want to make the playoffs and make sure you don't join the Minnesota Timberwolves at the bottom, and you want to work toward winning playoff series down the road, you could be satisfied with a point guard with a rating of .868, because that is the average rating for starting point guards whose teams make the playoffs.

Actually, if push comes to shove, you might settle for a point guard with a rating as low as .827, because that is the overall average starting point guard rating for the NBA as a whole. Since about half of the teams make the playoffs, the overall NBA average for each position is about the same as the dividing line between point guards who on average make the playoffs and those who don't.

But you also need a quality back-up point guard, so how can you use this powerful information to gauge what you need for that? Well, once again you have to know what your realistic objective is and then you want to use the third chart, "Average for Players who Play at Least 300 Minutes but do not Start". If you have your sites on being one of the final four teams, you can see from that chart that the average non-starting (backup) point guard for a final four team has a real player rating of about .789. The average rating for a backup point guard for a final eight team is about .741.

And you do the same for every other position and for every other combination of objectives. Obviously, you can also use this to determine whether the players you currently have are really good enough or not for what your overall objective is for the next few years. Then you will know who you should most want to keep on your team and who you most want to trick the Minnesota Timberwolves or the Memphis Grizzlies into taking (laugh out loud). Seriously, Minnesota made the playoffs for many years in a row not so many years ago, so you probably won't be able to trick them unless you get lucky. Try tricking Philadelphia though, seriously.

ANOTHER EXAMPLE
Now fans and writers such as yours truly can at a glance see whether players have what it takes to be in the final eight, the final four, or the final two teams or not. You or I might want to know in advance which players are most likely going to shine and which ones are most likely going to lose out in a playoff series. We want to know what to look for when we watch a playoff game instead of just being at the mercy of sometimes mindless announcers. If you are a coach you want to know who you might want to have your players double and trap as much as they can.

Once you know three things: Real Player Rating, position, and whether the player plays more minutes at the position than anyone else on the team or not, you can use the appropriate chart and see how this player stacks up to the League averages for various teams, all the way from the worst two teams in the League to the best two teams (the ones who play in the Championship).

For example, let’s consider Chauncey Billups, the starting point guard for the Denver Nuggets, who almost everyone in Denver thinks of as one of the very best point guards in the NBA this year and last. But is he and was he really? Quest for the Ring has for two straight years reported out a Chauncey Billups rating a little lower than needed for being one of the very best point guards. Specifically, Billups' 2008-09 rating was .870 and his 2009-10 rating is .889. Using the starter chart, here is how it reads for point guards:

--The average point guard among all NBA teams has a Real Player Rating (RPR) of about .827.

--The average point guard among all NBA playoff teams has a RPR of .868.

--The average point guard among teams that lose in the first round is .852.

--The average point guard among the final eight NBA (playoff) teams has a RPR of .893.

--The average point guard among the final four NBA (playoff) teams has a RPR of .951.

--The average point guard among the final two NBA (Championship) teams has a RPR of 1.025.

Now you see where Chauncey Billups falls in the big scheme of things: he's almost exactly the average among point guards of teams that are among the final eight. So on average the probability that a point guard as good as Chauncey Billups will reach the final four is about 50%. The bottom line is that although Chauncey Billups might or might not be good enough to get a team a win in round two of the playoffs (good enough to reach the final four) if he doesn't get out of the first round (to the final eight) the problem is probably more with other players, since Billups is definitely good enough to get a team out of the first round.

One of those other players dragging Billups and the Nuggets down in the 2010 playoffs is starting shooting guard Arron Afflalo, whose rating sunk pretty badly after the all star break and was .556 as of the end of March. But due to coaching error, Afflalo plays for more minutes at shooting guard than does J.R. Smith, RPR .722, who was clearly a better player than Afflalo even when Afflalo was much better earlier in the season. Yet due to coaching error Smith played 2,076 minutes and Afflalo played 2,230 minutes.

You have to consider the player who actually does play more minutes to be the starter, not the player who should be playing more minutes. So if as during the regular season Afflalo plays more than J.R. Smith, he is the starter regardless of what any depth chart might say. And in fact most and probably all of the published depth charts show Afflalo as the starter and Smith as the backup, because the published depth charts defer to the coaches of the teams in control of those teams and not to which player is really better or to what other coaches would do.

So let's see what we have for starting 2-guards so we can see where Arron Afflalo comes in.

--The average shooting guard among all NBA teams has a Real Player Rating (RPR) of about .636.

--The average shooting guard among all NBA playoff teams has a RPR of .668.

--The average shooting guard among teams that lose in the first round is .655.

--The average shooting guard among the final eight NBA (playoff) teams has a RPR of .687.

--The average shooting guard among the final four NBA (playoff) teams has a RPR of .731.

--The average shooting guard among the final two NBA (Championship) teams has a RPR of .789.

So Arron Afflalo is a below average starting shooting guard. If you look over to the right, you can see some averages for losing teams:

The average shooting guard among non-playoff teams has a RPR of .604.

The average shooting guard playing for one of the worst two teams in the League has a RPR of about .579.

Arron Afflalo was much better before the all star break than after it. He had a RPR of .633 as of February 4, which made him an average starting 2-guard. But then he went downhill from there and ended up with a season RPR lower than what you on average find on non-playoff teams.

In fact, almost all of the Nuggets went downhill after the all star break due to defensive problems that were never recognized or solved on the one hand and the lack of enough organization and flow on offense on the other hand.

VARIATIONS
Remember, all of the numbers in the charts are AVERAGES. Actual teams can win the Quest for the Ring with or without players at all five positions with ratings close to the averages for the best two teams. Most if not all teams will depart from the mold: they will have some players who are above and some who are below the averages shown, sometimes way above and way below. Offsets happen all the time. For example, an historical superstar center who is the best center in the League can offset a 2-guard who is merely at the overall NBA average for that position.

FILL IN THE BLANK: CARMELO ANTHONY WILL NEVER WIN A RING UNLESS...
How do you finish that sentence? Do you finish it, as George Karl might, “unless he becomes more well rounded and plays better defensively”? Although everyone is happy he is playing better defensively than a few years ago, there is a much better answer...

Carmelo Anthony will never win a ring unless he plays with a very highly rated (at least .950) point guard. This is true because Carmelo Anthony is one of the very most talented scorers in the League whether or not he plays with such a point guard. If he does not play with a great point guard (and as we have already seen Chauncey Billups is a very good but not a great point guard) he gets the scoring coming to him more from isolation plays and less from a great flowing offense and passing game sponsored by the ace point guard. In this scenario Anthony is one of the top five scorers in the League year after year but there is a ceiling on both his scoring and even more so on the scoring of the rest of the team due to the absence of the true high quality point guard maximizing scoring opportunities for Melo and the other players.

What if Carmelo Anthony was playing for the Suns with Steve Nash as the point guard? What if Carmelo Anthony was playing for the Hornets with Chris Paul as the point guard? What if Carmelo Anthony was playing for the Jazz with Deron Williams as the point guard? In any combo like those, both Melo and the team involved would have a real shot at a Championship, whereas the Nuggets could probably not win a Championship with their current roster even if they were not shooting themselves in the foot by not repeating what they did last year defensively and by not running a little more organized offense than the almost completely disorganized one they do run..

Chauncey Billups is not among the greatest point guards precisely because, unlike Nash, Paul, and Williams, he doesn’t have the ability and/or the desire to maximize the passing game and assisting on his team. But he has been a great match for the Nuggets as coached by George Karl because he and they don’t believe in what you might call the “power point guard” concept. Under George Karl, the Nuggets believe that every player on the court has about equal responsibility for maintaining the passing game, which unfortunately all too often results in no one maintaining the passing game when the going gets tough in the trenches in the playoffs.

So is there a team out there with a truly outstanding and truly great point guard (regardless of age, there is no age discrimination here) who really and truly wants to win the Quest for the Ring? If you have that point guard and you want that Ring, Carmelo Anthony and no one else is who you want at the small forward position. As far as winning the Quest is concerned, Melo is just wasting his time in Denver.