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NBA: What players have truly elevated their game in the playoffs?

NBA Los Angeles Lakers LeBron James and LA Clippers Kawhi Leonard (Photo by Jayne Kamin-Oncea/Getty Images)
NBA Los Angeles Lakers LeBron James and LA Clippers Kawhi Leonard (Photo by Jayne Kamin-Oncea/Getty Images)

Which players have truly elevated their games in the NBA Playoffs?

The playoffs in the NBA truly is the league’s second season. It’s where the greats separate themselves from the goods, the contenders from the paper tigers, the champions from the noble adversaries.

Like we saw in the last year’s Eastern Conference Finals, game plans can go out the window, and the sport boils down to “my star is better than your star.” One or two high-profile letdowns in these moments can forever stigmatize a player’s legacy.

In the words of Bob Costas, it is “neither right nor fair,” but the line between being remembered as a “choker” or a winner in this game is often razor-thin. The second season is quite an unforgiving one. We all know about the narratives, but what players have actually performed better or worse come playoff time?

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To start, here are the top 10 all-time in regular-season box plus-minus (BPM) since 1973-74, along with their respective (playoff BPM) measures:

  1. Michael Jordan 9.22 (11.24)
  2. LeBron James 8.94 (10.16)
  3. Chris Paul 7.59 (7.64)
  4. Magic Johnson 7.54 (7.64)
  5. David Robinson 7.48 (6.15)
  6. Larry Bird 6.89 (6.86)
  7. James Harden 6.88 (6.38)
  8. John Stockton 6.83 (6.01)
  9. Kawhi Leonard 6.81 (7.64)
  10. Kevin Durant 6.74 (6.95)

Take Kevin Durant for example. While his BPM rises in the playoffs as compared to the regular season, indicating that he elevates his game come April, May, and June, a deeper dive shows that this may not necessarily be the case.

This graph (above) compares his performance in each series compared to his team’s chance of winning based on Vegas odds (note that I excluded the 2019 Finals vs. Toronto since he only played 12 minutes before rupturing his Achilles).

As you can see, many of KD’s best performances have come when OKC/GSW is already heavily favored. That’s not to say that he feasts on first and second round roadkill by any means, but a metric that calculates postseason success should account for leverage in some sort of way, like Wins Above Replacement for relief pitchers in baseball does.

Durant also may have dealt with tougher match-ups earlier in his career, so we can also adjust for this by comparing his change in BPM season by season.

This demonstrates a similar trend, although it’s hard to quantify from eyeballing it just how much exactly he over/underperforms based on series expectations. In comes stakes-adjusted value over expected (SAVE), a statistic that incorporates pre-series win expectancy lines to measure playoff performance.

The logic is that players should be rewarded (or penalized) more when these series’ are closer to a toss-up rather than one-sided. Think about swing-states in U.S. presidential elections. Nobody bats an eye about the voting results in Texas or California because these places will nearly always align with the party (no matter how strong the candidate is); it’s these swing-states that largely determine the nomination, thus being a greater focus for the campaigns.

Michael Jordan or LeBron James beating up on an eight-seed in the first-round should factor far less into their resumes than more competitive match-ups, something that many statistics fail to account for.

With SAVE, I measured how much value (VORP) each player produced in every playoff series since 1987-88 (we don’t have Vegas lines from seasons before that), and compared it to how much value they would have produced had they performed at their regular-season level (in terms of BPM).

The leverage adjustment is in the form of a multiplier between 0 and 2 depending on how even the matchup was according to the odds (also note that five different series had missing lines, so I estimated those based on regular-season performance, homecourt advantage, and injuries).

Here are the players who have had the most and least (relative) success in the playoffs, based on SAVE:

Top:

  • Robert Horry +3.26
  • Derek Fisher +2.59
  • Bryon Russell +2.41
  • Reggie Miller +2.05
  • Michael Jordan +2.03

Bottom:

  • Tony Parker -2.75
  • Karl Malone -2.47
  • John Stockton -2.20
  • Gary Payton -2.13
  • Clifford Robinson -1.65

While this data generally matches up with the consensus – everyone knows the legend of “Big Shot Bob” and the playoff failures of the Stockton/Malone duo – we can save a further investigation into the results for future articles. This is just an introduction to SAVE, which I plan on fine-tuning and adding new layers too, as well as going in-depth on some of the more polarizing players. Also, keep in mind that this is a cumulative measure, we can use per-game or per-minute scales later.

That said, I would advise to never take all-in-one metrics as gospel. There is no empirical research on the leverage multiplier, so I just used a linear approach. Perhaps there are superior options to box plus-minus for the purpose of this exercise. This is just the first step in my attempt to contextualize playoff numbers.

In the meantime, here’s how a few active players rate in SAVE:

  • Kawhi Leonard +1.38
  • LeBron James +1.19
  • Giannis Antetokounmpo -0.17
  • Russell Westbrook -0.37
  • Chris Paul -0.57
  • Kevin Durant -0.70
  • James Harden -0.97
  • Stephen Curry -1.45