In late January I took a look at how ten of the top point guards in the league compared with one another according to 5 different advanced stats (PER, Win Shares, Wins Produced, Roland Rating from 82games.com, and Adjusted +/-).  Late last month I did a similar comparison on 27 of the best wings in the NBA using the same measures.  Now I'm back to do the same thing for the big guys, to see who are really the best big men in the NBA according to the advanced stats.

Methodology: Again, I will show the raw values for each player in each stat, then at the end rank-order how each player finishes in each stat versus the other big men under consideration.  The end result gives an interesting rough-and-ready ranking of what "the numbers" say about who is really playing the best this year...not always the same thing as our perceptions. 

I'll be looking at 25 of the top power forwards and centers in the NBA.  For the sake of space I'll show only the top-15 for each individual stat, but for the rank-order table at the bottom I'll put all 25 in there.  Without further ado...

PER: Hollinger's stat, probably the most popular of the "advanced stats", favorable (compared to other advanced stats) to volume scorers and players that generate a lot of free throws; generally ranks those considered "great" by the general public well, though also will tend to have role players with good scoring-per-minute very highly.

Win Shares: From Basketball-reference.com, emphasizes shooting/scoring efficiency; loves points per shot (thus values FTs drawn).  To account for different minutes played, we're going to look at Win Shares per 48 minutes played.

Wins Produced: Dave Berri's controversial stat (most likely to be trashed on an APBRmetric board) is also the one seemingly growing fastest in popular usage; wins produced values what he defines as possessions, so loves rebounds, steals, and blocks and doesn't like TOs; doesn't value shot creation, but does value assists.  We'll look at Wins Produced per 48 minutes.

Roland Rating: 82games.com's Roland Rating is based upon a combination of PER and +/- stats.  It looks at the individual PER of each player, the PER of their primary defensive assignment, and subtracts the 2 for a 1-on-1 value then they combine that 1-on-1 value with a team-impact based on-court/off-court +/- stat to get the rating.  Tends to produce fewest "what???" rankings, because players that rank out highly in both the 1-on-1 and team stats are almost universally who we consider to be among the best in the game...though the order at the top isn't always what you'd expect. (Note: 82games last updated on March 5, so these results are only current to that date)

1-year Adjusted +/-: This is Basketballvalue.com's APM calculation.  For the point guards I used 1-year APM, which I don't love because APM is so incredibly noisy that a single year (or less) doesn't give conclusive answers.  For the wings I used 2-year APM (which still may be too short for an APM calculation and also includes data from last season, which I really don't like) because at the time there were too many "no freaking way" values in the 1-year APMs that didn't match either the 2-year average or any stretch of common sense.  I actually like longer APM calculations, 4 years or more, to really clean up the noise and give a robust effect.  Nevertheless, we're talking about this year specifically and the 1-year values seem to have been cleaned up since I did the wings, so I'm back to using the 1-year APM here (with associated standard error):

Overall Rank orders: Giving each of our 25 guys a '1' through '25' ranking based on where they ranked in each stat, here is a summary of how each guy did.  I'll add an average across the 5 stats (with standard error) to give us a better idea how our seat-of-the-pants-advanced-stat-cross-section-view ranks 25 of the best big men in the NBA this year:

Conclusions:

As we saw with both the point guards (Chris Paul) and the wings (LeBron James), one big man stood out as clearly the best according to the advanced stats.  Dwight Howard was alone at the top among bigs, ranking first in three of the five measures looked at and top-3 in all five.  Call this the stats MVP-tier.

Next, there is a group of five or six big men that all have a statistical argument for second-best big man in the league: Dirk Nowitzki, Pau Gasol, Kevin Garnett, Kevin Love, Andrew Bynum, and maybe Al Horford.  Call this the top tier.

There was a lot more variation across the stats for the bigs than for the point guards or wings, which led to larger standard errors.  Thus, Horford could either be grouped with the top-shelf bigs above or the second-tier bigs because his standard error would place him in either set.  The other second tier bigs, by the numbers, include Tim Duncan, LaMarcus Aldridge, Blake Griffin, Nene, Lamar Odom and maybe Zach Randolph (like Horford, his standard error would get him into either this level or the one below).

Interestingly, the two Kevins with Timberwolves ties seem to be opposite sides of the coin from each other.  Kevin Love would be challenging Dwight Howard for the top big in the league honors if you looked only at the three box score-based stats used here.  But in the two stats that factor in +/- impact, Love is down among the lower third of bigs.  On the other hand, Kevin Garnett would be solid among the box score based advanced stats (eighth among bigs), but in the two categories that factor in +/- (which would include defensive impact) he's among the top few in the game.  Zach Randolph is another like Love that looks great in the box scores but struggles in the +/- categories, while Aldridge is another like KG that looks outstanding in +/- but not as strong in the boxes.  Just some food for thought.

These rankings illustrate what it is that makes the Lakers so strong and dangerous: they have THREE big men among the top two tiers, including two on the top tier.  No other team in the league has even two bigs in the top-2 tiers, let along 3.  If the Celtics ever get healthy they can use quality big depth around KG to take the battle to LA, and the Bulls and Hawks are no slouches themselves, but in terms of quantity and quality the Lakers bigs are really unique in the league right now.

Rookie wonder Blake Griffin measures out well here, among the better bigs in the league, though he's still behind old-man Duncan, which many casual observers probably wouldn't suspect just based on the Sportscenter highlights and box scores.

The player that finished surprisingly low in the rankings is Amare Stoudemire, who was actually getting MVP buzz just a month or two ago.  Now, according to the stats I looked at here, Amare would rank 18th among big men alone.  His PER looks great, but he is among the lowest rankings in each of the other 4 stats that I looked at.  Stat may have helped revive Madison Square Garden and helped bring the spotlight back to the Knicks, but the stats suggest that what he's producing on the court may not be quite as special as the buzz he was able to create off the court.

All in all, this has been an interesting study.  The bigs, especially, illustrate that the different "advanced stats" are measuring different and not-necessarily overlapping things to evaluate player quality.  You have to decide on your own which stats you value most in which situation (I tend to trust the +/- stats a bit more, but I think they all have value), but if a player is dominant no matter HOW you measure it then you know they really are doing their things.  Dwight Howard is the only big man really getting consistent mention these days in the MVP race.  Now, you have a bit more of a numerical backing as to why that is.