AKABAS | The Top 50 Players in the NBA: #7-1

In case you missed Part 1 and Part 2 of this series, you can scan through my complete, updated Top 50 list for a quick refresher. This final group of players was so hard to rank that, after losing nights of sleep over it, my dad suggested that I go back to my original criteria for ranking players: “If you dropped this player onto any NBA team at random, by how much would they improve that team’s odds of winning the title?” I set up a spreadsheet with each of the remaining players as the columns and all the playoff teams as the rows, and I tried to estimate (as best I could) the increase in championship odds if each player were to be magically placed onto each team’s roster. The results were laughably inconclusive. For the players ranked 5 through 7, I estimated that their average increase in championship odds would be 17.26%, 17.21%, and 17.15%, respectively. RIP.

AKABAS | The Top 50 Players in the NBA: Part 2

If you’re interested in which guys were 27 through 50 on my list, my criteria for these rankings, or the meaning of the different statistics I’m referencing in this article, check out Part 1. Additionally, after flubbing some players’ rankings in Part 1, I’ve decided to keep my Top 50 in a Google Doc, so that I can both correct my previous mistakes and continue to update the list throughout the season. All stats are current as of 1/11/19.  

26. Marc Gasol – I think he’s a tad overrated.

AKABAS | The Top 50 Players in the NBA: Part 1

We know how to rank teams: my team beats your team, therefore my team is better. Just rooting for our teams carries an old-school sense of hometown pride and loyalty, but ranking players is overwhelmingly more interesting and fun — it’s a combination of statistics and intuition, of situational evidence and conjecture. How does one even begin to try to rank basketball players? One obvious way is to determine which players are most valuable to their own teams. That’s what the Most Valuable Player award tries to do, at least in theory, but does anyone really know what that award means? This metric is fairly quantifiable, since we can look at team performance with a certain player both on and off the court.

AKABAS | Stop Complaining About A Perfectly Good NBA Finals Matchup

Since when did NBA fans become so spoiled? All I see online is people kvetching about another “boring” finals rematch between the Golden State Warriors and the Cleveland Cavaliers and how Kevin Durant has ruined the NBA. Said people are dumb. First off, this is the best option we had. The Celtics are fun, but they would have gotten romped by either Western Conference team.

FOOD WEEK | On James Harden, and Why Cereal Isn’t a Breakfast Food

In late September 2016, Houston Rockets coach Mike D’Antoni announced that his star player, James Harden, would be switching positions to play point guard. This seemed like a peculiar decision at first. Harden had played shooting guard his entire career up to that point, and was just coming off a season in which he did an awful lot of shooting, averaging 29 points and finishing third in the league in usage rate. Running an entire offense and getting teammates involved is a difficult thing to just pick up on the fly. But Harden did it.

AKABAS | 10 NBA Finals Questions, Asked and Answered

When the NBA season came to a close on Monday night, I had too many thoughts to sort out, so I decided to let my friends do it for me by sending me questions. Below are my answers to 10 questions about the 2017 NBA Finals, ranging from most simple to most complex. Very Simple Questions

Is ball even life? – Brian R.

Yes. Ball is still life.

AKABAS | Let’s Clear Up A Few Things About Kevin Durant Joining the Warriors

NBA fans constitute one of the most delusional groups of people, along with people who think Chicago-style pizza is pizza, people who don’t like pizza at all, and people who think that Gary Johnson or Jill Stein is anywhere close to knowledgeable enough about how anything works to be President of the United States. Rarely has this delusion been more palpable than in the aftermath of Kevin Durant signing with the Golden State Warriors in free agency this summer. Last year, the Warriors went an unprecedented 73-9 and narrowly defeated Durant’s Oklahoma City Thunder in the Western Conference Finals before losing a heartbreaker in the Finals to the Cleveland Cavaliers. Many fans were angry that Durant joined forces with the team that beat him, and this is justified. A lot of people, however, have said a lot of other things about what Durant did, and most of them are inaccurate, so let’s debunk these myths, one by one.