Hello all, and welcome to my first annual NBA Historical Ratings Presentation brought to you by SportsTwo.com, where I will be keeping track of all NBA teams and players and their progress and accomplishments from the foundation of the league to the present. Each annual presentation will gauge where teams are headed in relation to the previous season as well as how the players are impacting their teams and the league at large. I will rate every franchise and every major player and rank them from first to worst using a mathematical system, and try to compare those results with historical and current perceptions. Keep in mind that this archive is rating performances related to the NBA, and not the ABA. I may revisit the ABA and other defunct NBA franchises at some future date, but certainly not until I have completed the NBA portion. The presentation will be broken up into two segments, 1) the current 30 franchises, their history, rivalries, and the players who did the most to help raise the prestige of their franchise, and 2) the players themselves and how their overall careers impacted the league. In the future I may considering rating fan-bases, because I think they deserve to be mentioned with the players and teams as a part of the history of the league. Each day I will release a new franchise or segment of players to rate and discuss in depth, starting from the top. Each franchise will be rated based on their regular season and post-season accomplishments, and will list the top 10% of the players who have contributed the most to the fame of their franchise. The players themselves will be rated based on three areas: accomplishments, statistical merits, and tenure. To break this down: Franchises will be gauged by how often they are able to reach the playoffs, how far they are able to get, appearances in the finals, and titles won. The further a team goes, the more points they are alotted for that accomplishment (for example: a first round exit will be worth 1 point, a championship will be worth 5. The maximum score for a team in any given season is 15). These numbers are then added together and divided by the number of seasons a team has played to give us a rating. This rating will indicate how far a team will go on average in any given year. By making this rating an average based on annual performance rather than an overall collective number, a relatively new franchise to the NBA like the Spurs are rated above a very old franchise like the Kings/Royals. Player ratings are more complicated, but do not contribute to the franchise rating. This is simply to illustrate which player most ought to have a statue erected for them outside the team arena. The first category is achievements. Achievements are a collective number, rating the value of awards (like MVP 3pts, Finals MVP 2pts, other awards 1pt), all-star appearances and contests, all-league teams, their own playoff runs with the team, contributions to the league's best record, and of course championships. The second category is statistical merits. This is a number that can go up and down. It takes a player's per-minute production to rate their value on the floor at any given moment. In the areas where statistics can't be provided, I use a league average for a players position to fill those in. That can technically penalize a talented defensive player whose defensive stats were never recorded, but the impact is actually quite negligible when using league position average, and might sway a player's overall rating 1-2%. The third category is tenure. This takes a player's total minutes and divides it by 1,000. This category exists to help keep the statistical merits category in check for short term high impact players and rewards the Lindsay Hunters and Nate McMillans of the league who have some value to their fan-bases. These three values are then combined to create a player's rating. When I list the top 10% of a franchise's prestige players, it will take into account every player that has played a minute with the team. NBA teams are relatively small, and players tend to stick around a mean-average of 1,000 minutes with a team, so the number of players listed in the top 10% won't be large. These players will be listed in order of rating for what they've done for this team only, and each player listed in the top 10% will meet the following criteria: Six seasons or more with the team, or... 7,000 minutes played, or... 6,000 minutes played and one championship, or... 5,000 minutes played and two or more championships. Any player that is currently playing with the franchise that doesn't meet any of the criteria, but would otherwise make the top 10% will be listed as an honorable mention at the bottom because they will be considered "in progress" for making that team's top 10%. I will also list what that player needs to do to make it in. After all the teams are reported on, I will then take the top players in the history of the league and compare them the way they were compared in each individual franchise. Each year current players will have a chance to increase their standing with historical players and with each other in their progress to the top. Next year I will compare their last position with where their new one is to see what kind of momentum they have. So without further ado, I give you the Summer of 2010 NBA Historical Ratings Presentation. I hope it will be as fascinating to some of you as it is for me. Please feel free to leave comments criticizing or praising the work, or leave me any questions and I will answer them. Enjoy!
