Best Wing Players in the NBA by the Numbers

• By: The Professor
• On: 2/28/2011 7:53:00 AM

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About a month ago I took a look at 10 of the top point guards in the league according to 5 different advanced stats (PER, win shares/48 minutes, wins produced/48 minutes, Roland Rating and 1-year adjusted +/-).  I showed the raw values for each player in each stat, then at the end rank-ordered how each player ranked in each stat versus the other point guards 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. 

So, now I'm back to do the same thing with the elite wings in the NBA.  I expanded a bit (last time 10 wasn't enough candidates...it left notable snubs like Chauncey Billups), so I'll be looking at 27 of the top shooting guards and small forwards 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 27 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.

	PER
LeBron James	26.6
Dwyane Wade	25.2
Kobe Bryant	24.3
Kevin Durant	24.17
Kevin Martin	22.37
Manu Ginobili	21.61
Carmelo Anthony	21.38
Eric Gordon	21.12
Paul Pierce	19.53
Monta Ellis	18.98
Rudy Gay	17.96
Joe Johnson	17.94
Danny Granger	17.8
Andre Iguodala	17.68
Ray Allen	17.29

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.

	WS48
LeBron James	0.232
Dwyane Wade	0.214
Paul Pierce	0.203
Manu Ginobili	0.2
Kobe Bryant	0.187
Kevin Durant	0.185
Kevin Martin	0.181
Ray Allen	0.177
Eric Gordon	0.157
Andre Iguodala	0.142
Luol Deng	0.139
Richard Jefferson	0.131
Jason Richardson	0.127
Rudy Gay	0.124
Danny Granger	0.122

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.

	WP48
LeBron James	0.347
Dwyane Wade	0.299
Landry Fields	0.285
Andre Iguodala	0.257
Manu Ginobili	0.237
Kevin Durant	0.223
Paul Pierce	0.218
Kobe Bryant	0.206
Ray Allen	0.193
Andrei Kirilenko	0.186
Rudy Gay	0.158
Carmelo Anthony	0.143
Eric Gordon	0.142
Kevin Martin	0.139
Gerald Wallace	0.128

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 hasn't updated this since Jan. 19, so these results are only current to that date)

	Roland Rating
LeBron James	15.2
Manu Ginobili	12.6
Dwyane Wade	11.6
Paul Pierce	11.3
Rudy Gay	9.6
Kevin Durant	9.4
Kobe Bryant	8.9
Eric Gordon	8.2
Carmelo Anthony	7.9
Joe Johnson	7.9
Ray Allen	6.9
Kevin Martin	6.6
Andre Iguodala	5.1
Landry Fields	4.8
Danny Granger	4.3

2-year Adjusted +/-: This is Basketballvalue.com's APM calculation.  As I mentioned above APM is so incredibly noisy that a single year (or less) doesn't give conclusive answers (and too often the answers are nonsensical for my tastes).  Even 2 years may be too short for an APM calculation.  I 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 so we'll have to make due on both issues with the 2-year compromise.

	2 yr APM	2 yr APM SE
LeBron James	15.05	2.71
Kevin Durant	12.38	3.9
Dwyane Wade	11.01	3.27
Luol Deng	7.6	3.62
Gerald Wallace	6.98	3.33
Landry Fields	6.87	4.33
Paul Pierce	4.91	3.44
Manu Ginobili	4.83	2.92
Vince Carter	4.8	3.27
Carmelo Anthony	4.63	3.11
Ray Allen	4.17	3.54
Danny Granger	3.34	3.02
Kobe Bryant	2.86	3.7
Ron Artest	2.83	3.26
Rudy Gay	2.77	3.72

Overall Rank orders: Giving each of our 27 guys a '1' through '27' 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 seat-of-the-pants-advanced-stat-cross-section-view ranking order:

	PER	WS48	WP48	Roland Rating	2 yr APM		Average	Std. Error
LeBron James	1	1	1	1	1		1	0.00
Dwyane Wade	2	2	2	3	3		2.4	0.24
Kevin Durant	4	6	6	6	2		4.8	0.80
Manu Ginobili	6	4	5	2	8		5	1.00
Paul Pierce	9	3	7	4	7		6	1.10
Kobe Bryant	3	5	8	7	13		7.2	1.69
Ray Allen	15	8	9	11	11		10.8	1.20
Eric Gordon	8	9	13	8	16		10.8	1.59
Carmelo Anthony	7	17	12	9	10		11	1.70
Rudy Gay	11	14	11	5	15		11.2	1.74
Kevin Martin	5	7	14	12	26		12.8	3.68
Andre Iguodala	14	10	4	13	23		12.8	3.09
Landry Fields	25	18	3	14	6		13.2	3.99
Luol Deng	20	11	17	19	4		14.2	2.99
Joe Johnson	12	19	16	10	17		14.8	1.66
Danny Granger	13	15	23	15	12		15.6	1.94
Andrei Kirilenko	16	16	10	17	19		15.6	1.50
Gerald Wallace	21	21	15	18	5		16	2.97
Vince Carter	23	20	20	16	9		17.6	2.42
Jason Richardson	18	13	18	22	20		18.2	1.50
Richard Jefferson	26	12	19	21	21		19.8	2.27
Monta Ellis	10	22	21	20	27		20	2.77
Jason Terry	19	23	26	23	18		21.8	1.46
Ron Artest	27	24	25	26	14		23.2	2.35
Michael Beasley	17	26	27	25	24		23.8	1.77
Stephen Jackson	22	25	24	27	22		24	0.95
Tyreke Evans	24	27	22	24	25		24.4	0.81

Conclusions:

Every stat, no matter how it was measured, agreed that LeBron James has been the best wing in the NBA this year.  In fact, LeBron and Dwyane Wade measured out 1-2 overall among wings across the body of stats examined here.

Behind the Miami boys is a group of 4 guys on the next tier: Durant, Ginobili, Pierce and Kobe.  While Kobe and Durant are super-duper stars, it's interesting that Ginobili and Pierce measured right there with them this year.

Ray Allen is right behind Kobe, and highlights the next Tier that features eight guys (down to Luol Deng on the list).  This tier is an interesting mix of big names and guys that may be having a bigger impact than their names would suggest.  New Knick Carmelo Anthony is on this tier with Ray, along with several young scorers (Gay, Gordon, Martin) and a couple of more versatile glue/defensive type players (Iguodala, Deng and Fields).

I'm not going to spend much time with the rest, though it is interesting that guys like Joe Johnson and Monta Ellis are maybe further down the list than you might expect.  The take-away for me is that while Miami (obviously) is built around 2 super-wings, the Celtics (and I guess, now, the Knicks) are the only other teams with two wings from among the top 3 tiers.