Nikola Jokic, Devin Booker, Jalen Brunson, Anthony Davis, Jimmy Butler and the NBA's Best Players of the 2023 Playoffs

It's time for a look at how the NBA's 2023 Playoffs players stacked up according to catch-all metrics from Basketball Reference and FiveThirtyEight!

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With the NBA’s 2022-23 regular and postseason in the rearview, it’s time to take stock of those who made the playoffs with an exercise we used throughout the regular season.

For years, player efficiency rating (or PER) was the gold (er, only) standard for basketball’s catch-all metrics. Win shares eventually had their moment too, but more recently, adjusted plus-minus has become all the rage. And various outlets from around the internet have pushed their own versions of that last measure.

Basketball Reference houses box plus/minus (BPM), Dunks and Threes has estimated plus-minus (EPM), FiveThirtyEight gave us RAPTOR and Basketball Index has LEBRON. All are essentially trying to measure the same thing (impact by an individual player per 100 possessions played), but they get there in slightly different ways.

You could get a sense for how each looks at a given player by saying something like, “So-and-so ranked 10th in BPM, 18th in EPM, 15th in RAPTOR and 23rd in LEBRON,” but no one has time to do that for hundreds of players in a given season.

As a sort shorthand way of saying the above, a few years ago, I started sorting the league’s players (who meet a certain minutes threshold) by the average of their ranks in various catch-all metrics (not by the average of their marks in those catch-alls themselves).

Of course, it’s far from a perfect exercise. And I’ve never claimed that it should be some definitive way to rank players from an NBA season, but it can be a helpful guide.

Unfortunately, EPM and LEBRON aren’t tracked through the playoffs, so we have to be a bit more old school.

Basketball Reference updates playoff BPM, win shares per 48 minutes and PER every day. And if we sort every player in the playoffs with 100-plus minutes by the average of their ranks in those metrics and FiveThirtyEight’s (plus the cumulative versions of each), this is how things shake out.

Just one more note before we dive in, though: Sample sizes are small in the playoffs. This exercise is far more stable after 30-40 regular-season games. The most anyone could possibly play in a single postseason is 28. So, you’ll probably see some names in positions that will surprise you.

Rank. Player (average of ranks in rate and cumulative catch-all metrics)

1. Nikola Jokić (1.4)

2. Devin Booker (3.6)

3. Jalen Brunson (6.3)

4. Anthony Davis (7.0)

4. Jimmy Butler (7.0)

6. Jamal Murray (7.7)

7. Jayson Tatum (9.0)

8. LeBron James (10.6)

9. Anthony Edwards (11.7)

10. Stephen Curry (15.7)