NBA

What the 2015-16 All-NBA Teams Should Have Looked Like

What the All-NBA Teams would look like if chosen using advanced analytics instead of a voting process.

It happens every single year.

NBA award season rolls around and just about every award or honor given out breeds some kind of controversy. It used to be that fans and pundits would simply get in heated debates about who won and who didn't, but now that the voting process is largely public and presented in great detail, even the individual votes are scrutinized.

But what if we did away with the voting process entirely and instead left the decisions up to advanced analytics?

Sure, there would still be issues of bias concerning which numbers to use, but at least there wouldn't be as many disputable votes rooted in homerism or other distractors. The focus would be entirely on identifying the league's top performers, and fanbases would have less to get mad about. If your favorite player didn't make the cut, it would be because he simply didn't perform well enough in a stat, rather than as a result of someone (or many someones) egregiously overlooking him.

For an idea of what that would look like, consider the All-NBA Teams that were just released:


There are plenty of debatable decisions there.

Rather than pick each and every one of them apart, however, why don't we just show you what the All-NBA Teams would look like if they were exclusively performance-based and stripped entirely of biases related to voter fatigue, popularity, market size, etc.?

To do so, we'll use our in-house metric, nERD.

If you're not familiar with nERD, it measures the total contributions of a player throughout the course of a season, based on his efficiency on both ends of the floor. Comparable to Win Shares, this ranking gives an estimate of how many games above or below .500 a league-average team would win over an 82-game season with said player as one of its starters.

Here are our "All-nERD" teams:

All-nERD First Team

Position Player Team nERD
Forward Kevin Durant OKC 19.7
Forward Kawhi Leonard SA 19.1
Center DeAndre Jordan LAC 12.7
Guard Stephen Curry GS 26.3
Guard Russell Westbrook OKC 14.7

All-nERD Second Team

Position Player Team nERD
Forward LeBron James CLE 15.5
Forward Draymond Green GS 10.2
Center Hassan Whiteside MIA 12.4
Guard Chris Paul LAC 14.2
Guard James Harden HOU 13.2

All-nERD Third Team

Position Player Team nERD
Forward Paul Millsap ATL 9.4
Forward Al Horford ATL 8.4
Center LaMarcus Aldridge SA 11.2
Guard Kyle Lowry TOR 11.5
Guard Jimmy Butler CHI 8.6


If you've got a problem with those teams, you'll have to go argue with the numbers.