Draymond once deflected from his poor regular season performance by describing himself as a “16-Game Player”, as in someone who is at his best in the playoffs.

After Brunson’s epic performance this postseason, I wanted to do a deepish dive on who the best 16-game players were.

Methodology

I decided to look at two metrics, PER and Win Shares per 48 Minutes, because they’re the two catch-all performance measures that are readily available for the entirety of league history.

For each metric, I considered both the players’ ranks all-time, as well as the actual value. I filtered out everyone who either ranked lower in the playoffs for either measure or had lower values of the metric in the playoffs. I also only included players who ranked in the top 250 all-time in each metric and met whatever playing time minimum thresholds basketball-reference uses.

Results

For some context, it’s very unusual for players to actually play better in the playoffs. Only 35 improved their win shares per 48 and only 45 improved their PER. The overlap between those groups is less than I expected, leaving only 16 players in NBA history who were better in the playoffs by both PER and win shares per 48.

The order I ranked them in is their average rank by each of the four measures that I used.

The All-Time Best 16-Game Players

1. Gus Williams
2. Hakeem Olajuwon
3. Jalen Brunson
4. Mack Calvin
5. Walt Frazier
6. Shawn Kemp
7. Tim Duncan
8. Isiah Thomas
9. Lebron James
10. Michael Jordan
11. Reggie Miller
12. Chauncey Billups
13. Kawhi Leonard
14. James Worthy
15. Dikembe Mutombo
16. Red Robbins

How cool is it that there are 16 of these guys? What a crazy coincidence!

One cool note is that Williams, Brunson, Isiah, Frazier, and Chauncey are basically all of the small guards to ever lead a team to a title.

I was glad to see some of the guys I usually think of as great playoff performers make the cut, like Worthy, Miller, and Kawhi. Jimmy Butler almost made it, btw, but his playoff PER is trivially less than his regular season PER.

Shawn Kemp really surprised me but I think he may be something of an artifact, because he played a lot of subpar regular season games in Cleveland after he got fat. Maybe I never really gave him his due, though.

Considering how great they are in the regular season, it was kind of amazing that Lebron and MJ made the cut.

Brunson was the top improver by PER, btw, so there’s an argument that he is the greatest playoff improver of all time.

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