Nikola Jokić Is The Big Table Topper

Leader of Leaderboards

Apr 07, 2021

One aspect of being a stat-hungry NBA fan that no one ever talks about because it’s so mundane is the amount of time you spend looking at data tables. Basketball-reference.com, stats.nba.com, pbpstats.com, and a myriad of other NBA sites that track stats present the majority of their information in rows and columns. There’s good reason for this. Tables make it easy to look up the value of something specific or to sort every player by a particular variable.

But because so much data in the sports world is stored in tables, we spend a disproportionate amount of time talking about the players at the top (or sometimes the bottom) of these tables. Where a player ranks in a particular statistical category often becomes a more salient talking point than the value of the stat itself.

For example, last week during a game between the Denver Nuggets and the Los Angeles Clippers, Kevin Harlan ran out of breath listing all the different statistical categories that Nikola Jokić, the MVP frontrunner, sits at, or near the top of.

(Apologies for the potato audio quality. I have no idea what I’m doing.)

Setting aside for a moment whether it’s better to emphasize a player’s rank or value in a particular statistical category, Harlan’s rant had me wondering, exactly how many data tables does Jokić top?

It turns out, this is a tough question to answer.

I spent a few days over the past week looking around for the biggest NBA data table I could find. Specifically, I was looking for a very wide table, one with lots of different columns and statistical categories. I thought if I found a single table with a column for every publicly available stat and a row for every player then I would be able to answer my question pretty quickly. All I’d need to do is sum up the number of columns in the table that Jokic was at the top of.

But that table doesn’t really exist.

Most sites store data across many different tables. Linking them together is possible, but can be a real pain in the ass for reasons that aren’t all that interesting.

The closest I could find to a single, unified table that had a good mix of counting and rate stats and also filtered out low-minute players is on basketball-reference.com. There, on the season leaders page, you can view the top 20 players across 50 different statistical categories for any given season. The categories range from the benign like total personal fouls accumulated to the more advanced like Box Plus Minus 2.0 (BPM). Some of them are counting stats (like total points scored) and others are rate-based (like assist percentage). While this table is nowhere near comprehensive, it’s 50 different categories represent a hefty share of the stats that are most commonly cited by the larger basketball-watching world.

The chart below shows which of the 50 different categories Jokić ranks in the top 20 of.

In total, Jokić ranks number one in nine different categories, including:

He ranks in the top five on an additional eight leaderboards and in the top 20 on 35 of the 50 leaderboards overall.

The only other player in the same ballpark as Jokić is Giannis Antetokounmpo. The chart below shows the number of tables that Jokić and Giannis rank Nth or better in. For example, we already know that Jokić has a spot in the top 20 on 35 different tables. Meanwhile, Giannis is right behind him at 31, and with 15 top five placements of his own.

There was actually one other table I found that was wider than the one on baseketball-reference.com. If you use the API for pbpstats.com, you can get access to a table with more than 240 different individual player stats. They cover a lot of the same ground as the one on basketball-reference, but have more detailed statistics like blocked corner threes, points off of put backs, average three point distance and a bunch of things you probably didn’t realize were recorded.

Many of the stats on this page are counting stats and favor players who have logged a lot of time on the court, but just for fun I checked to see how many of these different categories Jokić ranks in the top N in.

Of the 242 tables on pbpstats.com, Jokic ranks in the top 20 on 94 of them. No one else places in the top 20 on more 80 tables.

To be clear, this is a pretty silly exercise. Even if we limit our scope to only look at the most robust advanced stats, a player’s rank isn’t as telling as the value of the stat itself. For instance, Jokić leads the league in BPM and Estimated Plus Minus (EPM) by a large margin. Meanwhile, he’s second to Rudy Gobert in LEBRON, but by a meaningless difference of one tenth of one point.

Ranks alone can’t tell you who the league’s best player is. But I do think seeing Jokić’s name so frequently at the top of so many tables will work in his favor in MVP discussions at the end of the season. At some point it just becomes hard to make a case for anyone else when so many things are showing Jokić first.

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