With an All-NBA campaign last season, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander entered the upper echelon of players in the league.
The 25-year-old continues to prove that this season. He is averaging 30.1 points on 54.7% shooting, 6.3 assists and 5.6 rebounds.
In a recent Bleacher Report article that ranked the top 50 players in the league roughly a quarter into the season, Adam Fromal has Gilgeous-Alexander highly ranked due to his rolling player rating MVP score.
Now, what exactly is a rolling player rating? It looks at an individual player’s impact and boils it down to a single number. The five factors involved in the statistic includes:
- True peak (a player’s highest RPR score of the season)
- 10-game peak (the average of a player’s 10 highest RPR scores)
- Sum (the sum of a player’s RPR scores)
- Average (the average of a player’s scores)
- Team success (the relevant team’s SRS, or simple rating system, mark for the season, which is calculated via weighted average if a player has contributed to multiple teams)
“A player’s RPR MVP score is calculated by summing the Z-scores in each of the five categories, thus accounting for position relative to the pack in each component.
Players aren’t eligible until they’ve hit the 10-game threshold … and can lose ground for a variety of reasons, from not having consistent top-end performances to playing on lackluster teams to not having the requisite volume to challenge other standouts.
It is worth noting that defense is a bit undervalued by this metric, which both hurts the Association’s Defensive Player of the Year favorites and aids some of the league’s leading traffic cones.
It’s also difficult to account for plays that don’t lead to box-score contributions, and some players benefit from meaningless stats accrued in garbage-time situations, though the latter tends to be less relevant as the sample size grows.”
With that in mind, Gilgeous-Alexander comes in with an RPR MVP score of 17.408. This is the second-best mark behind only Nikola Jokic.
To put into perspective Gilgeous-Alexander’s meteoric rise, he was 48th in RPR MVP score two seasons ago and sixth last season. At 25 years old, it appears the Thunder have another MVP candidate in their prime for the foreseeable future.
