The Nuggets' Best 8 Players Are Exactly as Good as the Spurs' Best 8, But...

It's time to see how the Nuggets stack up against the boogeyman, the San Antonio Spurs.

ABOUT THE REAL PLAYER RATING
1 The real player rating is calculated for the top 300 players ranked according to gross player rating.
2 A player must have at least 8 minutes per game to be included.
3 A player must have played in at least 1/4 of the number of games that the player or players who have played in the most games have played to be included.
4 Real Player Rating = Gross Player Rating / Minutes Per Game.
5 Gross Player Rating is the net total of the following:

ADD THE FOLLOWING
Points
Rebounds
1.4 X Assists
Steals
1.4 X Blocks
# of Field Goals Made
0.5 X # of 3-Pointers Made
0.25 X # of Free Throws Made

SUBTRACT THE FOLLOWING
0.7 X Turnovers
0.8 X # of Missed Field Goals
0.8 X # of Missed Free Throws

The Real Player Rating reflects reality better than the gross player rating, since it washes out differences in playing times among the players. The straight up player rankings are obviously heavily affected by how many playing minutes the various players get. With many teams, you can rely on the coach to give his various players roughly the playing time that makes the most sense for his team. Unfortunately, some coaches bring other factors besides actual performance into their rotation decisions. Therefore, it makes good sense to introduce a new and extremely important statistic that Nuggets 1 calls the Real Per Minute Player Rating. As the name implies, this is the gross ESPN player rating divided by the number of minutes. The statistic is called Real Player Rating for short.

This statistic allows anyone to see whether or not players who play only a small number of minutes are doing better than their low gross rating will indicate. You can spot diamond in the rough players who are not getting all the respect and playing time due to them. At the same time, it will allow anyone to see whether players with a lot of minutes are playing worse than, as well as, or better than their gross rating shows.

In summary, the Real Player Rating allows the reader, at a glance, to see exactly how well each player is doing without regard to playing time, which is subject to coaching error and subjective and less important factors such as a player's personality. The Real Player Rating provides the real truth-pure knowledge not available anywhere else.

Rank, Player, Team, Pos., Real Player Rating
DENVER NUGGETS
13 Carmelo Anthony, Den SF 1.024
19 Allen Iverson, Den G 1.002
29 Marcus Camby, Den C 0.948
101 J.R. Smith, Den SG 0.776
112 Kenyon Martin, Den PF 0.764
116 Linas Kleiza, Den GF 0.759
146 Anthony Carter, Den PG 0.708
225 Eduardo Najera, Den F 0.606

SAN ANTONIO SPURS
8 Tim Duncan, SA FC 1.116
10 Manu Ginobili, SA SG 1.090
22 Tony Parker, SA PG 0.994
125 Brent Barry, SA G 0.740
133 Fabricio Oberto, SA C 0.727
151 Matt Bonner, SA FC 0.705
219 Ime Udoka, SA SF 0.616
234 Michael Finley, SA GF 0.595
248 Francisco Elson, SA FC 0.573
270 Jacque Vaughn, SA PG 0.527
289 Bruce Bowen, SA SF 0.412

Now if you compare the 8 Nuggets who are among the 290 NBA players good enough to be ranked to the BEST 8 Spurs, by taking the averages of the player ratings, this is what you get:

Nuggets: 0.823
Spurs: 0.823

The two teams best 8 players are exactly equal as of December 28, 2007. But that's it for the Nuggets. The Spurs have three more players who are ready right now to play in the playoffs and the Nuggets technically have none. On the bright side, both Nene and Chucky Atkins are back from long injury outs and, as long as these two get back into gear, the Nuggets will have 9, only 1 fewer than the Spurs.

However, if George Karl goes ballistic again and benches anyone for the playoffs, then the Spurs would enjoy the 10-8 advantage in players ready to bring home another series win for San Antonio, as if they need one.

In any event, no matter how many good players Karl has on paper, he usually can only figure out a way to use 8 of them effectively in games anyway, and sometimes only 7. Coach Greg Popovich of the Spurs almost always makes use of 9 players in individual games, and sometimes even 10.

The other caution to keep in mind is that neither this nor any other statistic measures the intensity and quality of defending, and everyone knows that the Spurs have some of the best defenders in the NBA, whereas the Nuggets are just a little above average in made you miss defending at best.