NBA 2020-21 Regular Season Most Valuable Players
BY ADAM GROSSMAN
In a post earlier this year, we highlighted the most valuable players in the National Basketball Association (NBA) at that time. Los Angeles forward Lebron James ankle injury, however, provided us with the opportunity to see if a star power can still generate significant value for a team even when he is not playing.
Of the top-five performing on-court players by position, Block Six Analytics' (B6A’s) Influencer Analysis Platform (IAP) has found that Denver Nuggets center Nikola Jokić is the NBA’s best player and Milwaukee Bucks forward Giannis Antetokounmpo is the NBA’s most valuable player for the 2020-21 regular season. However, James is still more valuable than both even though he missed a significant portion of the season with an injury.
B6A’s research has found that both on-court and off-court factors have a statistically significant relationship to revenue. From an economic perspective, teams should value employees (such as players) in large part based on their holistic ability to generate revenue.
Therefore, IAP was created in part to determine the MVP from both an on-court and off-court perspective. This means answering the following questions:
On-court – what is a player’s impact on winning and what is winning’s impact on revenue?
Off-court – what is a player’s star power and what is star power’s impact on revenue?
IAP is built upon the use of multiple regression analyses to determine the factors that drive winning and star power. For winning, shooting, offensive rebounding, assists, usage rates, and defensive plus / minus were determined to have a statistically significant impact on NBA teams’ on-court performances. The aggregation of these factors was used to determine how many wins a player generates for his team in a proprietary metric called B6A Wins.
For star power, jersey sales, social media conversation, and media mentions were found to have a statistically significant impact on NBA teams’ off-court performances. B6A Wins and star power metrics are then multiplied by the weights (coefficients) in our IAP model to determine how much each player impacts his team’s revenues.
To demonstrate why teams should not focus solely on on-court performance when determining value, B6A created a team with the five players with the highest B6A Wins total by position for the regular season. In addition, our team was selected to have the composition of a typical NBA five-man starting roster. We did include Luka Dončić as a forward in this analysis as he is listed as playing both forward and guard on the NBA’s website.
As the table above shows, the best player is not the most valuable player. Jokić is having the best season to date, however, Antetokounmpo is the player that drives the most revenue to his team.
We also included James in our analysis even though he was injured for a significant portion of the season.
The table above shows just how valuable James is even though he was injured for a significant portion of the season. In particular, James still had the highest jersey, social, and media mention values) of any player in the NBA. While James’ off-court value exceeds his on-court value, every player in our top-five has generated millions of dollars in off-court value for their teams.
The main takeaway is that IAP builds on core concepts that come from B6A’s approach to asset valuation focused on revenue generation whether it comes from players or partnerships. It is critical to determine all factors that drive revenue growth to fully understand the value of an asset for a specific team, league, or company. Taking a holistic approach, rather than focusing on one factor such as on-court performance, is typically a better way to determine value.