Who are the best NBA players of the last 30 years?
While many sports analysts and reporters have made claims about the best NBA players in recent history, there have been relatively few attempts at using quantitative models to answer this question. In our approach, we first use statistical analysis to predict the regular season success of NBA basketball teams. We then extend this analysis to give offensive and defensive ratings for individual players. In an area with an abundance of performance statistics, we show that only a few key statistics are important to make accurate predictions and ratings. We argue that these simple models are often able to give more accurate predictions and ratings than more complicated models that have been used in the past.
