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The Best of the Best and Things to Come

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Categorized as: Author: Patrick, Fantasy Basketball
Posted on: June 18th, 2009

I feel like I’m missing something… wait, are the conference finals over already?

As Nels mentioned, we’ve taken a short and well-needed break at the GMTR laboratories. I was officially on vacation last week – where it proceeded to rain for five days straight – and Nels is on vacation this week (where he is hopefully getting much better weather).

But other than watching my least favorite team and least favorite player in the league plow through the Orlando Magic to win a championship and literally rewrite history, it’s generally been a quiet summer, especially in regard to fantasy basketball.

Don’t worry though – we are in the process of cooking up all sorts of good stuff for this summer, including an interactive project that I’ve been thinking about doing for a long, long time. I’m pretty damn excited about this one and I’ll officially make the big reveal starting tomorrow.

Until then, the project required me to update my top fantasy players of all time list that I made a few years ago. Now the list contains over 10,000 players, covering the years 1979-80 to 2008-09, ranked in order from 1 to 10-thousand-whatever. Use it to impress acquaintances, start arguments at bars, or soak up a 2 liter of cola. One of the accidental side-effects of the list was this: Being able to look at the number 1 fantasy player in the NBA every year from 1979-80 to 2008-09. Here it is:

Top Fantasy Player in the NBA by Year Since 1979

Year/Player/VOFRP
1979 Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (16.3)
1980 Magic Johnson (15.5) Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (13.1) – I missed the fact that Magic only played 37 games that year.
1981 Larry Bird (13.3)
1982 Larry Bird (14.5)
1983 Larry Bird (14.2)
1984 Larry Bird (17.6)
1985 Larry Bird (17.2)
1986 Larry Bird (18.8)
1987 Larry Bird (18.1)
1988 Michael Jordan (18.0)
1989 Michael Jordan (17.6)
1990 Michael Jordan (16.2)
1991 Michael Jordan (14.4)
1992 Hakeem Olajuwon (16.1)
1993 David Robinson (15.0)
1994 David Robinson (14.6)
1995 Michael Jordan (14.5)
1996 Michael Jordan (12.7)
1997 Karl Malone (10.7)
1998 Jason Kidd (10.8)
1999 Kevin Garnett (12.0)
2000 Ray Allen (11.4)
2001 Tim Duncan (12.4)
2002 Kobe Bryant (14.3)
2003 Kevin Garnett (15.2)
2004 Kevin Garnett (13.1)
2005 Shawn Marion (14.2)
2006 Kobe Bryant (11.8)
2007 Chris Paul (13.4)
2008 Chris Paul (13.8)

Now, your first thought (other than the utter fantasy domination of Larry Bird and MJ) is probably – what the hell is VOFRP? It stands for Value Over Fantasy Replacement Player and it’s basically a fantasy version of VORP. After ranking players for a given year, I found the 200th ranked player in that year and officially named him Joe Replacement Player (or Vlad Radmanovic for short). His value became the “replacement value” and was used to adjust every player’s score for that year. Consider it a simple way to adjust for league differences between the years.

And that trend among years is an interesting one. You can see that the top fantasy performances in the NBA have generally followed along with the pace of the league – it was running like gangbusters in the 80’s, really got mucked up in the late 90’s and started to rebound somewhat in the early aughts. Just like everything else, Kobe saved us.

Make sure to come back tomorrow… I’m going to need your help.

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Other Stuff Like This:

  • seanlb
    way to go karl malone?
  • MVP baby.
  • EJ
    Awesome!! The Legend!!
  • Evan
    Wow, Magic was on top for only one year???
  • I thought the exact same thing when I created the stats. I figured Magic would be tailor made for fantasy. But he actually took almost no threes until the end of his career and had a lot of turnovers, even by 80's standards. Those two things kept him a notch below Bird fantasy-wise.
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