NBA's Top Five

Who are the top five players in the NBA? There are multiple ways look at it. On voting, you could use the All NBA first team (5 players), or MVP vote shares. Statistically, you could use PER, Win Shares, Roland Rating, or even Points Per Game (weak, but the point of basketball is to score points). For explanation, Win Shares is an estimate of how many wins a player adds to his team (click here for more info) and Roland Rating is basically a hockey style plus minus rating (with adjustments for teammates, or for out preforming opponents, explained here).

What happens this year?

All NBA-Lebron, Kobe, Dwayne Wade, Dwight Howard, Kevin Durant

MVP votes-Lebron, Durant, Kobe, Howard, Wade

Win Shares-Lebron, Durant, Howard, Wade, Dirk Nowitzki

PER-Lebron, Wade, Durant, Chris Bosh, Tim Duncan

PPG-Durant, Lebron, Carmello Anthony, Wade, Kobe

Roland Rating-Lebron, Durant, Wade, Howard, Kobe

Say we give 5 points for first, 4 for second, and so on (All-NBA is 3 points each). For Durant, for example, he would get 3, 4, 4, 3, 5, and 4 points, giving him a total of 23 points. What are the final standings?

1. Lebron James - 27 points

2. Kevin Durant- 23 points

3. Dwayne Wade- 15 points

4. Dwight Howard- 10 points

5. Kobe Bryant- 8 points

Kinda makes sense right? Some might say Kobe should be higher (not in the regular season he wasn't), but it's a fairly accurate assessment of the NBA's top five players.