Despite all the mystique surrounding the NBA Finals in the basketball world, relatively little has been done to rank/tabulate these games. The best attempts I've seen usually involve ranking Finals Performances by Game-Score, which while something, is clearly not the optimal way to approach this.
With that in mind, I set out to rank every Finals performance since 1978 using Alternate Win Score (AWS), the best linear boxscore metric for evaluating NBA players. I also made sure to account for pace and strength of opponent, to give a more accurate picture of player production.
The rankings for 2000-2013 are complete, and a sample is posted below. Performances are ranked Per-Game, with a Per-48 column on the left that allows you to look at production per minute.
With that in mind, I set out to rank every Finals performance since 1978 using Alternate Win Score (AWS), the best linear boxscore metric for evaluating NBA players. I also made sure to account for pace and strength of opponent, to give a more accurate picture of player production.
The rankings for 2000-2013 are complete, and a sample is posted below. Performances are ranked Per-Game, with a Per-48 column on the left that allows you to look at production per minute.
Top 30 Finals Performances 2000-2013
I plan on doing the same all the way back to 1978 (when the data ends), and adding a third column that depicts how "valuable" each performance was (based on the percentage of a teams AWS each player accounted for).