Have we found the new Michael Jordan?

Nikola Jokic is incomparable. And Anthony Edwards looks like MJ. But another player just had a season eerily similar to His Airness.

RAPTOR, the NBA projection system I designed — and which we hope to bring back for next season — works by making statistical comparisons between past and future NBA players. Some names come up a lot. It’s not hard to find modern players similar to Joe Johnson, for instance — even his name is generic — or Chris Bosh, or Jeff Hornacek. But one guy who rarely comes up as a comp is Michael Jordan. He was just too much of an outlier based on his combination of incredible scoring, toughness, and strong defense (9 All-Defensive teams) — not to mention the clutch factor that statistical systems like RAPTOR can have trouble measuring.

MJ comparisons are even rarer when dudes just sit around and reminisce about former players. Likening anyone to the perceived GOAT is sort of verboten, and you’d better bring receipts if you do. So it caught my attention when Bill Simmons recently compared Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, the Oklahoma City Thunder guard who is probably about to win his first MVP, to His Airness.

Nobody is claiming that SGA has anywhere near the career accomplishments of MJ. Jordan, in between his two retirements, had 10 Top 3 MVP finishes and won 6 rings. Gilgeous-Alexander, after this season, will at best have two and one, respectively.¹ SGA didn’t have the same pedigree coming out of college, and it took him a while to get going: Jordan won a scoring title at age 23, before SGA had even made an All-Star team. Gilgeous-Alexander’s strengths are slightly more subtle than Jordan’s, based partly on incredible efficiency. And he toils in relative obscurity in America’s 47th-biggest media market.

But to describe just how good Gilgeous-Alexander was this season, I don’t think you can do him justice without “going there” and invoking MJ. Although Anthony Edwards is the more aesthetically pleasing comparison — Ant even kind of looks like Jordan — SGA is more similar to Jordan in terms of his overall impact on the game.

My fake NBA MVP ballot

• 5. Evan Mobley

• 4. Jayson Tatum

• 3. Giannis Antetokounmpo

• 2. Nikola Jokic

• 1. Shai Gilgeous-Alexander

The NBA playoffs begin tomorrow, and today’s newsletter was originally on the Silver Bulletin editorial calendar as “Nate’s fake NBA MVP ballot” — I don’t have an actual vote — before it morphed into a column mostly about SGA. So I’ll just go through this briefly. There’s a relatively clear consensus on NBA MVP voting this year that I won’t deviate from much.

Nearly everyone lists Giannis and Jayson Tatum 3rd and 4th in some order, for instance. They’re different players in different circumstances, but I prioritize Antetokounmpo mostly because of the On-Off numbers. The Celtics are a very good team, but they were just 0.5 points better per 100 possessions with Tatum on the court, while there was an 11-point gap between the Bucks’ scoring margin with and without Giannis on the floor. Admittedly, the Bucks are a much shallower team, and I might have flipped them if the Celtics had won the Eastern Conference, but they didn’t.

Instead, your Eastern Conference champions are the Cleveland Cavaliers. Most people have the Cavs’ Donovan Mitchell listed 5th for MVP: the pickings are slightly thin this year since some other candidates who would usually be in the running, like Luka Doncic and Victor Wembanyama, didn’t play enough to meet the NBA’s 65-game requirement. After considering names like Edwards, LeBron James², Steph Curry, and Karl Anthony-Towns — my pro-Knicks bias is showing — I found nothing compelling enough to override the impulse to default toward rewarding a player on a team that finished with a 64-18 record. But I couldn’t get over Mitchell’s merely average efficiency — he shot 44.3 percent on field goal attempts — so I opted for his teammate Evan Mobley instead, who has slightly better On-Off numbers and who is in the running for Defensive Player of the Year.

But the only decision anybody will care about is whether SGA or Nikola Jokic gets listed first. I’m a huge Jokic stan. I think it was a minor travesty that Joel Embiid won the MVP in 2022-23: otherwise, Nikola would be coming off four straight MVP awards, making him the only player ever to sustain that streak. There’s no other player in NBA history even remotely like Jokic. (Maybe you can get there if you imagine that Larry Bird was 6’11”, weighed 284 pounds, loved horses, and was far more durable than the actual Bird.) Jokic’s performance from 2020-21 through this year is among the small handful of best peaks in NBA history. If RAPTOR says it was the very best peak once we get it back online, it wouldn’t surprise me.

And then this year, Jokic averaged a triple-double — 30/13/10, rounded to whole numbers — for the first time in his career, plus shot 42 percent from 3-point range while increasing his volume. EPM, along with my former colleague Neil Paine’s Estimated RAPTOR, is my go-to “all-in-one” metric while the original RAPTOR is down, and this was the 10th-best since 2001-02 according to EPM, meaning in the past 24 NBA seasons.³

Why not even higher? Well, because EPM considers Jokic’s defense to be mediocre and because we’re living in an era where eye-popping statistics are the norm. But that’s still very, very good. The only players to rank higher and not win the MVP are James Harden in 2018-19 (who probably should have won, but lost to Giannis amidst some voter fatigue; Harden won the MVP in 2017-18), and Chris Paul in 2008-09, an advanced analytics darling who nevertheless ranked slightly below James that year. And … SGA this season, whom EPM rates a few notches higher this year, also played slightly more minutes, and was on the much better team.

So while I wouldn’t begrudge anyone who listed Jokic first this year — how can you not vote for a guy who averaged a 30-point triple double? — it takes something incredibly epic to compete with one of the best peaks in NBA history. Something like …. Michael Jordan’s peak.

SGA = MJ?

Let’s break out the tale-of-the-tape format that I’ve sometimes used in the past. We’ll compare SGA’s 2024-25 season to the following alternatives:

• Jordan, averaged between his 5 MVP seasons.

• Kobe Bryant, whom Simmons also compared to SGA, in his lone MVP season in 2007-08.

• Dwyane Wade, perhaps the best stylistic comparison to SGA, the year he won the scoring title in 2008-09.

• Harden, averaged between his actual MVP year in 2017-18 and his statistically superior, should-have-won-the-MVP season in 2018-19.

• And Edwards this year, whom I’m including partly because of the aesthetic similarity to Jordan but also to show you the difference between good and great players.

The theme here is “physical guards”. These players have different silhouettes, but all were listed at between 6’4” and 6’6” and between 198 and 225 pounds. They’re bulky, able to draw fouls and get to the rim and provide at least a little bit of a positive contribution on defense.

Here they are compared by their traditional, per-game counting stats:

There’s really not a lot to differentiate them on the surface. Collectively, they averaged 31/6/6/2/1 line (points/rebounds/assists/steals/blocks), and nobody deviates very far from that.

Connoisseurs might note that SGA has the best assist-to-turnover ratio of the bunch, however, part of what you’ll see is a theme of his being both incredibly prolific and incredibly efficient. SGA also played fewer minutes per game than the others, which reflects the league’s increasing understanding that even superstars can benefit from extra rest, although since the Thunder (like most other modern teams) play at an incredibly fast pace, there’s less difference in terms of the number of possessions per game. One final detail-driven facet is that Jordan had more offensive rebounds than the others. My research for RAPTOR found that offensive rebounds are much more valuable than defensive ones, the logic being that defensive rebounds are the default, so there’s a larger expected value gain from overcoming that and extending a possession.

But in how these players achieved their 30-ish points per game, we start to see some differences:

The first thing that jumps out is that SGA almost pulls off the efficiency quad-fecta. Even compared against these other greats, he had the best overall field-goal percentage, the second best three-point percentage after Edwards, the best two-point percentage (by a bunch) and the best free-throw percentage, which matters quite a bit because all of these guys except Edwards are getting to the line a lot.

For classifying 2-point makes (dunks, layups, floaters, midrange), I had to be creative. Basketball Reference lists the number of dunks based on play-by-play data (in Jordan’s case, I have to extrapolate from what data we have since it isn’t available prior to 1996-97). I consider any shot made from under 3 feet that wasn’t a dunk to be a “layup”, and anything from 3 to 10 feet to be a “floater”, though toward the outer boundary of that range, you’ll also get some more traditional jump shots. And any made field goal from 10 feet or beyond that isn’t a 3-pointer is “midrange”.

The floater category is important because it’s where SGA really shines even relative to this elite competition. He averaged 2.5 made field goal attempts between 3 and 10 feet this year, meaning it contributed about 5 points per game to his scoring average, almost double any of the other players.

You’ll sometimes hear the term “3-level scorer” applied to players who are proficient both at the rim, in the midrange, and on 3-point attempts. With SGA, you’re almost getting a 4-level scorer instead, since he’s taking advantage of this space around but not quite adjacent to the basket that can otherwise be neglected. He shot 49.2 percent from floater range this year, which might not seem that good, but shots from this distance also tend to both draw more fouls and elicit more offensive rebounds than shots from longer range, which significantly improves their efficiency. They can also provide for a great bailout option when the shot clock is running down, part of why the Thunder had the 5th-most efficient offense in NBA history this season; with SGA on the floor, you’re basically never going to have a wasted possession.

For a modern player, Gilgeous-Alexander is also quite proficient in the traditional midrange, however. He shot 51.4 percent on long 2’s this season — shots beyond 10 feet — which are basically Kevin Durant numbers. This also gives him a different shot diet than, say, Harden, who abhors the midrange.

But unlike Wade or — if we’re being honest, Jordan — SGA is also a proficient (although not outstanding) 3-point shooter. I do think, if he were playing today with the benefit of modern analytics and its emphasis on 3-pointers and getting to the rim, Jordan might end up with an approach more like SGA’s and also get more reps in the gym to provide for more consistency from long range; he ran hot-and-cold on 3-pointers throughout his career. But the whole point is that SGA has some Jordan-like skills — not being nearly as athletic as Jordan (or Edwards) but making up for it with superior efficiency.

Finally, let’s look at a few data points in the “miscellaneous” category:

On-Court rating is simply how many points a player’s team outscored its opponents by per 100 possessions while he was on the floor. For SGA, this number is an astonishing +16.9. An NBA team that played a full season outscoring its opponents by that amount would be projected to finish with a 74-8 record, better than any actual NBA team in history.

And while SGA has some excellent teammates, OKC was nevertheless 11.1 points better per 100 possessions with him on the floor than without him. (This is how On-Off rating is calculated). True, you can do even better in On-Off if your teammates stink — like Wade’s in 2009 or Jokic’s this year⁴. Nonetheless, having SGA on the court amounts to difference between a team that might be a 4-seed and the actual Thunder, which just finished with the best scoring differential in league history.

Gilgeous-Alexander probably won’t make an All-Defensive Team this year — he hasn’t in the past — whereas Jordan made First Team All-Defense in each of his MVP seasons. But SGA is an active, physical defender and EPM shows his defense to be notably above-average. As defensive analytics have improved, voters have become less deferential to superstars.⁵ Based on what I can tell from our historic RAPTOR ratings⁶, Jordan probably deserved his strong defensive reputation while Kobe did not.

Although it’s not the ideal way to make these comparisons since some of these categories are more important than others, one final way to evaluate these players is simply to compare which player wins the head-to-head matchup among each of the 31 categories I listed above:

• Against Kobe, SGA has a 24-7 “record”. That is, he was superior in 24 categories and inferior in 7.

• Against Ant, SGA is 22-8-1 — they’re really not in the same league, particularly when it comes to the efficiency data.

• Against Harden, Gilgeous-Alexander is 18-12-1

• Against Wade, he’s 17-13-1

• And against Jordan, he just barely squeaks out a victory, 16-15.

With the fate of humanity on the line, I’d still take Jordan I suppose.⁷ But both traditional and advanced statistics — not to mention team performance — suggest that Simmons is right that Gilgeous-Alexander’s recent level of play has been in line with the greatest guards of all-time, including MJ. Until and unless he wins a couple of titles, the comparison will strike many hoops fans as ridiculous. But Jordan didn’t win his first title until age 27. SGA is 26 this year, and the Thunder are about as well-positioned for future success as any team in league history.

1. I put a little bit of money on Thunder futures a couple of months ago, so I’ll be rooting for him.

2. Both Edwards and James actually finished with negative On-Off differentials; their teams were better without them on the floor than with them. This speaks to the limitations of On-Off, which can be subject to variance, but nonetheless it’s pretty unusual for an MVP-caliber season.

3. Minimum threshold of 65 games played, prorated to the nearest whole number for seasons when a player’s team played fewer than 82 games.

4. Jokic had a +19.0 On-Off this season — and that’s not even the best total of his career. But he also creates some problems for this metric because he’s so unique that it’s hard to find a backup center who can play in even remotely the same way.

5. Also, in the past, the NBA required voters to choose two guards for the All-D team. It’s a positionless award now; otherwise SGA might have more of a shot.

6. For Jordan, I use historical RAPTOR ratings for the all-in-one stats because EPM is not available prior to 2001-02.

7. SGA also has a ways to go in making better commercials.