With two rounds of playoff basketball in the books, the NBA's 2024 postseason rolls on to the conference finals. But how did we get here? Who were the driving forces carrying their teams to the doorstep of the NBA Finals?
Just like we did after Round 1, we'll be ranking the top players of the playoffs to date -- filtering down to those whose teams made the second round -- by using a mixture of statistics. Specifically, we're blending estimated RAPTOR, box plus/minus (BPM), win shares and player efficiency rating (PER) into a single measure of consensus wins, with each component getting equal weight. (We'll also be adjusting for the number of games each team played, so players whose teams won more quickly don't get penalized.)
The rationale for mashing up our metrics is that we're getting an overall picture of who has looked the best according to a variety of popular stats. And yes, these metrics often value two-way play, as well as scoring efficiency in addition to pure volume -- so players such as Luka Dončić and Jalen Brunson (both of whom have below-average true shooting percentages during the playoffs) might get downgraded when compared with Nikola Jokić or Anthony Edwards and their sky-high shooting marks.
Remember, this is purely a statistical ranking, unaltered aside from the adjustments we made to put each rating on the same scale of wins added. It's also important to note that this isn't a ranking of the league's best players in the playoffs; it's just based on who has put up the best performances since the postseason began in April.
Here are the 12 most valuable performers of the first two rounds among teams that punched their tickets to the conference semifinals, by the numbers: