NBA Power Rankings: Ranking the Starting Power Forwards From Every NBA Team

Blake Griffin has been generating a lot of attention, and deservedly so. His power and athleticism are a combination matched by few, perhaps none except the man standing on his right in the picture to the left. It has people wondering whether he should be starting in the NBA All-Star game. 

RANKING SCORES

If you don't want a gob of details then I'll just tell you this much. A great score is over 24, a good score is over 22, an average score is 20-22, and a below average score is 18-20 and a sucky score is below 18. If you want to know why read below. If you don't care, then just go to the next slide. 

METHODOLOGY

I've been working with a formula to rank players objectively based on both their offensive and defensive production. Part of the problem with that is that there are so few defensive stats out there which can give you a real grasp of how a player actually plays on defense. Steals and blocks are limited in that they can be misleading, partly because, if a player is exceptional it will account for at most five or six plays on average out of a hundred. 

Better stats that are available are defensive rating, which shows how many points a players' team gives up on defense while he's on the court, and Opponent Player Efficiency Rating (oPER) which shows the PER of the player they are guarding while on the court. I've been trying to figure out a method that incorporates both of these figures into a number that indicates the players overall defense. 

In essence, oPER can show a player's on the ball defense while a defensive rating suggests their help defense. Either one by itself can be somewhat misleading. After much playing around (and a few failed attempts) I think I've come up with a formula that adequately measures defense without over crediting it. 

The formula is a bit complicated but essentially the logic of it is that it takes the...