What is The Most Important Position in Basketball?

Photo Credit: Frank Franklin II/AP

The NFL has realized the value of the quarterback: their contracts dwarf those of their teammates and the league has made it a priority to protect them from injury. In basketball, is there a particular position on the court that holds greater value when compared to the other four?

This generation of basketball has seen tremendous talent emerge in the small forward and power forward positions, notably LeBron James and Kevin Durant. The previous generation had one of the most impactful centers of all time in Shaquille O’Neal. So are we able to determine which is the most important position on the basketball court? In this analysis, I will make a go at it.

The sample set of this analysis includes the last ten NBA seasons. Going back further is certainly possible; however, as I’ve discussed before, there has been a consistent improvement in shot efficiency over the years. Consequently, the present-day game appears notably different from before.

Going back 10 seasons, I’ve constructed a dataset of the 30 teams and defined team wins as the dependent variable that my model aims to predict. With a small but relevant sample of 300 data points, I had to limit the number of features in my model to 15 to prevent over-fitting.

The 15 features I included are each of points scored, assists dished out, and rebounds corralled for each of the five positions—point guard (PG), shooting guard (SG), small forward (SF), power forward (PW), and center (C). I divided my dataset into 90% training data and 10% testing data and built a Random Forest prediction model.

The model’s out-of-sample performance in the testing data resulted in a Mean Absolute Error of 8.52 wins and an R-squared of 37%. Essentially, the model is able to capture 37% of the variance in team wins by using just points, assists, and rebounds of the starting five. On average, the model predicts a team’s win total 8.52 wins higher or lower than the actual win total.

As illustrated in Figure 1 below, the model performed very well when predicting wins for teams that captured between 20 and 50 wins, tended to overvalue bottom tier teams that finsihed with under 20 wins, and tended to undervalue top tier teams that finished with more than 50 wins. The bench plays a critical role in elevating elite teams and a lack of depth compounds problems for weaker teams. Coaching, steals, blocks, and overall defensive positioning are other potentially impactful factors that are not considered in this model, and should be investigated in a further analysis.

Figure 1: Testing data scatterplot with the y-axis being the actual team win total and the x-axis the predicted team win total

Figure 2 below shows the feature weights of the model.

Figure 2: Random Forest model feature weights for point guard (PG), shooting guard (SG), small forward (SF), power forward (PW), and center (C);
rb: rebounds
ast: assists
pts: points scored

As evident from Figure 2, the most important factor that drives team success is having a point guard that can score at a high clip, and the second most important factor is having a point guard that can consistently dish out assists.

Being able to score is the most important characteristic of a point guard, shooting guard, and center. On the other hand, rebounding and assisting are more important than scoring for small forwards and assisting is more important than scoring for power forwards. Rebounding is a close second in importance to scoring for centers. Assists from the shooting guard position are the least important of the 15 features.

Table 1 below outlines the combined relative importance of each position. The point guard is approximately 10% more valuable than the average position on the court; the center carries an equal value to the average position; the power forward is worth 1% less than the average position; the shooting guard is worth 4% less than the average position; the small forward is worth 6% less than the average position.

Table 1: Relative importance of each basketball position

Conclusion

When constructing a basketball roster, it's crucial not to overlook the significance of the point guard position, which tends to hold the highest value on average. Furthermore, emphasize prioritizing point guards that can score and that can dish out assists. Once the point guard position is addressed, concentrate on scoring and rebounding from the center position.

Then, focus on assists and scoring from the power forward position. Next, prioritize scoring capabilities when selecting a shooting guard. And finally, focus on rebounding and assisting for your small forward.

Once a well-rounded starting lineup is established, elevating the team to the next level can be achieved by emphasizing the depth of the roster.