The Hoop Games

Hoop Games and About Me

Jonathan Welch, creator of The Hoop Games

  • Basketball
    • Lifelong basketball fan
      • Dallas Mavericks fan: I’ve controlled for this bias everywhere in the Hoop Games except for any Dirk Nowitzki / Dwyane Wade scoring
    • Played basketball in high school and college but have since transitioned into retirement, playing mainly at the local park or in intramural/work leagues
    • I’ve also taken and passed the NBA agent exam
  • Career
    • Currently an Executive Vice President running Tech and Product at a Private Equity company
    • Former Amazon Tech and Product Leader
    • Former ExxonMobil Finance
    • University of Virginia degree in Economics
    • University of Notre Dame MBA

Where it started

This project started as a quarantine activity with friends of ranking the best players ever. Specifically, it started with a Dirk vs. Wade argument (a triggering one for me for those who know me), built on two numbers: career regular-season PER and championship count. The case was that Wade was the better all-time player because of those two data points. I didn’t think that told the full story — and of course, it was wrong.

Around the same time, I was watching The Last Dance documentary, which I’m sure most of you have seen. A comment after Jordan’s first retirement stuck with me: that he was retiring after three straight championships as “the greatest team athlete of all time.”

That felt like a stretch, given the accomplishments of Russell, Wilt, Kareem, Magic, and Bird over full careers with longer longevity. This model can put a number on claims like that: fact or fiction.

A similar LeBron James comment always stood out to me too. After the 2016 Finals, the one where the Cavs came back from down 3–1 and won Game 7, after which LeBron wore the “Ultimate Warrior” T-shirt back in Cleveland (an all-time troll job, even if he claims it wasn’t intentional) he said that championship “made me the greatest player of all time, that’s what I felt.” That was LeBron’s third ring: half of Jordan’s six, and still two behind Kobe’s five. Did that championship actually make him the GOAT? The GAME model can take a swing at that too.

The philosophy

Ranking players and arguing hypotheticals with friends is an essential part of being a basketball fan. I wanted to build a composite model that was dynamic and relative to every other player, and that would update automatically as a player added to their résumé: an MVP, an All-Star selection, a championship, a Finals MVP.

I also wanted it to:

  • Support answering the biggest “what if” questions in NBA history: What if Jordan never retired the first time and won another championship or two? What if Barkley, Malone, or Stockton had won a championship? What if Kobe had won a 6th ring? What if KD never joined the Warriors?
  • Answer what LeBron needs to do to top Jordan as the greatest of all time or what other players need to do, and how quickly, to break into the top 25 all time
  • Answer questions like: Does a player need a ring to crack to the top 10? How important are the incremental rings a player wins? How good was the player relative to his peers? How much actual help did a player have throughout his career?
  • Avoid crowning players all-time greats too early: young players will naturally rank low on longevity and career-total metrics until they’ve actually built the career.
  • Let you strip out the championship component entirely, to see how careers stack up without it, and how rankings shift under different scenarios.
  • Separately identify the best regular-season players, the best postseason players, and more.
  • Account for things that traditionally get undervalued in GOAT debates: teammate help, a player’s personal contribution to a championship instead of just the ring count, and more.

Where it landed

It was after The Last Dance documentary and that Wade-vs-Dirk conversation that I decided to combine two things I’m passionate about: data and basketball, and try to put a model around “who is the greatest basketball player of all time.” That became what I call the GAME Formula: initially a quarantine project to fill the time that used to go to hanging out with friends and watching live sports, both of which stopped for months, and then became a fun project for the last few years.

The model can genuinely answer a lot of these questions. This site is where I put that to work. I hope you enjoy it.

Special shout outs

  • My wife Kelly
  • My parents
  • Cirillo, Shuber, Sean, Smedley