Who do the advanced stats say are the best Sixers players?

The eye test can always tell us which Philadelphia 76ers players appear to be doing the best, but the numbers don’t lie. Who’s REALLY doing the best?

Thus far, the leaders of the Sixers have been Ben Simmons and Joel Embiid. This is pretty much indisputable. Looking at the advanced stats reveals those two on top, and they flip-flop between first and second place depending on which stat you look at.

The question is not about these two, because we know they’re good. The question here is who else on the roster has been performing well? Based just on gut feeling, I’d expect J.J. Redick and Robert Covington to have positive stats, and Dario Saric and Timothe Luwawu-Caborrot to have negative ones.

On this front, I was only partially right. I used Win Shares per 48 minutes as my statistic of choice, but truthfully most of them give similar results. In terms of highest to lowest rating, the results (among players with at least 50 minutes played) are as follows:

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Ben Simmons
Joel Embiid
Robert Covington
T.J. McConnell
Amir Johnson
Jerryd Bayless
Timothe Luwawu-Caborrot
J.J. Redick
Justin Anderson
Dario Saric
Markelle Fultz

This isn’t too surprising on second glance. Simmons, Embiid, and Covington have been the Sixers three best players. Saric and Fultz have played poorly, for various reasons.

For me, the ones that defied my expectations were McConnell, Johnson, and Redick. I’ve always known McConnell was feisty, but I didn’t think he’d rank this high. Perhaps his newfound three-point shooting really is an incredible boon for the team.

Amir Johnson was even more shocking, because I felt like he’d been doing pretty bad this year. Yet somehow, he’s still making a positive impact at the end of the day. I don’t understand it either completely, but he’s been putting up good advanced numbers without good counting numbers or a pretty-looking game for his whole career, so I doubt this is a fluke.

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I also thought Redick was doing well, so I didn’t expect him to be so low. However, he’s only shot 35.3 percent from deep (which is pretty average and very un-Redick) and he has the worst Defensive Box Plus/Minus of our rotation players apart from Justin Anderson. If Redick plays his typical subpar defense and continues to not make up with it by shooting well, then he will hurt the team.

All of this analysis should come with the disclaimer that it’s a small sample size; less than one-tenth of the season has been played. Things can and will change. Don’t draw too many conclusions from the state of things so far.

I also wanted to analyze lineup data, but the Philadelphia 76ers‘ most used lineup (Bayless, Redick, Covington, Simmons, Embiid) has played 52 minutes together, and the next closest has only 19. There is truly no point in trying to extrapolate from that data.

Perhaps more interesting to note is that Brett Brown has used 105 different lineups in eight games. Clearly, he’s still mixing and matching players to find what works best for the team, and it should be interesting to see if his rotation solidifies a bit over the course of the year.

Next: So T.J. McConnell can shoot now...

The stats can’t tell us everything, and watching the game still matters. However, in many cases the numbers can back up what we already believe to be true. We’ll have to see if these trends hold over the next 74-plus games this year.