The opening round of the 2024 NBA playoffs is in the books, and it wasn't without its surprise twists or heroic performances. From Jamal Murray and the defending champion Denver Nuggets closing out the Los Angeles Lakers to Jalen Brunson's old-man shot-making for the New York Knicks, Philadelphia 76ers star Tyrese Maxey's four-point play, and the wild back-and-forth Game 3 battle between the Milwaukee Bucks and Indiana Pacers, this postseason etched some indelible moments into NBA history.
Now it's time to assess who played the best during this initial set of games, and whether the remaining players can maintain their performances in Round 2 and beyond.
To help measure who was most valuable during the first round, we're using a metric I'm calling consensus wins, which averages a player's value across a number of advanced metrics. We'll be combining estimated RAPTOR, box plus/minus (BPM), win shares and player efficiency rating (PER) into a single measure of wins added in which each component gets equal weight.
Despite his Lakers losing, LeBron James was one of the most valuable players of Round 1 because he carried his team offensively -- he had a 63.7% true shooting percentage with a 29.0% usage rate and assisted on 36.4% of teammate baskets when on the court -- while also making an impact on defense with a 3.0% steal rate and 2.1% block rate. Looking at his component wins added via BPM (1.7), PER (1.5), RAPTOR (1.2) and win shares (0.8), our consensus estimates James produced 1.3 wins during the first round, which ranked third highest behind only Denver's Nikola Jokić, Dallas' Kyrie Irving and Philadelphia's Joel Embiid. The Lakers might have been eliminated by Denver, but they likely would have been swept for the second straight postseason without James' play.
(We'll adjust for the length of each series to make sure players on the Oklahoma City Thunder or Minnesota Timberwolves aren't penalized because they closed out their first-round opponents in four-game sweeps.)
This ranking is not the same as the one compiled by my colleague Chris Herring before the playoffs began. He was looking at the entirety of a player's résumé to determine the best players of the postseason field. Here, we're looking at the best players of Round 1. Many stars are on both lists, but some surprising players will appear here because they had stellar performances in the stretch of four to seven games that made up the first round. Still other players didn't crack the top 20 because it is a holistic ranking: Each metric values something different to a greater or lesser degree, so a player has to impress across many dimensions to rate highly here.
With that said, here are the 20 most valuable performers of the first round, by the numbers: