Is Jalen Williams Actually the Thunder’s Key to Winning?

I analyzed which Thunder and Pacers players had the strongest statistical ties to team success. The results were surprising — and told a more complicated story than expected.

By one measure, Jalen Williams might be the most important player of these NBA Finals. (William Purnell/Getty Images)

It is sometimes said that while league MVP Shai Gilgeous-Alexander is the Oklahoma City Thunder’s best player, Jalen Williams is their key player: the one guy who unlocks all of the good things OKC can do when they truly get rolling. And while that sounds like the type of hoops-hipster contrarianism cooked up by someone eager to flex their galaxy-brain takes, it makes a certain degree of sense — and the NBA Finals haven’t exactly disproven the notion.

When Williams had a rough game by his standards in Game 1 (17 points but only on 6-19 shooting), the Thunder ended up blowing a double-digit second-half lead with Williams missing each of his last four field goals in the final minutes. But as Williams improved his output in Game 2,¹ the Thunder re-asserted themselves in the series and won with relative ease. From my perception at least, it fit into the narrative that Williams is an important bellwether for these Finals: When he plays well — especially by contributing up and down the stat sheet — OKC wins more often than not.

So I decided to put that theory to the test by analyzing which members of the Thunder and Pacers have stats most closely tied to team success.

For this exercise, I looked at every regular regular member² of the two finalists’ playoff rotations and calculated what’s called the point-biserial correlation coefficient between their per-minute stat lines and whether the team won or lost each game.³ In theory, this tells us which players’ performances are most strongly associated with team outcomes: the ones whose good games usually lead to wins, and whose off-nights often contribute to losses. In other words — the true “key” players in each lineup.