Who Are the Unsung Heroes of the 2025 NBA Playoffs (So Far)?
Let's shine a spotlight on the players making a big playoff impact without gaudy boxscore numbers.
The NBA playoffs are where the stars come out to shine, and we’re already seeing that in 2025 with big numbers from Anthony Edwards, Nikola Jokić, Jalen Brunson, Steph Curry, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and a rejuvenated Kawhi Leonard. However, you need unsung heroes to thrive as well, and that’s what this post is all about — players with nice advanced metrics in the playoffs, even if their basic boxscore numbers don’t fly off the page.
Here’s a plot of every player with at least 50 minutes in the playoffs (as of Monday morning), along with their Wins Above Replacement per game, their modified Points + Rebounds + Assists per game,1 and the circles are sized according to their odds of making Round 2 in the Neil’s Substack “stats-only” forecast:2
Players above the trendline are those who have more WAR per game than we would expect from their basic boxscore stat-stuffing; players below it have fewer WAR than we’d expect. And of course, players to the top right like Jokić, Edwards, Curry, Jayson Tatum, LeBron James, etc. have stellar basic and advanced stats — no surprise there.
The players I’m more interested in, though, are further to the left side of the x-axis on the chart, those who have less gaudy PPG + RPG + APG but still make a big impact on the game.
For instance, among players with below 25 mPAR/Gm, the WAR/Gm leader is Cleveland’s Ty Jerome, a guy who has shown up among the league leaders in Estimated RAPTOR on a per-possession basis all season long. In the playoffs against Miami, he’s been associated with the highest plus/minus of any Cav who played at least 50 minutes (+45.1 per 100 possessions), and the team is +40.1 better with him on the court than off. His high level of scoring and passing efficiency + volume makes him an instant offense-booster, and it’s fitting that a guy with hidden value would snag a lot of steals on defense, too.
Now, Jerome is becoming less of a well-kept secret by the day; he had 28 points in Game 1 against Miami and a double-double (13 points, 11 assists) in Game 3. So maybe we should rifle around deeper in the bargain-stats drawer for more unsung stars. Among those below 20 mPAR/Gm, the WAR/Gm leader is technically Jimmy Butler, though that’s in the 2 games before he was hurt. More in the spirit of the exercise is Jerome’s Cavs teammate Max Strus, who has also been hyper-efficient — he’s hitting 50 percent of his 3-pointers on 7.3 attempts per game — but with a much lower usage rate (16.4 percent) overall.
The ability to make an impact without scoring is the name of this game, and that’s also why Oklahoma City’s Alex Caruso leads in WAR/Gm among those with fewer than 15 mPAR/Gm — few players better fit the mold of a perimeter defensive specialist who can also knock down the odd 3-pointer than the Bald Eagle. And keeping with the OKC defender theme, the WAR leader under 10 mPAR/Gm is Caruso’s teammate Cason Wallace, who has a +3.4 Estimated RAPTOR in these playoffs despite averaging 4.0 PPG with a microscopic 9.2 percent usage.
If we’re looking for the guys with the biggest positive differentials between actual WAR/Gm and what we’d expect from PPG/APG/RPG, the overall ranking is: Jerome, Caruso, Butler, Strus and Minnesota’s Jaden McDaniels, followed by another Thunder player — Jalen Williams. But Williams isn’t unsung; he’s just a star. (Just because he basically does everything for OKC doesn’t mean we should let the MVP shadow of SGA obscure how brilliant Williams has been.)
It’s no coincidence, by the way, that the players above the trendline have larger circles — again, representing advancement odds out of Round 1 — than the names below the line. It’s a bit circular, because plus/minus is technically part of the Estimated RAPTOR brew, but it is also logical that the same level of boxscore-stuffing would be more valuable on a winning team than a losing one. By having a greater impact than their basic stats indicate, players at the top of the chart above have put their teams in a better position to move on in the playoffs — and isn’t that the essence of being an unsung hero, after all?
Filed under: NBA
This is just PPG + RPG + APG, but the “modification” is simply to weight rebounds and assists at 0.65 relative to points, in accordance with their relative weights in the Estimated RAPTOR formula.
The full Composite Forecast depends on FanDuel odds as an input, so it has chances to make and/or win the Finals, but nothing about advancing to a particular round before then.