The NBA Finals are set to tip off between the Boston Celtics and the Dallas Mavericks on Thursday at 8:30 p.m. ET (watch all games on ABC), and that means the on-court stars will be out for the sport's biggest series. But which stars have shone brightest in the playoffs so far?
To help answer that question, let's once again turn to the numbers. Like we did after the first and second rounds of the 2024 NBA playoffs, we're ranking the players who were active in the most recent conference finals round, based on their statistical value added in the entire playoffs to date. We'll be using a mixture of different advanced metrics, blending together estimated RAPTOR, box plus/minus (BPM), win shares and player efficiency rating (PER) into a single measure of consensus wins, with each component getting equal weight. We'll also adjust for the number of games each player's team played, so stars from the Celtics don't get penalized because they swept their way into the Finals.
As always, this ranking is purely based on our composite of different stats in playoff games only. But it provides a nice perspective on which players the metrics show are steering their teams deep into the playoffs -- superstars such as Boston's Jayson Tatum and Dallas' Luka Dončić, for instance -- and players, such as Indiana's Tyrese Haliburton and Minnesota's Anthony Edwards, who put up valiant efforts for squads that just fell short.
Here are the 12 most valuable players of the first three rounds, among players whose teams went to the conference finals: