Every week, we'll rank the top 10 players from the previous week using game score as our starting point.
Created by former ESPN.com stats guru and current Grizzlies VP of basketball operations John Hollinger, game score measures a player's productivity for a single outing based on weighting of various box score statistics. It takes into consideration points, field goal makes and attempts, free-throw makes and attempts, offensive and defensive rebounds, assists, steals, blocks, fouls and turnovers. You can see how it's calculated here, but it's a relatively straight forward way of comparing great performances of the apples-and-oranges variety. It also holds up reasonably well over relatively small sample sizes.
A couple of house rules: While total value counts, we also can't discount brilliance over fewer games. Since players can't control the schedule, we won't penalize them for having fewer games in a week than others. For this reason, we'll use average game score over a week rather than the cumulative total. That being said ... total value counts! If Player A performs at 95 percent of the level of Player B but does it while playing five games instead of two, Player A probably did more to win the week.
So with that out of the way, on to this week's top 10 players.
Note: These rankings run through the games on Sunday, Oct. 22.