The NBA's 2025 All-Fluff Team
Who creates the most empty calories? Here are the fluff monsters, including multiple All-Stars and lottery picks
We’ve already covered the No-Stats All-Stars — a breed of player that does all the little things that help a team win, whether they show up in a box score or not: boxing out, setting good screens, throwing accurate passes into shooting pockets.
Today’s column presents the opposite type of player.
Below are five players, including three NBA All-Stars, whose stats overstate their impact. We can measure the gap between how much these five players appear to contribute and how much they actually contribute to winning NBA games.
It’s the All-Fluff Team — the Empty Calories All-Stars.
Here is a quick Q and A to introduce this metric, followed by the five players I’ve selected for this year’s All-Fluff Team:
What is fluff?
When a player has gaudy box-score stats but less impact on winning — according to plus-minus data — then he ranks higher in empty calories, or fluff.
What’s the significance of this stat?
Team success is at stake: The players with the most fluff contribute about four wins per season fewer than the players with the least fluff, all else being equal.
How do you find the fluff?
We like science over here, and it turns out there is a scientific way of determining the players whose advanced stats feature a little too much fluff.
In our simple, two-step process for finding the fluff, we compare these two components:
Adjusted Plus-Minus (APM). This is a metric that cares only about team points scored and allowed with a player on the floor, taking into account quality of teammates and opponents, while completely ignoring any and all individual stats — stat-stuffing won't get you very far in this metric
Statistical Plus-Minus (SPM). This is our in-house version of the metrics built on box-score stats, such as Box Plus-Minus (BPM).
Those two metrics are nearly identical for the average player.
But when a player’s stats dwarf his impact, he’s a candidate for the All-Fluff Team. In other words, when his SPM is a lot bigger than his APM, the player is producing a lot of empty calories.
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