Stephon Marbury is the best point guard in the NBA. Just ask him.

“I already know I’m the best point guard,” Marbury proclaimed prior to the Knicks’ game against the Nets on Saturday. “It’s like asking if it’s raining outside. You’re going to tell them it’s raining.”

The skies seemed awfully dry later that night at Madison Square Garden. The Knicks’ 93-87 loss to the Nets reminded Marbury of a valuable lesson: First, walk the walk; then, and only then, may you talk the talk.

Marbury’s contest against New Jersey’s Jason Kidd provided an opportunity for the press to recall that the Nets’ fortunes immediately reversed when they exchanged him for Kidd – and to note further the Suns’ remarkable turnaround after unloading Marbury. Indeed, it seems that trading the Coney Island native is an instant panacea for any team that attempts it – a confounding development if he is indeed the NBA’s best point guard.

The tempest surrounding Marbury’s boast brings up some important unanswered questions: Is Marbury really the best point guard? If not, who is? And where does Marbury really rank?

We can examine these questions using my Player Efficiency Rating, a tool that measures each player’s statistical contributions on a per-minute basis. Using PER, I took the top point guards and charted where each ranked at his position over the past three seasons. I then averaged the three seasons, weighting the most recent twice as heavily as the most distant, to come up with a ranking of the top point men over that time.

Based on the rankings, Marbury has been near the top, but he’s not quite the cream of the crop. He didn’t crack the top three overall in any single season, while adversaries like Kidd, Sam Cassell, and Steve Nash consistently outperformed him.

Looking at this season’s stats, the numbers tell a similar tale, though Kidd and Cassell are showing their age. New Orleans’s Baron Davis ranks well ahead of Marbury, while Nash and Philadelphia’s Allen Iverson (new to the position after several years at off guard) also trump him.

Nonetheless, you could argue that Marbury is as close to being at the top of the mountain as he’s ever been. Davis has been spectacular when he’s played, but a back injury has kept him out of all but nine games. Iverson, while ahead on numbers, is a notorious chucker who only plays the point because the 76ers lack a viable option. The two younger players rising up to challenge the top guards, Steve Francis and Gilbert Arenas, are both shoot-first types who lack Marbury’s ability to distribute.

In other words, if you had to choose an All-NBA point guard for 2004-05, it would be either Marbury or Nash. Despite Phoenix’s incredible start, it’s not totally clear to me that it should be the latter. Nash barely rates ahead of Marbury statistically, and his defense could be described as “atrocious” whereas Marbury’s is merely “apathetic.” Throughout his career, the Canadian has consistently been very good but never quite great, and even in this his best season, a few players at his position outrank him statistically.

Marbury, meanwhile, is enjoying his best season as a pro while displaying increased maturity, both as a decision maker on the court and a leader off it. This is a major breakthrough for a guy who begged out of Minnesota because he was jealous of Kevin Garnett and then alienated most of the locker room in New Jersey.

So if we’re just focusing on the first 30 games of 2004-05, Marbury’s boast doesn’t seem too outrageous. It could even be seen as a positive: Don’t you want your team’s star player taking the court thinking he’s the best, regardless of what the reality may be? Isn’t that the instinct Isiah Thomas is dying to see in the team he’s built?

Not necessarily. Marbury’s boast wasn’t a sign of confidence as much as it was a sign of the old, immature Marbury – thinking about himself vs. Jason Kidd rather than Knicks vs. Nets, and still fretting over a trade that was three years and two teams ago. Thus, despite outplaying Kidd – Marbury scored 31 points by repeatedly beating his nemesis off the dribble – it was Stephon who came away looking like the fool.

The stellar numbers against the Nets in fact served only as a lightning rod for the biggest criticism of Marbury: He puts up numbers, but he doesn’t win. Even now, in what could be his most successful season, the first-place Knicks are there more by default than because of anything they’ve done, at just 16-14 in an awful division.

Ultimately, that’s why nobody other than the guy who wears no. 3 for the Knicks considers Stephon Marbury the NBA’s best point guard. With his mediocre defense and constant need for the ball, he’s never lifted the boats around him with the tide of his play, as Kidd did in New Jersey or Nash has done in Phoenix. Maybe one day Marbury really will walk the walk, so his talk won’t seem so ridiculous.