Archive for the 'History' Category

Inspired by yesterday's quiz about the 1990s All-NBA Teams, here are the Win Shares leaders for each decade (made possible by the handy BBR Player Season Finder):

The Fifties (1952-59):

All-Decade WS team: G Bill Sharman (67.6) - G Bob Cousy (60.5) - F Dolph Schayes (95.2) - F Paul Arizin (69.8) - C Neil Johnston (92.0)

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I was browsing the stats this morning when I noticed that Ron Artest is currently using 14.7% of the Lakers' possessions when he's on the court, the 19th-lowest possession-usage rate of any qualified player in the NBA. Before joining L.A., Artest was accustomed to usage rates well over the league average of 20%, which had me wondering how Artest's decline in usage compares to other players who changed roles at varying times in the their careers.

It turns out that Artest is currently on pace to be one of only 5 players in NBA history (since 1952, at least) to have one qualified season with a possession rate of at least 25% and another with a rate of 15% of less:

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These days, the NBA always schedules its Christmas Day games to be marquee matchups, with announcers copiously throwing around phrases like "playoff preview" during the broadcast. But historically, how often have holiday combatants actually gone on to meet again in the postseason? And when they did meet, how often did the Christmas winner repeat their victory?

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In honor of the Christmas Day games tomorrow, here are some great Christmas performances from the past. First, the best individual games (from 1986-2009) according to "APMVAL", the adjusted plus/minus-based game score metric I introduced here:

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This is sort of a random data dump/trivia post, but this old Doug Drinen post about NFL teams' records vs. fellow playoff participants inspired me to run a similar query for NBA top-4 seeds' records against other top-4 seeds (in either conference). Since the NBA expanded to 16 playoff teams in 1984, here are the top-4 seeds with the best records vs. their fellow top-4 seeds:

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I was messing around with the database this morning, and I decided to check out the 2010-11 leaders in the percentage of team points produced by a player while he's on the court:

No doubt that this has been a good season so far for Kobe, but if he's producing 34% of L.A.'s points at age 32 on a team with Pau Gasol, Lamar Odom, Ron Artest, & co., what must his % have been around 2006 or so, when he was lining up with guys like Smush Parker and Brian Cook?

Curious, I dialed up the post-1977 single-season leaders in this stat:

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Here's a quick mailbag from "Imadogg", who writes:

"I was wondering who the best 'one-sided' players of all time are. For example, when thinking of the best offensive players ever, a name like Jordan or Wilt might come to mind, but no one would dare call them one-sided or only offense. On the other hand, when I think of Steve Nash, I think of perfection on one side of the ball and nothing at all on the other. On defense, guys like Dennis Rodman, Ben Wallace, or Dikembe Mutombo come to mind as amazing defenders who you would prefer never to give the ball to."

Imadogg went on to suggest looking at the percentage of a player's Win Shares devoted to offense vs. defense, so I'm going to take that approach when determining the most "one-dimensional" players in post-1952 NBA history.

I should note, one issue with using Win Shares is that they can sometimes be negative, which totally wreaks havoc on an exercise like this. But as a kludge, I just zeroed out the negative OWS/DWS, and took the percentage of those totals devoted to each side of the ball.

Among players with 10,000 career minutes, here are the players most extremely biased toward offense:

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Facing his former team in Cleveland last night, LeBron James played like his vintage Cavs-era self, pouring in 38 points on 15-25 shooting with 8 assists in 30 minutes. That had me wondering, where did James' performance rank among historical instances of a player facing his ex-'mates the season after he left town?

So I ran a database query on all games since 1987 where a player was facing a team he had played for the previous season. And for the performance metric of choice, I want to introduce an adjusted plus/minus-based game score-style metric called "APMVAL". I basically ran an intercept-free regression between APM value over replacement (minutes * (APM + 6)) and raw box score totals, coming up with this formula:

APMVAL = 45*pts - 35*tsa + 18*reb + 30*ast + 72*stl + 41*blk - 75*tov - 39*pf

The best APMVAL game of the overall 1987-2010 period was Michael Jordan's 69-point outburst vs. Cleveland in 1990 (Kobe's 81-point game was 2nd). Here were the best games against a player's former team in the first season after his departure:

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Because the much-hyped 2011 Miami Heat have had such a bizarre season so far (they apparently have a knack for whipping bad teams but losing close games to good opponents), we've had to think harder about the nature of blowouts. For instance, are they really very predictive if they come against weak opponents?

Adapting an old Football Outsiders study to the NBA, I found that the answer is actually 'yes'. I also found that a team ranking system which gives a lot of weight to blowouts is more predictive than one which places less emphasis on lopsided games.

Now BBR reader "Anon x 2" asks another question:

"What if being blown out means a lot more than blowing someone out?"

Let's take a look using roughly the same methodology as the "Guts and Stomps" article.

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Here's a follow up to a post I made two years ago regarding the best Thanksgiving Day performances since 1987. I only looked at raw totals then, but this time around I think we should nerd it up with an overflowing cornucopia of advanced stats. Yum!

Hollinger Game Score

The most basic metric you might consider "advanced" is John Hollinger's Game Score. It's a simple linear weights formula based on his infinitely more complex Player Efficiency Rating, but the weights are a step up from something like TENDEX. Here are the best Thanksgiving games by game score since 1987:

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