Archive for the 'History' Category

Alex Sonty, who writes ChicagoNow's Load O' Bull blog, has been paying close attention to Henry Abbott's TrueHoop posts about Derrick Rose -- specifically, this post about past MVP winners and their teams' rankings in wins. Henry found that team wins were highly correlated with MVP voting, to the point that 19 of the last 20 MVPs came from a team with a top-3 record. This of course is bad news for Rose, as the Bulls are 6th in winning % at the moment.

But Alex was wondering how past winners stack up in a schedule-adjusted margin-of-victory based metric like the Simple Rating System, where the Bulls are 5th. So here's the master list -- every MVP winner, with their team's rank in both WPct and SRS:

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In last night's Super Bowl, the Packers defeated the Steelers on the strength of an MVP effort from quarterback Aaron Rodgers. What made Rodgers' accomplishment more impressive was the fact that, less than three years ago, he was tasked with replacing Brett Favre, an institution at QB for Green Bay. Favre had been the Pack's starter for 16 consecutive years before the team moved on to Rodgers, but it's hard to argue that the decision was anything other than a success in light of their championship last night. Here are some similar situations in the NBA (when a team replaced a longtime fixture at a given position), many of which didn't work out as well as the Favre/Rodgers transition did:

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This post is a major data dump, and really more for trivia purposes than anything else. But I put together a list of every player who led an NBA team in scoring in a regular-season game from 1987-2011, along with their PPG in those team-leading games, and the team's W-L record in those games (for the full list of players, click here). Here were the 50 players with the most games as a leading scorer:

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Here's a fun post from Ryan DeGama of CelticsHub:

Semih Erden: Greatest Of All Time? | CelticsHub.com

In it, Ryan examines whether or not Semih Erden can eventually overtake Sean Higgins, Don Reid, and Zeljko Rebraca as the top player ever to be selected last in an NBA draft.

(Hat tip to TrueHoop for the link.)

As if Monday's post wasn't enough, we're back for another painful Cleveland history lesson courtesy of SI.com's Zach Lowe:

"Has any team finished last in both offensive and defensive efficiency? [...] Cavs now in danger of pulling off this double."

During the era in which we can apply the official possessions formula, two NBA teams can claim the unfortunate distinction of finishing last in both offensive rating & defensive rating in the same season:

Of course, that's just since 1974. If we use my pre-1974 possessions estimator, the list doubles in size:

How close are the 2011 Cavaliers, then? They're already dead last in offense, with a 0.9 pts/100 poss. cushion between them and #29 Milwaukee. They're also 28th in defense, fractionally ahead of #29 Toronto and 0.4 pts/100 poss. in front of last-place Phoenix. So it's certainly going to be possible for them to overtake (undertake?) the Suns before the season is over. Here's how they stack up against the other teams listed above:

This morning, Zach Lowe of SI.com's must-read Point Forward blog emailed me wondering how Utah's collapse in defensive rebounding % ranks among all-time declines. That got me wondering about the biggest drop-offs in all of the Four Factors, so I ran Z-scores on each team's numbers and looked at the biggest negative changes from one year to the next:

Offensive Effective FG%

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What was the best run ever for your favorite team? What was the worst stretch of seasons? Let's take a look at the raw numbers in terms of NBA winning percentage over an x-year span (including our regressed 2011 WPcts):

Best & Worst 2 Years

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Last week we had a question that I wanted to get to, but didn't have a chance until today. David wrote:

"After seeing LeBron drop 44 and Wade drop 34 in the game today, I was wondering when was the last time two players on the same team both scored 40+?"

Our box score database goes back to 1986-87 -- 1991 for the playoffs -- so we have three games on hand where two teammates scored 40+ points in the same game (and oddly enough, two took place in the postseason):

• Utah at Houston, May 5, 1995. Facing elimination in Game 4 of the 1995 West quarters, the Rockets got exactly the kind of performance they envisioned when they acquired Clyde Drexler to pair with Hakeem Olajuwon. Glide dropped 41, Dream poured in 40, and Houston dominated 123-106. Two nights later, Olajuwon & Drexler combined for 64 points to put Utah away, and they went on to power the team's 2nd consecutive NBA title bid that June.
• Chicago at Indiana, February 18, 1996. For the Bulls, this was just one of 72 victories in a landmark 1996 campaign that still stands as the most successful in NBA history. Fresh off the All-Star break, Chicago took their 36th win in their last 39 games when Michael Jordan (44 points) and Scottie Pippen (40) combined for more than 76% of the team's scoring output all by themselves.
• Philadelphia at Indiana, May 6, 2000. This time, Indiana was on the giving end of the scoring outbursts, as Jalen Rose and Reggie Miller each tallied 40 apiece during a 108-91 win over the Sixers in Game 1 of the Eastern Conference semis. The Pacers would go on to take the series in 6 games, eventually advancing to the NBA Finals before running into a Laker buzz saw.

Since there's a certain primacy to players who required fewer "ballots" for Hall of Fame induction, here is everyone in the Basketball Hall of Fame who played in the NBA/ABA/BAA, sorted by the fewest years between their final NBA/ABA/BAA season and the HoF class in which they were inducted:

This is not necessarily a list of players with the shortest time between retirement from basketball and HoF induction. In most cases, "retirement from the NBA/ABA/BAA" and "retirement from basketball" are the same thing, but it's possible for a player to delay his eligibility by playing in a minor league after retiring from the "majors".

¹ - Cousy initially retired in 1963, which would have made him eligible for the Class of 1969. However, he returned to the NBA with the Royals for 7 games in 1969-70. After re-retiring, he maintained his earlier eligibility from 1969.
² - Inducted before HoF established the 5-year waiting period.
³ - Baylor played 9 games before retiring early in the 1971-72 season, so for the Hall of Fame's purposes he was eligible in 1977.

I was curious about which seasons saw the most Hall of Famers in action, so I set up a query to count how many HOFers (inducted as players) were active in a given season, both in the NBA and the NBA/ABA/BAA combined:

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