Archive for the 'Just For Fun' Category

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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In early November, we had a reader point out that James Posey & James Jones were having historic seasons -- namely, the two Jameses were 1-2 all-time in terms of the highest single-season percentage of shot attempts coming from beyond the 3-point arc. A month and a half later, I thought we'd check in once again on that pair, to see if they're still on a collision course with history.

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Back in early May, I conducted a poll asking our readers to vote on who should be inducted into the inaugural Fantasy Basketball Hall of Fame class, and you responded very well, registering almost 1,000 votes. According to the rules of the HoF (based on the Baseball Hall of Fame process), a player had to be named on 75% of ballots to be inducted, which left us with two players (2 point guards, actually): Kevin Johnson, and Tim Hardaway. KJ was honored in July, so now it's time for the original king of the killer crossover...

Timothy Duane "Tim Bug" Hardaway
Position: Point Guard
Height: 6-0 ▪ Weight: 175 lbs.
Born: September 1, 1966 in Chicago, Illinois
High School: Carver in Chicago, Illinois
College: University of Texas at El Paso
Draft: Selected by the Golden State Warriors in the 1st round (14th pick, 14th overall) of the 1989 NBA draft.

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This is pretty sweet... It's a PDF version of the Book of Basketball painting ESPN commissioned John Alexander to create, featuring all of the players the top 50 players in Bill Simmons' Hall of Fame pantheon-pyramid.

(Btw, somebody should make a Sporcle quiz where you identify the players from their depiction in the picture.)

For those who played their share of Connect Four growing up, ESPN Arcade gives you a chance to take on either Stuart Scott, Jeff Van Gundy, Amare Stoudemire, Rajon Rondo, Derrick Rose, Steve Nash or Brandon Jennings in the classic Milton Bradley game.

Be warned, though: all of these guys are apparently world-class Connect 4 players. And they will taunt you when they win. Which will be often.

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 fun layup from May that I didn't find until this week... As an exercise in counterfactual history, Roger Pimentel of How To Watch Sports used our own SRS to re-shape the NBA's 1990s landscape if Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls hadn't dominated the league so thoroughly. It's all for kicks, of course, but it is interesting to think of what might have been for Portland, Phoenix, Seattle, Utah, and Indiana, had #23 hadn't been standing between them and the championship.

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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As a follow-up to my review of Draft Day Sports: Pro Basketball 2, Wolverine Studios president Gary Gorski has generously offered to give one lucky BBR reader a free copy of his game. And since he asked that I come up with a contest for the giveaway, I thought this would be a great chance to revisit our old friends at Sporcle...

A significant part of DDS:PB2 is devoted to testing your skills as an executive, so I want you to name every NBA team's current General Manager in under 4 minutes. You can re-take the quiz as many times as you want, but starting the moment this post goes live at 11:00 AM EST , the first person to email me a screenshot of their form with all of the answers correct, within the allotted time, wins the game.

On your marks... get set... Go!!

UPDATE: We have a winner! This contest is closed.

Here's a fun question: Which uniform number is the best in NBA history? As in, which number has seen the most production from the men wearing it?

For the answer, let's turn to our uniform number database and use Win Shares, which includes defense and does a good general job of separating out the good players from the bad ones. You may quibble with WS when it comes to individual players, but over huge samples of many different players, it's the perfect tool for a question like this.

Here are the most productive numbers in NBA history (not including 1950 or '51, since they didn't track minutes those years):

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