Dancing With Noah

Just messing around, getting triple doubles

Category Archives: STATS

The Pain of Being Number One

2 Comments Posted by on November 29, 2012

Injuries are the bane of an athletic existence. When our favorite athletes (in any sport) get hurt, everyone loses: The players and teams lose out on money, investments and glory. The fans lose out on entertainment and glory and are forced to wonder what could’ve been which leads to wild speculation and imagination. And injuries come in all shapes and sizes: Shoulder strains and contusions, patella injuries, concussions, colds, flus, torn ACLs, torn Achilles tendons, hamstring injuries, slipped disks, back injuries, stress fractures, broken bones, HIV, chlamydia, gonorrhea, diarrhea, migraines, scratched corneas, stabbings, shootings, sprains, depression, anxiety, substance abuse and on and on. All players are vulnerable to injuries and the recent revelation that Andrew Bogut underwent the dreaded microfracture surgery in April opened my eyes to something I already knew: The top draft picks in the NBA haven’t had a great run of health over the past decade.

The injuries plaguing these young players run the gamut from freak (Bogut’s fall that led to a horrific broken wrist) to chronic (Yao Ming and Greg Oden) and have hit players of varying race, age and position. Injuries don’t give a fuck what God you pray to or what block you grew up on or how much pain you’ve already experienced in your life. Injuries are lurking … just ask the top picks from the past decade:

  • The table above looks at the percentage of games a player could have appeared in (% Possible = 100% for each player) and the percentage of games he missed (% Missed).
  • Graph doesn’t include playoff games.
  • A rookie like Anthony Davis is unfairly represented due to the small sample size.
  • Yao Ming appears twice. The first Yao Ming (without asterisk) represents his career pre-retirment. The starred Yao Ming* includes games he missed since he’s been retired with the assumption being that without injuries, Yao would still be with us today and the NBA would be a radically different place.
  • The total numbers for all players are: 6,147 possible games played, 4,455 games missed for a total of 27.5% missed.
  • If you remove the top (Dwight Howard, 2.9% missed) and bottom (Greg Oden, 80% missed), the percentage of missed games drops to 26.5%.
  • I’m uncertain about league averages for games played/missed, but my gut reaction is that missing 27.5% of possible games is on the high end. Additionally, teams drafting a player number one overall likely have the expectation that these players will be suiting up more frequently than the numbers here show.

Lastly, if anyone out there has access to injury data or DNP reasons, that additional information could add quite a bit of insight into the causes for the numbers above. As it stands, let’s all have a moment of silence for the careers of Greg Oden and Yao Ming.

Guess I'm Strange, STATS , , , , ,

Guess Al’s Strange

1 Comment Posted by on April 16, 2012

Sometimes we go through hiatuses and require a divine intervention, an intoxicating muse or maybe just a bizarre stat to snap us out of our doldrums.

So it was tonight when I was looking at the box score from the Mavs-Jazz game which ended in triple overtime with the Jazz getting a huge 123-121 win. Six players played over 50 minutes, the teams combined for 62 free throw attempts, five players scored over 20, Al Jefferson had 28 points and 26 rebounds, Dirk put up 40. The game was stuffed with numbers of all kinds, but what stood out the most was a pair of zeros side-by-side, attention grabbing emptiness: In 54 minutes and 4 seconds of play, Al Jefferson attempted zero free throws.

This is a man who grabbed five offensive rebounds and took nine shots in the paint. He spent time most contentious area of the court, but didn’t get to the line once. In all fairness, no one fouled out this. It wasn’t a foul fest or a game won or lost in the trenches. In terms of free throws attempted, the 62 combined free throw attempts were just a few more than the league’s FTA average per minute.

But the 0-0 in 54 minutes made me wonder who, if anyone had ever endured this kind of FTA allergy. And so I took a look at basketball-reference’s player game finder (dating back to 1985-86) and came up with the following, not-so-coveted list:

Player Team Season Minutes Career FTA/G
B.J. Armstrong Chi 1992-93

58

1.9
Alvin Williams Tor 2000-01

57

1.8
Dennis Rodman SAS 1993-94

56

2
Jim Jackson Hou 2003-04

54

3
Bimbo Coles Mia 1993-94

54

1.8
Charles Oakley NYK 1997-98

54

2.7
Al Jefferson Uta 2011-12

54

3
Guess I'm Strange, STATS, Utah Jazz , ,

3 x 15 Club welcomes Rajon!

3 Comments Posted by on March 4, 2012

In a week when rumors ran rampant that the Celtics were “aggressively” looking to trade their enigmatically styled point guard, little Rajon Rondo responded by blowing the dust off his headband and putting Boston on his back in a Sunday matinee against the Knicks. Rondo went for 18 points, 17 rebounds and 20 assists in the overtime victory. That line is crazy even if came with a D’Antoni caveat.

To put Rondo’s statistical performance into context, I took a journey to Basketball-Reference.com’s Player Game Finder and found out that since 1985, only three other players have performed the improbable 3 x 15 (15 points, 15 rebounds, 15 assists in one game):

Rondo, more exclusive than secret societies.

**I didn’t see the tail end of ABC’s Knicks-Celtics broadcast today, so if they flashed some stat graphs referencing the numbers above, I can’t be accused of stat-jacking since I had no awareness of its existence.

Boston Celtics, Guess I'm Strange, STATS , , , ,

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