Week number two of the Sunday to Monday notes and the NCAA marches through its first week of mediocre, but riveting basketball. The NBA knows no breaks, unless you’re suffering through the spring swoons of Indiana (7-6 in March) and Miami (6-7). So while the “amateur” darlings (Jabari, Wiggins, Smart, McDermott) take March Madness dives, the NBA’s not ready to go fishing just yet.
The triple double was immortalized by Magic or Oscar or maybe Ice Cube. LeBron’s the youngest to triple double, Karl Malone’s the oldest. Wilt had triple doubles in nine straight games once and is the only player to ever get a triple double with at least 20 of each category – 22 points, 25 rebounds, 21 assists. The Big O averaged a triple double for an entire season and had 41 triple doubles in the same year. Grant Hill finished his career with 29 triple doubles, 10th most all time. For all the triple doubles the league has seen (a little over 34/season for the past 20+ years), Isaiah Thomas, the 5’9” Tacoma-born dynamo and starting PG for the Kings, became the shortest man in league history to record one on March 18th when he went for 24 points, 11 rebounds, and 10 assists against the Wizards. Just another example that this young man, the last pick of the 2011 draft, is here to stay.
Following up on Pearl Washington after last week’s Requiem for a League on the Big East is a story about the former Syracuse great written in-time (1990) when Pearl was an overweight point guard in the CBA. Hat tip to my buddy Bug for the link there which tells us that basically Pearl was prone to weight-gain and couldn’t find a good fit in his three-year NBA career.
Jason Collins has now appeared in 11 games for the Nets so he’s not qualifying for any rate stats this season and that’s probably a good thing, because his area of excellence is committing fouls. Over this short sample size, he’s prolifically fouling people: 8.0 fouls/36-min. That’s a foul about every 4:30 and would have him fouling out in about 27-minutes, but we don’t have to worry about that going down since no one in their right or wrong mind would consider keeping him on the court that long. That 8 fouls/36 is impressive, but it pales in comparison to 6’7”, weight unknown, Danny Fortson of Sonics and Warriors infamy/fame (depending on who you ask). It’s entirely likely that Fortson’s tracking Collins’s fouling frequency and laughing while double fisting club sandwiches and sliders. In his heyday, Fortson had a four-year stretch where he committed 8.5, 9.1, 9.9, and 8.7 fouls/36-min. Step up your game, Collins.
Al Jefferson’s been a viceroy of the post recently. His ppg is up nearly 20% since the All-Star break and it’s shown up in the win column as the Bobcats have won 65% of their post-AS break games compared to 43% before the break. To dig deeper into Charlotte’s dependency on the big man from Mississippi, he averages 25.3ppg with a 32.8% usage rate and a 95 DRtg in wins against 17.8ppg with 27% usage rate and 107 DRtg in losses. In short, as Al goes, the Bobcats go. SI’s Lee Jenkins profiled Big Al in the latest Sports Illustrated and as has become commonplace, Jenkins did a masterful job. But amid all this rich Jefferson content, one anecdote stood out:
Jefferson was the Celtics teenager who asked Gary Payton why Lakers banners hung in the Clippers’ arena — “You really don’t know they play in the same place!” Payton howled.
Anthony Davis’s torrid play continues to amaze much more than his non-conformist unibrow. Elias Sports Bureau tells us that he’s just the third player to average over 32 and 13 in an eight-game span since 1994-95. The other two are Kevin Love and Shaq. But that’s not enough. He’s the youngest player in league history to average at least 21, 10 and 2.5 blocks and in the spirit of the NCAA Tournament, Davis would be a junior this year:
Davis’s true shooting is ~59% which places him just outside of the league’s top-20. I wanted to compare his shooting range to other players on that 21-10-2.5 list, but the only comparable player whose shooting stats were available on BBR was Tim Duncan. I looked at Duncan’s career distance shooting and where Duncan, with all his touch, has shot ~83% of his FGAs since 2000-01 between 0-16 feet, just 15% have come beyond that range – with a significant uptick in his later years. Davis, in his 2nd year in the league, is shooting ~20% of his shots from 16-ft or deeper, but is shooting ~38% this season compared to Duncan’s career mark of ~41%. In addition to his around the rim savvy, Davis has a range that even in this era of stretch fours is enviable. To paraphrase Ralph Waldo Emerson … we greet you at the beginning of a great career …..
I’m highly partial to geographic loyalties. I’m from Iowa and live in Seattle and sometimes fail to keep my biases out of my fandom and writing. Sometimes though, the truth is impossible to ignore and I’m wondering if that’s what is happening with Harrison Barnes. The 6’8” swingman has a body that was sculpted to play basketball. He’s a graduate of Ames High School in Ames, Iowa and was teammates with Creighton’s Doug McDermott. His post-high school hype was unfair and he fell below pre-season All-American expectations as a freshman. It’s fair to say Barnes has been falling below expectations ever since and whether or not that’s his fault or just poor scouting is another topic. But we’re not 148 games into Barnes’s pro career and my I can’t figure out if I’m looking at a plateau or a slight decline. I’m uncertain what’s happening to be honest. We expect to see improvement from our second-year players, but Barnes is backsliding. His March splits have descended into an East Bay abyss and it’s gotten to the point the passionate Warriors fans on Twitter would swap him for another dance with Anthony Randolph …. Ok, it’s not that bad, but what’s up, Barnes? (Before tossing him limb by limb into a pack of snarling wolves, let’s remember Barnes is just 21 and would be a senior at UNC this year.)
Blame Harrison, blame the scouts, blame yourself … just exercise your right to blame.
While we’re talking about Ames, former Iowa State Cyclone, Royce White, made his first and second appearances for the Kings this week. They were rather uneventful from a statistical point of view, but the act of appearing is more than a lot of folks thought we’d see. On 3/18, Sacramento signed him to a second 10-day contract. The league allows teams to sign the same player to a pair of 10-day contracts and after that, they have to sign him for the rest of the season if they want to keep him. White’s deal wraps up on Friday, March 28th and the Kings play at home on Wednesday, then in Oklahoma City on Friday. If I was a gambling man, I’d guess they don’t extend him the remainder of the season based on the novelty minutes he’s been afforded so far. Hopefully, I’m wrong.
The Spurs have now won 13 straight and while cultural debates still rage around asinine statements like, “If you don’t like the Spurs, you don’t basketball,” the most discussed Spurs topic is Pop’s behavior during in-game interviews. (Worth noting that by keeping the focus on himself, Pop keeps the emphasis off his players which is probably part of some grand strategy that he devised over bottles from his own winery.) However you feel about this group from San Antonio, just know that in some form, it’s likely that their far-reaching tentacles have tickled or touched your own squad as evidenced by the Illuminati-like reaches of Spurs personnel throughout the league. If Malcolm Gladwell really wants to blow my mind, tell me how the fuck the Spurs have become the most successful franchise in American sports and give me more than Tim Duncan + Popovich = greatness. This week’s games include Philly (see more below), Denver, @ Denver, and New Orleans. Circle that game in Denver on Friday night. Home and aways often end in splits – I have no data to back up that statement.
Speaking of the Spurs reach, Philly’s coach Brett Brown is a Popovich acolyte, but apparently he didn’t pack up success when he left the Lone Star state. Philly’s now lost 24 games in a row. They won’t end up with the worst record in league history and while there have been lesser teams, something stinks about GM Sam Hinkie’s master planning. I’m excited about their future, but it feels like they’re making a deal with the devil to get there – perhaps this is just me moralizing on ugliness of scraping rock bottom to reach the top. Or maybe it’s just me directing my dislike of Daryl Morey on Hinkie. Whatever the case, losing 24 games in a row sucks and instead of pointing fingers at Brown and Philly’s semi-pro team, any criticisms need to be send to the Philly front office, C/O: Sam Hinkie.
More random tidbits from intelligent people:
Kevin Durant's 32.2 PPG and 50.7% FG would make him the first player since Michael Jordan in 1992 to average 30+ PPG while shooting over 50%
I arrived home last night (12/14/12) after an evening of wrestling with tallboys of Rainier and eating massive slices of New York style pizza and promptly did what I often do: Scoured NBA box scores in search of anything out-of-the-ordinary. This exercise is typically futile which is why it’s out-of-the-ordinary, but on this Friday night, I noticed something in the Kings-Thunder box score that caught my eye:
In the box score above, I highlighted the most intriguing stat of the night: Isaiah Thomas scored 26 points … in 16 minutes. This is no small feat; it’s prolific. It’s Reggie Miller prolific, Kobe Bryant prolific. I was curious to see if/when this had previously occurred and cross-referenced Basketball-Reference’s Player Game Finder which shows individual game data from 1985-86 to present. After plugging in the criteria (26 points in 16 minutes or less), I was pleased to get the following message:
All of this leads to a few quick observations:
If Isaiah Thomas earned the starting spot last year and the team isn’t winning with Aaron Brooks running point … and IT’s stats are better across the board, why is Brooks still starting?
As a follow-up question to the first point, is it possible that the same reason Thomas dropped to the bottom of the draft in 2011 (his height—5’9”) is the same reason Kings coach Keith Smart insists on starting Brooks (6’0”)?
I can honestly say I didn’t see any of the game last night. And with that admission, there’s a good chance IT entered after the game was already out of hand and just gunned for the 16 minutes (15 minutes, 42 seconds to be precise) he was on the floor.
That’s a lot of points in a short amount of time whether you’re playing with grade schoolers or in a JV game or in summer league, but against pros who are paid millions to prevent you from scoring? It’s a hell of an accomplishment.
So for your efforts on Friday, December 14th, 2012, I award you, Isaiah Thomas, the first ever Dancing with Noah Extraordinary Performer of the Night (EPN) award. The opposite of this award would be given to Keith Smart for his complete inability to logically choose which players should be on the court and how much time said players should spend on the court.
Dancing With Noah 