NBA Stats Are Boring. I Created Some New Ones
With the NBA taking away the ability for offensive players to just run into defenders and draw fouls, it got me thinking about other things that the NBA has to add/take away. Then I came to a profound realization.
STATS. They make the world go round and they are the driving force for how teams assemble themselves nowadays. But the stats we have now are incredibly boring. Who cares about points, assists, and rebounds anymore? True Shooting Percentage? PER? Yawn.
It’s time that we create some stats and I have the perfect solution. Come on, come all, and listen to some of my great ideas for new stats that basketball needs to invent.
Super-Clutch Scoring
Now, there is already such a thing called Clutch Scoring in the NBA. Not only do I think we need to take things one step further, we need to talk about clutch scoring more.
{Rant Incoming}
I feel like nobody talks about clutch scoring. We all know that there are late-game killers in the NBA. Guys like Damian Lillard, Kevin Durant, Luka Doncic, Kawhi Leonard, etc. Most superstars get the label of being great in crunch-time when the underlying numbers say otherwise. Do you want to know the 5 leading scoring in the clutch last season? Can you name them off the top of your head? I’ll wait.
Since I know you didn’t do that, here were the clutch scoring leaders from last season.
2020-21 Season Clutch Scoring Leaders*
- Damian Lillard – 162 points on 51% shooting
- Bradley Beal – 150 points on 48% shooting
- DeMar DeRozan – 140 points on 45% shooting
- Nikola Jokic – 131 points on 50% shooting
- Russell Westbrook – 131 points on 50% shooting
*(Clutch Defined As Last 5 Minutes of a Game, Within 5 points)*
A few things stand out here. Firstly, DeMar DeRozan? DeRozan was excellent late in games last season and I didn’t know that. It seems like nobody else knew that either since I haven’t seen anybody talking about how clutch DeMar DeRozan was last season.
Secondly, Nikola Jokic and Russell Westbrook were identical in the clutch last season? Jokic was the league MVP and Westbrook is the most polarizing player in the NBA. I have certainly not been the biggest Westbrook supporter, but apparently, Westbrook is pretty good when things get intense.
We don’t talk about clutch stats as much as we should. It’s a reputation thing when it really shouldn’t be. Kawhi Leonard has had great moments in the postseason, but have you seen his clutch stats from 2021?
Kawhi Leonard In The Clutch In 2021;
41 points on 31% shooting
Yeah, you read that right. Kawhi Leonard was terrible in the clutch and nobody even knows it. Kevin Durant shot just 29% from 3 in the clutch last season, but yet in this year’s GM Survey, the majority of the poll wanted the ball in his hands.
I think that we should look at clutch stats more, instead of just basing our opinions of superstars in crunch time based solely on name recognition.
{End of Rant}
Ok, now time for my new stat. I’m calling it Super-Clutch Scoring. It’s the next step for clutch scoring, which is already a stat that nobody talks about. Here are the rules, they’re really easy to follow;
Super-Clutch Scoring Is: The Last 2 Minutes of a Game When The Score Is Within 3 Points
This is a lot more precise than the normal clutch scoring metric. It’s the absolute end of a game when the game is just one shot or one play away from being completely changed. It’s the most chaotic part of a basketball game and it’s simultaneously the best.
Now, this stat has been tracked in the past, but there is no data for the 2020-21 season. But if you go deep into the internet archives, there are some places to find this stat. One of those places is my good friends at 82games.com, who have some archives of this very stat. These are from a long time ago, but my argument still stands;
In 2008, Manu Ginobili shot 61.7% from the field in super-clutch moments, which is just insane.
In the 2003-04 season, here were the best super-clutch players;
- Michael Redd (Bucks) – 64% eFG – 14/18 FT
- Carlos Boozer (Cavaliers) – 60% eFG – 18 TRB – 17/20 FT
- Andre Kirikenko (Jazz) – 73% eFG
- Steve Nash (Mavs) – 57% eFG – 15/18 FT
- James Posey (Grizzlies) – 55% eFG – 14/17 FT
James Posey? Really? Posey had the best season of his career in 2004 with the Grizzlies, but it’s still really surprising that he’s on this list among other All-Stars.
Michael Redd was one of the better scorers of the early-mid 2000s. In fact, the 2003-04 season was the year where he was an All-Star and an All-NBA Third Team member.
Steve Nash was incredibly accurate for the entirety of his career. This is pre-Suns Nash where he won back-to-back MVPs, but he was the best point guard of the 2000s and it comes to no one’s surprise that he’s on this list.
Andre Kirilenko was somebody I was surprised to see on here, but he quietly had a great career in the 2000s with the Jazz. Kirilenko was primarily a defender, but he made shots when things mattered.
But, I saved the best for last. The 2003-04 season was Lebron James’ rookie season with the Cavaliers. As you can tell, Carlos Boozer, one of the best late-game performers that season, was on his team. Boozer was an RFA that summer and keeping him next to a young Lebron would have been great. When the offseason started, Boozer and the Cavs agreed to an unofficial contract under the table, which is now illegal under NBA rules.
But when Boozer saw other players getting a lot more money than the unofficial deal he signed with the Cavs, he quickly signed a $70 million dollar contract with, you guessed it, Andre Kirilenko and the Utah Jazz. The Cavs were “blindsided” by the move and decided not to match the contract, showing their lack of commitment to their rising star, a pattern that would continue to show during James’ first stint in Cleveland.
In short, we need to talk about clutch stats more. They’re very telling about which players perform late in games and which ones don’t, which is important for a lot of reasons.
I like the super-clutch stat and I also think it’s very telling. When the pressure is on the most, when your team needs a basket, can they rely on you? As we saw, it’s not just All-Stars like Steve Nash and Michael Redd. A role player, James Posey, made that list in the 2004 season.
We need to create the super-clutch stat and just see what happens. I want to see who is the best, who is the best at performing when their team needs them the most? It would be an incredibly fun stat to keep track of and I don’t think it’s that hard to track. Somebody just has to do it.
Thanks for coming to my TedTalk.
WIDE Open Jump Shots
We already have an active stat tracker for wide-open jump shots. If you go to NBA.com, you can see players shooting splits from when they’re determined wide open, or when the nearest defender is more than 6 feet away. But similar to clutch stats, nobody seems to care about this stat when it’s pretty telling.
Can you make shots when you’re incredibly wide open? Can you convert the very easy stuff just as well as the very hard stuff? Here are some of the most interesting things I found when I was looking through this stat;
- Joe Harris had a eFG% of 82.3 when the nearest defender was more than 6 feet away, which led the NBA last season. He shot 56% from 3 in those same circumstances. But in the playoffs, those numbers were drastically worse. He had a 67.9 eFG% in the playoffs when deemed wide open and shot 47% from 3. He was 17/36 in the playoffs when he was deemed wide open. Had a made a few more of those, who knows? Maybe the Nets would have made it past the 2nd round.
- Maxi Kleber and Dorian Finney-Smith, both Dallas Mavericks, were in the Top 6 of the frequency that they got these wide open looks. This can also be described as the Luka Doncic effect.
- In the 2021 regular season, Giannis Antetokounmpo had 221 field goal attempts that were deemed wide open. His eFG% of those shots was just 43.7%. Do you want to know why that is? Because of those 221 attempts, 186 of them were 3-pointers. Giannis only got 35 two-pointers that were deemed wide open during the regular season.
- Steph Curry shot 42% from 3 last season, making 337/801 three-pointers. Of those 801 attempts, only 162 of them were deemed wide open. Curry shot 47% from 3 on wide open attempts. Meanwhile, 225 of Curry’s three point attempts came when he was guarded tightly (2-4 feet). He still shot 37% from 3 on this tightly guarded attempts.
Again, I think we should talk about how players do in certain situations. Steph Curry was incredible shooting the ball last season and it wasn’t because he was getting a lot of wide-open looks.
Joe Harris might have been the reason the Nets didn’t make the Conference Finals last season, due to his wide-open three-point looks not falling.
Luka Doncic creates so many open looks for his teammates. If only the teammates he was getting wide open were better than Maxi Kleber and Dorian Finney-Smith.
Giannis Antetokounmpo should likely be a better shooter, given how many wide-open looks teams give him.
But I also think we need to expand the term wide open. Instead of it being six feet, why not 10 feet? When you’re so open that you might even be too open. I want to see who gets the most shots when there’s no defender within 10 feet of them, I want to see who struggles when they’re that open, etc.
But for the time being, let’s look more into which players are getting open looks and which players are not. It’s good context to see just how good a player is.
Unseld’s
For those of you that don’t know, Wes Unseld played a long time ago, in the 1970s to be exact. Unseld was a 6’7″ center and he had a very interesting career. Perhaps one of the weirdest careers in NBA history.
He won Rookie of the Year and MVP in 1969, while only averaging 14 points and 18 rebounds per game. That was when players still voted for the MVP award. But then, the very next season, Unseld improved across the board and didn’t make an All-Star of All-NBA Appearance, which is so incredibly weird that it’s hard to put it into context.
After a knee injury in 1974, he averaged just 8 points a night for the last 8 seasons of his career, spent with the Washington Bullets (now Wizards). Unseld wasn’t a great defender, he wasn’t some sort of generational talent, and the only reason he won a title with the Bullets in 1978 was because Bill Walton got hurt and the Blazers were out of contention.
But while Unseld’s stats don’t scream Hall of Famer, he was still one of the greatest players of his generation, believe it or not. Unseld was a winner and he didn’t care about his stats. During the first 11 years of his career, Unseld’s Wizards were 176 games over 0.500 and they made 4 Finals appearances with Unseld. Like Draymond Green, all that counts is the winning.
The greatest strength of his game was his crisp outlet passes that went fifty feet across the court to his streaking teammates. Red Auerbach, the legendary Celtics coach, said that Unseld was even better than Bill Russell at throwing those full-court passes, which is quite the compliment.
But back then, there was no way to track those full-court passes. The closest comparison we have to guys like Unseld and Bill Russell, guys who would throw those full-court passes, is Kevin Love. But since Lebron has departed from Cleveland, we haven’t seen those full-court passes anymore.
So even though full-court passes don’t happen often, I think it’s still good to have a stat for them. Let’s call them Unseld’s because Bill Russell is too well-known for a stat like this. Let’s get weird with it.
I think I would define the stat as a pass that travels more than 50 feet across the court and results in a score for your team. It’s another classification for assists and I think that we should count secondary assists into this. If your full-court pass leads to a third guy getting involved, you still deserve credit for starting the fastbreak in the first place.
Who is going to lead the league in Unseld’s in 2022? Perhaps a guard like James Harden/Luka Doncic, both of whom are the maestros of their respective offenses. Perhaps Lebron James, one of the best passers ever and someone who can see over the defense. Maybe we even see Kevin Love return to form with a new rim-runner like Evan Mobley.
While this stat really won’t factor in that much anymore, I think it’s cool to commemorate an all-time legend with a stat that has never been invented before. It’s cool, it’s unique, and it would be very interesting to see who would be leading the league in Unseld’s.
That has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it?
Russells & Howards
This stat is another way that we can track blocks. In the NBA, a block is a block. We know what a block is, a defender hitting the ball after it’s been released/when it’s about to be released. Most blocks come at the rim and most blocks from centers.
But that’s just boring. Why is there only one way to classify something? We have to spice some things up and this is the way to do things. Two new ways to classify blocks, named after two players that should make it easier to remember the meaning of the stat itself.
Like Wes Unseld, Bill Russell was a great player. His stats don’t exactly wow you. He never really dominated teams with his scoring, but rather his defense and rebounding. But of course, there were no defensive metrics back then to try and measure his greatness. Heck, we don’t even know how many blocks Russell got during his career because blocks weren’t tracked until the 1973-74 season, for some reason.
[It’s a block. How hard is it to put that down on a piece of paper? We went to the moon before we started recording blocks in the NBA. I love America.]
Now, one of the things that Bill Russell excelled at (other than winning and dominating Wilt Chamberlain) was his defensive prowess. And while we don’t know for sure how many total blocks he had, we know how he got those blocked shots and how smart he was with how he blocked his shots.
Instead of just blindly trying to block the ball, Russell would block the ball as a way to kickstart fastbreaks. He would direct the ball to his teammates and get them easy scores on the other end. But instead of just hearing that, why don’t we try and track those? It would be really interesting to see who would lead the league in Russell’s.
And conversely, let’s go to the other end of the spectrum of blocks. While some blocks can help your team, some can do the opposite. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you, the Howards.
While most know Howard as a role player nowadays, for a brief time period in the late 2000s to the early 2010s, Dwight Howard was one of the best defensive players in the NBA. With the Orlando Magic, Howard won 3 straight Defensive Player of the Year awards from 2009-2011 and got four straight All-Defensive first-team selections from 2009-2012. He was a dominant force down low.
But while Howard was a force and averaged 2.6 blocks from 2009-2012, there was one problem in Howard’s game. He liked to play a little too much volleyball. While Russell’s guided tips, rebounds, and blocks fueled the Celtics to a dynasty, Howard had another way of collecting blocks.
By spiking them emphatically into the 3rd row. While that looks cool and might get the crowd a little fired up, it hurts your team more than it helps. Instead of getting the ball with a chance to score, you have to try and defend the opposing team again.
Now, Dwight Howard used to do this a bunch. Don’t believe me? Roll the clips;
This was Game 1 of the Eastern Conference Semifinals between the defending champion Boston Celtics and the Orlando Magic. Dwight Howard makes a cool block against Ray Allen, but the Celtics keep the ball. Do you want to know what happened next?
Glen Davis made the basket and the Celtics took the lead. Sure, it looked cool, but Boston will still take those two points they just got.
But I guess Dwight got the last laugh since the Magic won this series and eventually made it to the Finals. Maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about after all.
Aside from the crappy music and even crappier quality of this video, Howard did this type of stuff a lot.
There you go. Two new ways to view a block. Now, there are grey areas between these two new categories. But when you see somebody just spike the ball into the stands, that’s a Howard.
If you see somebody directing the ball with their block or just tapping a ball in the air to their teammate, it’s a Russell. Who would lead the NBA in these categories in 2022?
Howards: Myles Turner
Russells: Clint Capela/Rudy Gobert
Free Throw Assists
I think this one is obvious. When a player makes a great pass that leads to a foul, they should get credit for that. I don’t know why this isn’t counted in with assists yet, it’s the same thing as passing the ball to somebody who gets a layup. Why should the passer get less credit just because the defense fouled the player they’re passing to?
Now, if the guy who you passed the ball to only makes 1/2 free throws or only makes 2/3 free throws, what do you do? Well, then just make it half an assist. In the NFL, if two guys get a sack, then they each get 0.5 sacks. Why can’t we do that in basketball? It’s the same thing, give the passer some credit for creating points.
So let’s say Luka Doncic has 9 assists. He passes the ball to Jalen Brunson and he draws a foul. Brunson makes just 1/2 free throws. Luka Doncic now had 9.5 assists. That’s not hard to follow and it makes sense. Luka Doncic helped create points for his team, regardless if it was a field goal or not.
The thing is, will the NBA ever do this? Probably not. I still think we need to find a way to incorporate free throws into assists because they should be included. It’s the same thing as a pass leading to a field goal, so why can’t we add free throws?
Referee Accuracy/Complaining
Again, why don’t we have stats for these two things? I don’t think they’re that important in terms of evaluating a player, but I definitely think it’d be funny to see who would lead the leagues in these categories.
First, we’ll start with Referee Accuracy. We need something similar to umpire scorecards in baseball. Did Zach Zarba do a good job of calling fouls in this game? Does Tony Brothers call too many travels in this game? Which referee calls the most 3-second violations?
I want to see a few things with this stat. We of course need accuracy trackers. Was that foul actually a foul? Did a referee miss an obvious foul call? You get the point. It would be good to see who is actually good at calling stuff and who isn’t trying to make the game be about themselves. I want to see who the best referees are so that before a game, I can already tell if my team is going to get screwed or not.
I also want to see a tracker of which referees call certain calls the most. Do some refs not call fouls as often as others? Do some refs ignore three-second violations? Which referee calls the most flagrant fouls? These would all be pretty useful stats to just look at all the variety that we have with NBA officials.
The 2nd part of this stat is more of a joke than anything. Which NBA Players/Teams complain the most to referees? I would have to bet that Lebron James and the Lakers do the most whining, but it would be funny to see just how many times they’re openly complaining to officials during the course of a game and see how many complaints they can rack up over a whole 82-game season plus playoffs.
I also want to see if there are more complaints in the playoffs when the stakes are higher. I feel like we all know there’s more complaining in the playoffs, but how much more?
But I think the best question is how many complaints can one player get over the course of a season? Who is going to get the most complaints per game? We could see the ratio between complaining and technical fouls, like, do some players complain a lot and not get technical fouls? Do some players not complain that much, but when they do they get a technical foul?
All of these questions could be answered if we added these two stats, stats that in reality, we should already have given how easy it would be to track these.
What Are Some Stats That You Want To See Get Invented? Leave A Comment Down Below!
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