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Tag Archives: LeBron James
Shot Selection Round-Up: Part 1
Shot selection and specifically shot locations have become a larger and larger part of the basketball conversation. It’s a topic of great personal interest to me and I’ve written quite a bit about it this season. To add an easily comparably quantitative element to the conversation, I also developed Expected Points Per Shot (XPPS). This metric is based on the expected value of shots from different locations and boils the quality of a player’s … Continue reading
The Myth of Danger
Every year as the playoffs approach one thing is guaranteed. A team or two always gets marked as “the team no one should want to face.” The teams normally fall into one of two categories. First the young up and coming team that does something better than anyone else in the league. Think the Grizzlies of a few years ago, who excelled at the slowdown grind it out game because of an elite defense. … Continue reading
Weekly Stats Recap
With a short week and reserves aplenty, we took a week off from the Stat Study. Here are the stats you missed and trends that were ignored from the past seven days in the Association. Tuesday – In the last three weeks, Jimmy Butler has taken at least 10 shots on seven occasions. The Bulls are 2-0 when he does it against a playoff team with wins over Brooklyn and Miami, but are only … Continue reading
Objectivity, In A Subjective World
This week ESPN gave us a snapshot of what’s become one of their standard summer projects, #NBARank. As an end-of-season treat they put together an early preview, giving their panel of 111 contributors (myself included) the standard task of ranking each player on a scale of 1-to-10 in terms of ‘current quality.’ This time instead of evaluating the whole league we were just asked to assess a core group, assembling a list of the … Continue reading
Harden Week: Piling Stats Upon Stats
Welcome to Harden Week, a celebration of all things James Harden! Kyle Soppe is a regular contributor to Hickory-High, specializing in the identification of unique numeric accomplishments. You can find more from him at Hardwood Paroxysm and on Twitter, @unSOPable23. – James Harden made 10+ free throws six times in a 12-day stretch in late December. Kobe Bryant did so six times from December 9th to March 21st. It is worth noting that Kobe … Continue reading
Weekly Stats Recap
For this week I decided to chart the importance of turning turnovers into points. In the 52 games this week, the winning team scored 18.12 points per game off of turnovers while losing teams managed just 14.02 points. That may not seem like much, but when you consider that 17.31% of the games this week either went to overtime or were decided by four or fewer points, the ability to score points off of … Continue reading
Game of the Week: Miami Heat at Boston Celtics
Hello again, Hickory High. Sorry I wasn’t around last week. I was in Istanbul. And the first thing I saw when I got out of the airport was a giant poster of Hedo Turkoglu, the Turkish Michael Jordan. Hedo gets a pretty bad rap because we feel he hasn’t reached his potential. There were moments when he was in Orlando when it seemed like he could be a key player on a contender, but … Continue reading
Weekly Stats Recap
This week I decided to take a look at players who rebound, but also score. I charted the total points each team received from players grabbing at least five rebounds in an effort to determine if teams with high scoring rebounders won more often than not. I figured that winning teams would have a higher average point total from qualifying players, but never did I imagine the difference being this drastic. During the 50 … Continue reading
Weekly Stats Recap
For this week’s #StatStudy, basketball coach/guru @C1ayMitche11 questioned an offense predicated on launching three pointers and chasing down the loose ball was an effective strategy in the NBA. He estimated that 60% of teams that won the rebound battle and attempted more triples would win the game and that the number would rise to a 75% success rate if the team tallied more offensive rebounds and 3PA. Our sample size this week was 54 … Continue reading
Weekly Stats Recap
This week, thanks to the suggestion of David Vertsberger (@_Verts), I decided to take a look at the top assist men on each team and how they contributed to each game this week in terms of percentage of total points scored (PS%) and percentage of total assists handed out (A%). I constructed a spread sheet that detailed the top dime dropper on each roster along with the PS% and A% for that player entering … Continue reading
