Porter/Harden first 5 games of respective seasons Player(year)....pts...rebs..Ast...TOV...Stl...FT%...3P%......FG%....age KPj: (22/23): .....21.4...6.4....5.4....3.6.....1.4...87.5%..40.0%...41.8%....22 Harden(12/13):.27.8...5.2...5.0.....5.0.....2.0...82.0%..25.8%...44.6%....23 KPj: (22/23) 5 games in 2nd season playing PG [ 1st five games ] https://www.basketball-reference.com/players/p/porteke02/gamelog/2023/ Harden's first season with Houston (12/13) [ 1st five games ] https://www.basketball-reference.com/players/h/hardeja01/gamelog/2013/
10% into the season a look at evil, flawed, meaningless stats. Only included players who played at least 4 games TS% (League average 56.9%)(shocker our offense sucks) Spoiler 1. Garuba : 66.6% 2. Sengun : 62.4% 3. Gordon : 60.4% 4. Mathews : 54.2% 5. Nix : 53.1% 6. KMJ : 52.7% 7. KPJ : 52.3% 8. Eason : 49.9% 9. Green : 46.4% 10. Smith : 46.2% 11. Christopher: 43.7% Win Shares per 48 Spoiler 1. Sengun : +.163 2. Garuba : +.103 3. Eason : +.101 4. KPJ : +.063 5. KMJ : +.059 6. Gordon : +.059 7. Mathews : +.046 8. Smith : +.017 9. Nix : -.015 10. Green : -.016 11. Christopher : -.073 Net Rating Spoiler 1.Gordon : -2.5 2. KMJ : -3.5 3. Nix : -3.6 4. Mathews : -4.1 5. Eason : -5.2 6. Garuba : -6.3 7. Sengun : -7.2 8. KPJ : -11.1 9. Green : -14.4 10. Smith : -14.5 11. Christopher: -25.2 RAPTOR Rating (of the catch all stats, probably least matches the eye test so far) Spoiler 1. Mathews : +6.1 2. Garuba : +5.0 3. Sengun : +2.7 4. Eason : +2.5 5. KPJ : -0.5 6. Gordon : -3.8 7. Green : -3.9 8. KMJ : -4.3 9. Nix : -4.8 10. Smith : -7.5 11. Christopher: -10.7 NBAmath TPA(my opinion, of the catch all stats, probably best matches the eye test so far) Spoiler 1. KPJ : +1.74 2. Sengun : +1.32 3. Garuba : -0.76 4. Eason : -2.82 5. Gordon : -4.37 6. Nix : -9.33 7. KMJ: -10.85 8. Christopher : -11.26 9. Mathews : -12.86 10. Green : -24.46 11. Smith : -28.32
LOLLLLL the yearly "Mathews is X ranked on RAPTOR" tradition!! I fukin love you nerds. Funny thing is that if you would have made this post yesterday it looks much different doesnt it? I wont tell
I think it's easier to score 20+ ppg now than it ever has been. Or, at least, that it is getting easier over time. What I think is happening, at least partially, is that teams are playing smarter nowadays, and part of that is giving scoring opportunities to better scorers more often rather than distributing it more equitably to the less talented scorers. The obvious example is that we no longer see teams just conceding that they will ruin 3-5 of their own offensive possessions each game by posting up an untalented center as a way to reward him for running on defense. So anyway. I looked at all seasons from 99-00 to 22-23, and I filtered out those who didn't play at least 30 mpg and 65 games in a season (except for the strike shortened season, where I lowered the threshold to 52 games). The proportion of players who fit the criteria above are scoring 20+ ppg with greater regularity as time goes on: The data labels on the chart represent the number of players in each season who fit the playtime criteria above and scored 20+ ppg. As you can see, it has spiked the last 5 years. And I think this kind of understates it a bit. Because the mpg for these players has fallen over the same time period: So we can't say that they're scoring 20+ ppg more often because they're playing more. In fact, they are playing less - significantly less. I think this backs up my belief that it's getting easier, and is increasingly less impressive, to score 20+ ppg in the NBA. Maybe it's because teams are giving more scoring opportunities to better scorers, as I opined above, or maybe it's something else. What do yall think? Do yall think scoring 20+ ppg is getting easier, harder, staying the same? If the data above didn't sway you one way or another, how else would you like to see it? We have gone from about 23% of players scoring 20+ ppg to 41% of players scoring 20+ ppg in this time frame. [Post edited on 8/18/23 because I re-read my script and realized I screwed up a bit on the filter. But overall trend remains the same.]
I think it's pretty obvious individually the top scorers are scoring more points - it's been discussed; but the why is somewhat trickier. Jacking up more 3's. (The Warriors/Rockets effect) The pace is higher. Offensive ratings are higher. eFG% is higher. Skills of today's player are better in many ways. Rules favor offense more. Step-back 3's (the James Harden effect) Players taking games off These all affect one another, too, with the end result being teams, as a whole, are scoring more now than they were even just 5 or 6 years ago. The past year was even more bananas where no team averaged less than about 110 pts/game.
My line of thinking was more that the elite scorers are increasing their scoring, but others are staying mostly the same. I binned the data into groups by ppg and year over year the change for those on the lower end of the scoring spectrum didn't change as drastically as it did for those on the upper end. I didn't see a rising in ppg for all levels of scorers. I didn't have a satisfying way to visualize it so I abandoned it, but I'll work on it some more when I have time. There are some statistical tests I could do to see if the distribution of scoring was more equitable in years past. Maybe that's what I'll look at specifically next.
Good work! Players are more skilled and pace has increased. I think these are the main driving forces over 20 ppg players. As for the methodology, I think looking at the absolute numbers, which are also plotted on the graph, is more informative. When you try to the percentages, you need to do the filtering to get a base. The 65 game filter makes it harder to compare across years, because more players now fall under 65 games due to load management although they are 20 ppg players. If I were to do a filtering I would just do something like, over 30 or 40 games with no minute restriction. The surprising thing for me in the data, is that there is really no increase up until 2017-2018.
This is about the number of players who have scored 20 or more in a game, right? And could part of that second chart be attributed to the fact that star players are no longer regularly hitting 40+ mpg, thus giving non-stars more time in which to hit that 20-pt threshhold? I wonder how the number who averaged 20+ for an entire season has changed.
It's not that surprising. I don't know if you were watching the NBA back then, but this gets discussed on r/nba often. There was a convergence of various things happening around that time that led to the spike. Approximately a year or two earlier, the NBA's pace started going up, around 2017 is when the "threes and layups" mantra started taking off. FG% started going up, even though I don't think 3P% really changed all that much across the league. The corner 3 became a thing along with the mantra "if you're going to take a 2-pointer that deep, why not just adjust and take a corner 3?" Then you had Harden doing the step-back 3 which led to Doncic and everybody else imitating it. Kiki Vandeweghe back in the 80's used to do something similar and is probably the true originator but everybody seems to forget him (he was a Rockets nemesis, so I can't). The other thing that rarely gets mentioned is the 2018 shot clock change, which I'm sure had a small impact on scoring/pace. Before that, on an offensive rebounding situation where the shot clock reset, the clock would reset to 24 seconds, but after the new rule, it would reset to only 14 seconds. I don't know how massive a change it would be, but I'm sure it had an effect on subsequent years to push pace higher. It was around 2018 season that the average offensive ratings of teams exploded from what I recall (it may have been 2017, but somewhere around there). If you look at data since maybe 5-7 years ago in conjunction with data from maybe the decade or so before that, you'll see a definite change in offensive rating, FG%, etc. The funny thing about the stats during that period and before is that 3Pt% really didn't change much - they just took a higher volume of them. This was also an effect of teams trying to emulate the Rockets and Warriors. A lot. lol. Depending on how you set up your criteria, last year there were something like 40-50 players who scored over 20 ppg. The previous year something like 25. If you go back to 2015, there were only around 15. FYI : you can find this info on basketball-reference.com. You can see that after around 2017, there's been a spike in 20 ppg scorers, from what I remember, anyway. But it was last season where we went bonkers and everybody and their mother started putting up points. Last season was around the time I thought "do I need to re-qualify the meaning of being a 20 ppg scorer?" lol.
Good point about the shot clock. I am aware of the change after 2017 but I would guess to see some meaningful increase starting after 2010 and really ramping up after 2017. Instead, it goes flat and than ramps up.
The only thing I can think of is the 3's and layups era gave "average players" a thing to do. I'm not sure of any massive changes between 2010 and 2017 in terms of basketball - but I'm probably forgetting something. Post-2017, there definitely was a change, however, in how basketball was played. Maybe even post 2015, now that I think about it. I think for the past 30 years or so, there has always been around 15-25 20 ppg scorers in the NBA. Maybe the post-2015-to-2017 changes are really kicking into gear the past couple of years. One thing to also consider, which I haven't looked into with certainty is the influx of talent from overseas and other leagues in the past few years along with the volume of high school and younger players being dumped into the league. I don't know if anyone's done any kind of study on that, but the sheer talent pool may be larger nowadays, but again, I don't know for sure.
I thought about significantly lowering the games played too, but the reason I didn't is because I think the numbers will be even more drastic if I do that. And I wanted to make sure I wasn't fudging the data to confirm my priors.
@AlperenSengun I lowered the games played requirement to 30 (and 22 for lockout season) and the numbers were bigger. For last year, over half of the players who played 30 mpg and played at least 30 games scored 20+ ppg:
That's why no basketball conversation should ever center around PPG, raw scoring numbers simply is not impressive.
