Daily Thunder.com

Tommy Craggs had a wonderfully detailed feature on Deadspin today taking a deep, deep look into the dark secret that is NBA scorekeeping. The verdict? Scorekeepers fudge.

Alex quickly found that a scorekeeper is given broad discretion over two categories: assists and blocks (steals and rebounds are also open to some interpretation, though not a lot). “In the NBA, an assist is a pass leading directly to a basket,” he says. “That’s inherently subjective. What does that really mean in practice? The definition is massively variable according to who you talk to. The Jazz guys were pretty open about their liberalities. … John Stockton averaged 10 assists. Is that legit? It’s legit because they entered it. If he’s another guy, would he get 10? Probably not.”

The piece goes on to mention specific examples including Nick Van Exel’s 23 assist game for Los Angeles and Hakeem Olajuwon’s triple double back in 1995. Those box scores were inflated. The Olajuwon game was mandated from a higher authority, Alex said. It was just something that kind of happened it seemed. Read more…

Commentary Stats

Taylor is back at it again with more awesome stats to digest. Since we all (hopefully) know what each stat means, we’ll just go with the box score. And if you forgot what a CHBA is click here for a quick reference guide.

As Taylor said in his email the Could Have Been Assist category really backs up the gripes we all had with the Thunder missing so many open jumpers.

Interesting to note how the “Could Have Been Assist” really backs up a lot of the comments in the post game write up.  Against the Warriors the team had 26 assists compared to 22 CHBA.  Against the Lakers the Thunder had 17 assists compared to 33 CHBA.

Also, Taylor added a “Points Created” category as well as success rates for high and low post play. Read more…

Commentary Stats