Casual Basketball Artifacts
No Need To Be Selfish in Your Career High Scoring Game
Luka Doncic scored 46 points last night for a career high (CH). What's more impressive is he also had 12 assists. I would think a player would have to play a bit more selfishly in order to score a CH. Luka's 12 assists does not feel very selfish.
— alex cardazzi (@ACardazzi) February 14, 2021
The Days Between Contracts
NBA players sign contracts worth a lot of money relative to us mortals. As an outlier example, LeBron James was paid $35 million in 2019 by the Lakers. A random, current players on the front page of @bball_ref, PJ Tucker, made $8 million in 2019.
— alex cardazzi (@ACardazzi) August 30, 2020
Aggregation Issue: basketball-reference.com
Super niche @bball_ref thread: I am looking at some game logs for players and finding some inconsistencies. For example, Alvan Adams is reported to have obtained 157 ORB and 389 DRB in the 1980-81 season. However, there was a single game where O/DRB were not recorded.
— alex cardazzi (@ACardazzi) August 17, 2020
Are NBA Players Lying About Their Weights?
A lot of NBA players lie about their height. In the beginning of the 2019-20 NBA season, the NBA standardized how they measure player heights. Here are yearly height changes since the 1997-98 NBA season. This went from under 20 changes per year to about 250 in one season. pic.twitter.com/77QPajhclj
— alex cardazzi (@ACardazzi) May 31, 2020
The Explosion of the Woj Bomb
Is there a single Twitter notification more exciting than a Woj Bomb in early July? Perhaps you care more about the barrage in February, but July is when NBA free agency (usually) begins. As mere mortals, Woj is our best glimpse inside the offices of GMs across the NBA.
— alex cardazzi (@ACardazzi) March 18, 2020
Ordering Free Throws
On yesterday's episode of Buckets (w/ @BillyScafuri), @blumenfeld started with a cold open guessing some free throw probabilities. Being the nerd I am, I did the analysis.
— alex cardazzi (@ACardazzi) March 6, 2020
A (Jersey) Numbers Game
Recently, there have been a lot of players who have changed their numbers in honor of Kobe Bryant. I was interested in the frequency at which players choose their numbers, so I went to basketball reference for the data.
— alex cardazzi (@ACardazzi) February 1, 2020
Comparing Players’ Best Game & Best Season
During @jakeandamir 's most recent Buckets podcast, Amir says an NBA player's best game should be 2x their best season scoring average. I gathered all NBA/ABA/BAA player's top scoring game, season, and their career average from basketball reference.
— alex cardazzi (@ACardazzi) December 13, 2019
Indistinguishable Points & Rebounds (Wilt vs Drummond)
For Wilt's last 7 seasons, you can play this cool game where someone says his rebounding and scoring averages for the year and someone else has to guess which is which. Specifically, in 1966-67, he had nearly identical averages of 24.2 and 24.1. pic.twitter.com/QvLFFE8HSN
— alex cardazzi (@ACardazzi) December 1, 2019
The Rebounding Gravity of Russell Westbrook
Russell Westbrook (RW) is one of the most polarizing players in the league today. Here's a plot (data from 2000-2020) showing the "gravity" he has on the glass. The interpretation, and implication, of this phenomenon is fairly interesting. pic.twitter.com/SfJQdaOuHU
— alex cardazzi (@ACardazzi) November 9, 2019
LeBron James Never Records His Average
I've always been interested in how LBJ has averaged 27-7-7 (27.16-7.41-7.23) in the regular season for his career but never has had a game with that exact line. I looked at his games logs (excluding this season) and here's what I found.
— alex cardazzi (@ACardazzi) November 7, 2019