About the crazy stats in the NBA this year

It probably isn’t too shocking that the number of big Game Score outings in a given season is reasonably correlated with the league’s pace factor. The more possessions per game, the easier it is to produce eye-popping stat lines — and this season has featured the NBA’s fastest pace since the early 1990s. So, given the game’s more up-tempo state, perhaps we shouldn’t be too surprised by this year’s explosion of big statistical games.

But there’s also evidence that we’re in an age of better NBA talent than we’ve seen since the days of MJ and Sir Charles. When I borrowed FiveThirtyEight editor-in-chief Nate Silver’s “baseball time machine” technique — which infers the amount of talent present in a given season by comparing the performances of the same players in adjacent seasons — and applied it to basketball to prove millennials weren’t ruining the NBA, I found that the past few seasons contained the NBA’s strongest talent base since the early to mid-1990s. (As measured by Box Plus/Minus, which is pace-adjusted and accounts for both offense and defense.) It was part of a trend in leaguewide quality that’s been on the upswing since the mid-2000s, as the game finally stabilized after adding seven new teams between 1988 and 2004.

Lending further credence to the theory that there’s simply a wealth of good players in today’s NBA, 2016-17 has also seen its big stat-stuffing games spread across more players than past seasons have. This season, there have been 89 games with a Game Score of 30 or higher, recorded by 38 different players — an average of 2.3 big games per player. By contrast, the 1990-91 season featured an average of 2.8 big games per player, meaning the performances were more concentrated among players; the same was true in all of the big-game-heavy seasons of the late 1980s and early 1990s. This season has featured a lot of great performances, but they’re not being being hogged as much by the same small group of usual suspects.

Herbie Green wrote:Those charts are not very convincing.

Turtleneck wrote:

Herbie Green wrote:Those charts are not very convincing.

You're right, Herbie. Nobody is putting up crazy stats this year.

DWags wrote:Bucks are gonna win the world championship

Other Teams Pursuing That wrote:

DWags wrote:Bucks are gonna win the world championship

nice blown 18 point lead, asshole! had the bucks -5.5

Herbie Green wrote:
I didn't read all those words that must be trying to say that