Is Kobe the Best Clutch Scorer in the NBA?
- By: The Professor
- On: 12/17/2009 11:40:00 AM
- View Comments : 20
Related: The Professor Boston Celtics Cleveland Cavaliers Denver Nuggets Los Angeles Lakers Miami Heat New Orleans Hornets Oklahoma City Thunder Orlando Magic Phoenix Suns Portland Trailblazers Utah Jazz NBA
I will be using 82games.com for my clutch scoring stats, and their definition of "clutch" is in the last 5 minutes of the 4th quarter or overtime with the score within 5 points. They normalize their stats per 48 minutes so that we can compare how the players are doing on a per-48 minute basis. The numbers are more meaningful with a larger sample size, which means the further into the season you go the better. But we're more than a quarter of the way in, so we can at least get a general idea of how things stack up so far.
LeBron James: 77.4 points, 54%, 40.9 FGA, 0% of shots assisted
Vince Carter: 57.9 points, 38% FG, 39.2 FGA, 25% of shots assisted
Kobe Bryant: 56.8 points, 43% FG, 39.8 FGA, 11% of shots assisted
Carmelo Anthony: 55.8 points, 43% FG, 32.9 FGA, 18% assisted
Steve Nash: 54.3 points, 55% FG, 23.6 FGA, 9% assisted
Dwyane Wade: 35.9 points, 41 %FG, 31.3 FGA, 9% assisted
Chris Paul: 33.1 points, 39% FG, 22.1 FGA, 20% assisted
Brandon Roy: 32.5 points, 45% FG, 25.8 FGA, 7% assisted
Paul Pierce: 27.2 points, 37% FG, 19.9 FGA, 14% assisted
Kevin Durant: 20.6 points, 20% FG, 19.3 FGA, 33% assisted
Ray Allen: 19 points, 50% FG, 10.6 FGA, 80% assisted
Deron Williams: 13.1 points, 25% FG, 15.7 FGA, 67% assisted
Some of my take-away thoughts:
*Kobe, LeBron and Carter are taking the vast majority of their team's shots down the stretch of close games. They are all attempting almost a shot per minute, and most of their shots are coming off the dribble with very few of them assisted. This is a common thing among most of these perimeter players, that they are creating the shot for themselves and not being set up by teammates.
*LeBron is ridiculous. Kobe and Carmelo are effective scoring late, but LeBron is by far the best clutch scorer in the NBA thus far this season. Carter is scoring at a similar rate to Kobe and Carmelo, but at a lower percentage.
*Nash is also ridiculous. Nash's scoring average looks very similar to Kobe's and Melo's, but he's doing it on a lot fewer shots. He is shooting a ridiculous percentage for a jump-shooting point guard that creates his own shots, especially considering that he is also creating shots for others at the same time.
*Wade is having a down year so far. Last season he was right there with LeBron and Kobe for crunchtime scoring, but this year both his shot attempts and his percentages are down.
*Paul and Williams are also having down years in cruncthime thus far. Neither are shooting well at all, though Paul has a solid advantage here. I didn't include the assist numbers in this post, but if I would have that would have helped Williams' stats because he has dished a lot of assists late. Paul has not, but that could be due to the lackluster play of his teammates as well.
*Durant isn't quite there yet. His scoring average is dropping a lot in crunch time with shooting percentages that fall through the floor. He is going to have to pick that up quite a bit if he wants to be mentioned in the same breath with the other elite scoring wings in the NBA.
*The Celtics are sharing the crunchtime responsibilities. Pierce and Allen are both considered elite clutch scorers, but on the Celtics they share the ball late with each other as well as Kevin Garnett and Rajon Rondo. As such, none of them have the volume of points as the other elite wings. It is clear that Pierce is doing more shot-creating than Allen late when you look at the percent of their shots that are assisted, and this could tie into why Allen is hitting his shots at a higher clip than Pierce.
Side note: I plan to do big men in a separate post, but had I included them Dirk Nowitzki would have also scored well on this list. In fact, his numbers look more like the guards than they do to most of the other bigs in the league. This makes sense because he does so much of his scoring from the perimeter, but he is still a 7-foot tall power forward so I will include him with the big guys.
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Comments
On: 12/17/2009 12:22:00 PM
On: 12/17/2009 4:14:00 PM
On: 12/17/2009 5:47:00 PM
On: 12/18/2009 12:25:00 AM
nayfel - Really, Kobe is the best shooter in the league? There aren't *dozens* of players who would beat him in shooting contests? I guess the fact that Steve Nash (for one, among dozens) murders Kobe in %s every year is just a fluke?
On: 12/18/2009 5:54:00 AM
Robert Horry has a few rings (so do Scott Williams, Jerry Sichting, the Paxson brothers, and probably a hundred other skillful role players). I'm not arguing that rings per se are the absolute measure of a player's ability (that's absurd); but when comparing the best of the best players, it is all about championships - and if you haven't won at least a couple of titles, you're not even in the conversation.
You see, basketball *is* a team game, and the ultimate objective is to *win* the game (and ultimately the championship), not to simply compile gaudy individual statistics in losing efforts. The best players all realize this, and to some degree or another, they each sublimate their individual games for benefit of their team's overall fortunes.
Until LeBron actually wins a title or two (and I expect that he will), most reasonable folks will maintain that there *is* something besides free throws at which Kobe is clearly superior: namely, winning NBA championships. I think you will find that the evidence is pretty unequivocal on that point, and at the highest levels of competition, that's the only statistic that really matters.
On: 12/18/2009 8:36:00 AM
Yes, Kobe deserves wonderful credit for all of his achievements, including his titles. But to use those rings in a vacuum as evidence for him when he clearly had by-far the more talented teams, I don't agree with that.
On: 12/18/2009 10:31:00 AM
On: 12/18/2009 11:47:00 AM
As of today, LeBron can't be seriously considered alongside guys like Jordan, Bird, Magic, Isaiah, Olajuwon, Duncan or Kobe (or even Oscar Robertson, the player to whose individual game LeBron's is often compared). Failing to win a championship (in the team sport whose outcomes are most heavily influenced a great individual player) is an insurmountable shortcoming on his resume, and so long as LeBron remains title-less (untitled?), he will be a notch below all those guys, in *many* peoples' opinion (and there is nothing "delusional or unaware" about that).
On: 12/18/2009 1:01:00 PM
On: 12/18/2009 1:03:00 PM
Yes, you are correct, that if their careers ended today Kobe would go down in history as the greater player than LeBron in large part because of the titles. Kobe has four titles, LeBron has none, so Kobe's current legacy is stronger in a historical sense for that reason.
But Cole0271's original point (which he stated more strongly than I would have, but I agree with the gist) was essentially that LeBron is a better basketball player than Kobe right now. That has absolutely nothing to do with their historical legacies, and is entirely tied to what they do on the court.
And on the court, LeBron is producing more than Kobe right now as an individual in just about any way you care to measure them...individually. If you want to argue that Kobe is a better player than LeBron currently due to a team achievement then that is where I disagree, where I think you have to take circumstances like the fact that Kobe's team is just better into account.
So yeah, legacy, right now Kobe takes the comp. On-court right now, I think it's LeBron.
On: 12/18/2009 3:01:00 PM
That's exactly what I am disputing, because I believe that "being a better basketball player" - in real life as opposed to a roto league - can't be established with basic arithmetic, and it isn't determined by simply adding up points/rebounds/assists/blocks/steals and subtracting turnovers.
Jordan's best statistical year was 1988-1989, when he scored 32.5/game and averaged 8 rebounds, 8 assists while shooting 54%. Yet very few sensible folks would argue that Jordan "was a better basketball player" that year than any of his seasons from 1991-1998, when he was dominating the league and winning titles every year, while averaging lower totals in most (if not all) of his individual statistical categories.
By the same token, a big part of Kobe's maturation into the game's best player (like Jordan's before him) has involved sublimating his own game and his own statistics, for the sake of a more efficient role on stronger team. Bryant once scored 81 points in a game, but he doesn't have to do that every night, and obviously he doesn't try to. As I have said before, at the highest level - fairly or not - great players are judged (by themselves, their peers, and the fans) on championships won, so it's kind of disingenuous for us to hold them to a very different standard for the purposes of our imaginary award.
At the end of the day, the fact that we all vigorously debate the issue of "best player in the league" is testament to the very subjectivity of the issue; I am certainly willing to accept dissenting opinions, but I am not willing to be dismissed as "delusional or unaware" because I continue to believe Kobe Bryant to be the better basketball player right now.
On: 12/18/2009 6:43:00 PM
Consider the example of Pau Gasol; he was *precisely* as good last year as he was while a distinguished member of the Grizz. During last year's season, did he suddenly get better? Change his game, or approach? Having followed him closely for years, I can assure you that the answer is "no". What took him from "All-Star" to "Champion" was being traded to the Lakers. Therefore, changing our assessment of Pau Gasol (certainly a star-caliber player) based on the results of last year's NBA Finals would be foolish; same player, same effectiveness, different team result. Thus there is a serious disconnect b/t individual effectiveness & team outcomes, and any attempt to conflate the two is seriously misguided.
Further, the only "causal mechanism" (to be generous) you specify for this effect, the "sublimation of ego" is flat-out contradicted by empirical evidence: Kobe's usage rate in '08-'09 was actually HIGHER than it was the year before, when Boston won the title. Of course, Kevin Garnett was healthy then, and Pau wasn't yet in Laker gold, further illustrating the importance of team construction and league context.
As a final aside, I find the issue of championships even less relevant here than I normally do, given that LBJ is all of 24 years old. Perhaps he still has enough time left to sublimate his ego by being traded to the Lakers, as Pau did?
On: 12/18/2009 6:46:00 PM
On: 12/18/2009 9:04:00 PM
Personally, I don't believe that "individual effectiveness" can be isolated from team outcomes. At a very basic level, basketball is an irreducibly synergistic game. Individual stats can offer some meaningful insights about the degree to which individual players are contributing to their team's totals, but they can also be extremely misleading when attempting to abstract an individual player's performance from the context of his team's, and/or compare him to other players.
The truth is that players can really only be "effective" insofar as they faithfully execute the duties of their role within the specific team context, and in the service of the team's ultimate success. Accordingly, Pau Gasol was never really "effective" as the leader of the Grizz (they never even won a single playoff game with him), but he is quite "effective" as a Pippen-esque second-banana with the Lakers.
At the end of the day (like my grandmother used to say), the proof is in the pudding. Kobe has repeatedly demonstrated the ability to drive a well constructed team to the NBA title (which he did again just this year), while LeBron's ability to do so is thus far entirely speculative and hypothetical. In my opinion, that makes Bryant the demonstrably superior player right now, and I still haven't seen any terribly convincing counterarguments to that simple point.
On: 12/18/2009 10:10:00 PM
The position you are espousing seems to prohibit any form of meaningful empirical comparison of individual performance. While I agree with the notion that basketball is rife with "synergy" (to be technical, "interactive effects" is more accurate, as synergy only implies a productive direction of the effect; any Warriors fan will tell you a team can be less than the sum of its parts, too!), that doesn't mean that we're unable to glean *anything* useful from individual statistics. There is absolutely no logical or empirical basis for that conclusion. At. All. Various counting statistics can be adjusted on a per-possession basis, plus-minus accounts can be adjusted for strength of teammates, and all sorts of rich comparisons can be made.
The notion that Pau Gasol was not effective at the task of winning games for the Grizz may be true, but it is in fact a logic-chopping truism and nothing more. It is a sophist's conclusion that tells us nothing. The same can be said for Kobe Bryant vis-a-vis championships: it's certainly true that he's been good at piloting superbly-constructed teams, but that is a very limited conclusion that, while technically correct, doesn't offer us very much. To get down to brass tacks, Kobe has never won a title without Shaq or Gasol, and his personal winning percentage in games played without those two is very underwhelming. By contrast, LBJ has never played with a teammate of the caliber of Gasol or early 00s-Shaq, his personal winning percentage has been excellent, and his statistical domination of Kobe in individual measures is overwhelming, despite playing on a team known for low-possession games.
So, Kobe had had more *effective* opportunities to win championships than LBJ has, and he won them ... as my little brother used to say, "so"? That tells us nothing. All of the rest of the evidence is overwhelmingly in LBJ's favor right now. To ignore that in favor of limited conclusions is pure obscuranti
On: 12/18/2009 10:13:00 PM
On: 12/19/2009 8:10:00 AM
When considering two sublime players on contending teams whose statistics each reflect first-rate excellence across the board, team outcomes remains significant, because individual statistics just describe their roles with their own teams, without saying much about their degree of effectiveness within those roles, relative to one another (though ironically, FT% seems like the one statistic that transcends this limitation).
By the same token, Magic's five championships don't suggest that he's 40% better than Larry Bird. The fact that they were both demonstrably effective at winning championships makes such a comparison similarly futile. Conversely, the fact that LeBron hasn't yet won a single title is compelling, and all things being equal (which is the essence of what I've been saying about individual statistics for players of this caliber), that's the differentiator that makes Kobe superior to LeBron at this point in time, in my opinion.
I don't think you (cole0271) and I are disagreeing as much as you seem to think, and I don't believe it is ludicrous for you to propose that LeBron is the best player in basketball (you could also make reasonable cases for Chris Paul, Tim Duncan, Dwyane Wade, D12, Carmelo, etc.). I just think there is a more compelling argument in favor of Kobe's candidacy, while you seem to consider LeBron's superiority a foregone conclusion, based on an itemized comparison of roto numbers, and a thorough disregard for team outcomes as part of the equation ("I find the issue of championships even less relevant here than I normally do"). I believe that's somewhat myopic, but you're certainly entitled to your opinion, and I do appreciate the debate. Hopefully we'll get an LA / Cleveland Finals, to add a little more fuel to the fire!
Happy Holidays!
On: 12/19/2009 10:51:00 AM
On: 12/19/2009 5:14:00 PM
Here's to hoping LBJ gets a good running mate in Cleveland ... or somewhere else?!
On: 12/19/2009 6:09:00 PM
LeBron plays in an offense where he has to create pretty much everything. He commonly starts a possession 25 feet from the basket and dominates the ball to the extent that it is rare for the team to score without him assisting or hockey assisting.
So, comparing their statistics isn't a fair fight. Put Kobe on the Cavs and he'd score 32 ppg easily in my opinion.
team offenses and quality of teammates needs to be factored in when comparing statistics.
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