Ranking the All-Time Great Scoring Seasons in the 3-PT Era by Their Distance from Greatness

 mediasres Keep using PER. I'll use this. Not everybody has to agree on everything.

 thecity2 then keep telling me that Corey Maggette (5 seasons) Jim Paxon (82-83, Wayman Tysdale (89-90), Rik Smits (2 seasons) were greater scorers than Kareem Abdul-Jabbar 1979-80 Charles Barkley 1986-86 1989-90,  Hakeem Olajuwon 1990-91 Shaquille O'Neal 1995-96 1996-97, Michael Jordan* 1997-98, David Robinson 1998-99, Allen Iverson 2000-01  Tracy McGrady 2000-01

The eyeball test. Sometimes you just have to look.

I do agree that we don't have to agree on everything.

 mediasres In this post, I limited the data points to those with > 25% USG.

The full analysis with all players includes those with USG < 25%. Some of those are players you mentioned. Out of 10,000 player seasons total, here is where those other seasons you mentioned are ranked:

Kareem '80 (#104)

Barkley '90 (#37)

Barkley '87 (#60)

Hakeem '91 (#1234) 55% TS 25% USG  = not all that great

Shaq '96 (#75) '97 (#232) 31.1% USG 55.6% TS (not great by his standards)

Jordan '98 (#231) 33.7% USG 53.3% TS (not great by his standards)

Robinson '99 (#1098) 23.8% USG 56.4% TS (would be a somewhat above average mark today)

Iverson '01 (#184) 35.9% USG 51.8% TS (high-volume chucker, but arguably it was necessary on that team)

McGrady '01 (#600) 31.2% USG 52.1% TS (Monta Ellis territory)

Your cherry picked examples for most case show the weakest seasons of each particular player. Overall, I think you've helped me make my point even better. Thanks.

 thecity2 lol - you just measured their seasons by the very stat that is under question USG. I"m saying USG is a bad measurement of great scoring here are some examples. You are saying: Those examples all have low USG. Well, what else do you expect? Of course they have low USG, that is the entire point.

I would contend though that Charles Barkley's or Michael Jordan's lower USG seasons are STILL better "scoring greatness" season than Corey Maggette or Kelly Tripucka's best USG seasons. These are Hall of Famers.

 thecity2 another way of saying this is - using a contemporary example - while Kobe Byrant's USG has been steadily going up the last 5 years, his PER has been going down. According to you by these two factors he has been improving as a scorer, while I suggest he as been declining.

 mediasres No, he hasn't been improving according to me. You can read my other post which uses this metric to study aging:

http://www.d3coder.com/thecity/2012/04/08/using-the-usage-efficiency-distance-metric-to-create-aging-curves-for-the-nba/

 mediasres Also, you're not understanding the relationship that I've found between TS% and USG%. It's the perpendicular distance of the data point (TS%, USG%) relative to the "frontier" on the edge of the data set. It's not just "high USG = better". That's only true if it's accompanied with some relatively high level of TS%.

 mediasres You can always cherry pick stats like these.

If I used PPG, you'd cherry pick that. If I used PER, you'd cherry pick that. There are 10,000 data points. I'm glad you found 1 you don't like. That means I got it right 99.99%.

 mediasres If you know of a stat that will give "perfect" results, let me know.

It's not PER, though. Or PPG.

 thecity2 I'm just suggesting - and would love to see - the correlation between TS% and PER. I wonder what the frontier line would look like. I don't think you did anything wrong here at all. It just begins the thought process: How could it possibly be better? If we saw the frontier line for PER v TS% we could then criticize that data group too. But one has to say that giving a player like Maggette who hasn't even made an All Star game 5 of the greatest scorer seasons in the 3 pt era raises eyebrows. We all know he isn't that good.

 mediasres There would be a very high correlation between TS% and PER, that's the problem. By definition, PER is correlated to shooting efficiency. USG is not.

Maggette is a very good scorer. He can't do anything else. But he can score. I have no problem with that.

 mediasres I already explained in the other post that Barkley's '87 season is rated #60 out of all 10,000 data points. It's just not on the spreadsheet included in this post. Maggette's highest rated season is #106 (2010) when he shot 61.5% TS on 26.7% USG.

Now go cherry pick the next one you have a problem with.

 mediasres Maggette in '04 had the #452 best season. That's nowhere near as good as Barkley's '87 season according to my metric.

 mediasres Kelly Tripucka's best season rates #325 on the full list.

 thecity2 hmm. "No, he hasn't been improving according to me."...you didn't read what I wrote. I said "by these two factors (USG vs PER)" you are counting improvement. In other words, because you are weighting USG you are failing to capture just how MUCH he has declined. If you used TS% and PER you would see a much more notable decline as both have plummeted for Kobe.

I actually came here through your aging post, which was a great one. In fact you commented on my Kobe's 5 Year Efficiency Decline post to begin with.

 thecity2 "There would be a very high correlation between TS% and PER, that's the problem. By definition, PER is correlated to shooting efficiency. USG is not."

That is actually what I wonder. Would there be a noticeable and effective frontier line of players with high TS% and lower PER, or high PER and lower TS%? Only by running the data would we know.

Maggette is a good scorer, but nowhere near a great scorer. He is the traditional high volume shooter on bad teams scorer.

 thecity2 I guess I can help it if all your data isn't in the spread sheet. I can only look at the data you gave me. :(

 thecity2 this is the thing, and maybe you can clear the whole thing up for me. Your spread sheet, which I took to included ALL the data you felt was relevant because you ranked the players in it, doesn't have Barkley at #60, it has Dirk at #60, and Barkley was missing, as are a lot of other players.

Below is the spread sheet I have from you, and included are the missing players with great PER seasons (in gray). If all or most of these gray marked players are actually ranked high by your DIST stat, then we have no big disagreement

with PER added: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AhuaUsq2ln9JdHBZOUtyeHlmME1nNkFWNjdSazQ2M3c

I'm not sure why you disqualified players based on TS% and USG% minimums, but all could go on was your ranking.  If you are telling me that your spread sheet was partial and your rankings were somewhat provisional then this was largely a misunderstanding.

Honestly above when you were telling me what number Barkley and others were I had no idea you were talking about your own rankings (I was reading quickly)  because they did not match what you presented. I thought you were talking about USG or another stat.

 mediasres "If you are telling me that your spread sheet was partial and your rankings were somewhat provisional"

That is what I've been trying to tell you. In this post I only showed players with > 25% USG, but I went back later and included all players. That's why on the other spreadsheet you'll see Artis Gilmore with a 70% TS 19% USG season on the list.

 mediasres "Try this thought experiment. Picture Dominique Wilkins (I hope you saw him play because it helps). What a dynamic scorer he was. Now imagine that he was capable of 9 boards a game or 6 assists. Suddenly he becomes more than a dunker and jump shooter. He becomes a next level scorer. He is all that more unstoppable. Or take Lebron now. Imagine his game only contained 3 assists a game, or 4 rebounds. He just is a different player, and nowhere near as impactful or threatening as a scorer. If he kept the same USG he would just be a gunner, and not a truly great scorer."

I don't understand the point of your counterfactuals. Can we just talk about what actually happens?

 thecity2 There is what is happening (events in the world), then there is aesthetic judgement of those events ("this class of events were 'great'"), and then there is statistical measurement of events attempting to capture the aesthetic judgment. But lets not pretend that statistical measures ARE the aesthetic judgment. Counterfactuals help in pointing out the nature of the aesthetic judgment itself, why we say someone is a "great scorer".

Otherwise why not just use average points per game, a nice firm easy to understand number, and say that the greatest scorers are the players that score the most points in a game?

 mediasres You are free to use PPG. I think people will have more issues with that list than mine, though, including yourself perhaps.

In any case here is a Google Doc spread sheet of your Distance data with PER added in. In gray are player seasons that did not make the Distance list. PER was only added to seasons that made the NBA reference All Time season PER list

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AhuaUsq2ln9JdHBZOUtyeHlmME1nNkFWNjdSazQ2M3c

At the very least your distance metric makes for great discussion. The above spread sheet may very well have errors as PER was added by hand.

 mediasres Remember PER includes other things, especially rebounding and assists. Most of the players on that list of yours were great rebounders and shot blockers. The metric being discussed in this post is only about *scoring*. It's not about rebounding, assists, blocked shots, etc.

Look up the TS% and USG% for those players and see where those points would fall on the plot.

 thecity2 Multiple high PER season omissions of Allen Iverson, Charles Barkley, Olajuwan, O'Neal, McGrady, some of the greatest scorers in the history of the league, while players like Corey Maggette (who??), Tysdale, Drew do make it. The point isn't where they fall on the plot, it's whether the plotting actually is measuring what it is supposed to be measuring. I know no analysis is perfect, but I think we are missing something here by giving so much credence to USG. Just my opinion tho.

 mediasres Barkley had one of the all time best scoring seasons when he shot 67% on 27% USG. In 85-86 (the season that I "omitted"), he shot 62% TS on 22% USG. That's a huge difference. James Harden did better than that this year.

 thecity2 ..as I've mentioned elsewhere, I do think that passing and rebounding are big parts of scoring. Wilt was an impossible scorer to stop, but part of that was that he also was very hard to keep off the boards. If Jordan couldn't pass worth a lick, he would have been much easier to defend. The overall impact on the game is part of scoring, I believe.  

 mediasres But Jordan appears on my list multiple times. Wilt would probably appear to, but I'm only counting since 1980. If rebounding and assists help you score, that's great. Then a player who can do those things should have no trouble appearing on this list.

Mystic, don't be offended by what I'm about to say. I appreciate your suggestions, but your choice of "misleading" I still find insulting. I know you're German, so I can write it off as a language issue most likely. When you say something is misleading, it implies some sort of sinister motivation on my part. All you really had to say was you find the analysis incomplete (as all models tend to be), and that you have some suggestions for future revisions. Your suggestions are good ones, although I'm not sure I like the idea of adjusting for position. Perhaps, if assisted FGA were available for all years, that would be useful, but we have no way of knowing those stats for all but the last few seasons. Adjusting for league averages is a good idea.

Sorry Evan, I did not want to imply any kind of hidden agenda on your part. I just think that the method of choice will give misleading results (in a sense of inaccurate). You picked certain players in order to determine "greatness" while we do not know that those players are indeed "great" in terms of actual improving the offense for the whole team. As for the position adjustment: Look at the highest efficient scorers in your figure with lower usage like Barkley, Dantley, Stoudemire or Malone. Those were mainly post scorers. It would be good to see whether you get a different slope for wing scorers and post scorers (well, Malone is tricky, given the fact that he also changed up his game over the time to go with more midrange shooting).

Mystic, you see that those post scorers (Barkley, Stoudemire, Malone) and the wing scorers like MJ and Kobe all seem to lie along the same line. So, at least, from these data, what slope are you expecting to be different? In other words, if I fit a line to Barkley, Malone, and Stoudemire, the slope won't be very different from a line fitted to the other players. If it were, the R^2 wouldn't be close to 1 when I fit all of the players included on the graph. As far as the results leading to the team outcome, we all know there is more to that than just scoring. But those are undoubtedly some of the greatest scorers to have played the game, are they not? I know you don't like Dantley, but do you not think he was a great scorer?

Well, if you connect two points, they will lie on the same line too. ;) I once did look at the usage vs. efficiency stuff and I noticed that bigs tend to go faster down with increased usage than wings. If you cut out the top low usage scorers like Barkley or Dantley and replace them with the best low usage wing scorers, you will likely notice a similar thing. I found something like -1 as slope for bigs and -0.5 for wings while usage is x in a normaler linear function and y is TS%. I don't like Dantley's offensive game, because he stopped ball movement and didn't improve the team offense as much as his scoring efficiency suggest. Whether he can be actually used in order to determine "great" scorers, is questionable imho. I think scoring which happens within the flow of the game without stopping ball movement is more valuable in order to get a better team offense. If other players had picked their shooting opportunities as much as Dantley did (Dantley avoided tough shots), they would have likely also seen an increase in their efficiency. As a team you want to use the possession as efficient as possible, using up the shot clock while letting your teammates bail you out, will likely not help offensively afterall. But we are probably running just into a problem which can't be solved by individual boxscore numbers.

Mystic, as to #1, if both the x- and y- variables depend on TOV, there will automatically be correlation. Why would you want that here? As for the other comments, I'm not sure I would consider them as things I did "wrong". You might suggest these as further lines of inquiry, but I think it's unfair to say what I have done so far is "wrong".