Fantasy Basketball Advice

Two weeks ago, the New York Times published an article detailing the rapid decline of triple-doubles in the NBA. On Monday, Kyle Lowry went 16/10/10 against the Timberwolves, earning just the second triple-double of the season (Rajon Rondo earned the season’s first on January 1, 2012 against Washington).

Below is a visualization of how accurate the Times’ assertion actually is.

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In the last 26 seasons, there have been 1,026 regular-season triple-doubles. The vast majority (974) were pts-rbd-ast triple-doubles, 47 were pts-rbd-blk triple-doubles, three were pts-ast-stl triple-doubles and two were pts-rbd-stl triple doubles.

The typical NBA season is 24 weeks long and yields an average of 41 triple-doubles each season, or 1.7 every week. This season has seen that average plummet to 0.4 trip-dubs each week.

If the two lockout seasons are removed in addition to the 21 triple-doubles earned in those two seasons, there are 1,005 triple doubles spread out over 24 seasons.

The largest outlier occurred in the 1997-98 season, the season before the lockout season. Despite playing almost 900 more games in 1998 than in 1999, the earlier season saw just two more triple-doubles. As suggested in the graphic above, a large number of players with a knack for earning triple deuces missed a fair amount of games that season, but enough to account for about half the number of triple doubles it should have had? Not likely. In 1997-98, the league averaged the seventh-worst ORtg and the eighth-best DRtg of the last 26 years, which also doesn’t truly account for the lapse. Alterations to league rules such as hand-checking (instituted a couple seasons earlier), or moving the three-point line back to its original position also don’t account for the dearth of triple-doubles in 1998, as the same effects were not seen in the seasons before or after. Perhaps that Bulls team was so good that it left opponents who had just faced them shattered for several games afterward or terrified for the five or six games leading up to it.

Frankly, that last theory makes the most sense.

This made the rounds back in 2009. I never felt it was done properly. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it. It’s like a magic eye without forcing yourself to go cross-eyed just to see some stupid sailboat.

With the franchise now known as the Washington Wizards, and at one point known as the Chicago Packers, Zephyrs, or Baltimore, Capitol and Washington Bullets, I thought it might be fun to create a word cloud that showed the names of anyone who’s ever worn the teams’ jerseys with their names sized relative to the time with which which they were on the team.

And while guys like Unseld, Gus Johnson and Hayes are not surprising, who knew Brendan Haywood was such a long-running member of the squad? Or that Bernanrd King wasn’t? It felt like he was a Bullet twice as long as he was a Knick. Then again, I was an infant in that era.

Ever wonder how many players have scored 50+ points in a game since Jordan entered the league? No? Really!?! What about the number of 50+ games over the last 27 years? No, again? NEVER? That’s weird. I wonder what you DO wonder about. Us, here at Razzball, we mostly wonder about that kind of stuff. We also wonder what others are wondering. This is how we get through the long winters.

Anyway, we mapped out every player with multiple 50-point games starting in 1984. We had two reasons for this. The first is because what better era to begin with than the Jordan Era, and 2) because compiling accurate game log stats pre-1984 is terribly taxing and I have a cat that needs affection. Priorities!

Couple notes:

I have no doubt that Olajuwon laced up his L.A. Gears every game with the intent to never ever let someone drop 50 on his team, so Houston never being on the fuzzy end of that stick doesn’t surprise me, but Seattle/OKC and Indiana being the only other two teams never having been embarrassed like that surprises me greatly.

As Jason pointed out when turning over his research, in the last 27 seasons, LeBron has had the fourth most 50-point games (9), but none of them occurred in front of a home crowd. Dominique Wilkins, on the other hand, ONLY scored in front of an Atlanta crowd. Bernard King also did his monster scoring at home. Frankly, without King, both D.C. and New York would have significantly poorer showings. So, you know … damn you, Bernard King.

The Washington Wizards/Bullets are the only franchise with more than two guys to score 50 points in a game in the last quarter century. Not the Lakers. Not the Celtics. D.C.

Larry Bird did drop 50 against the Hawks on November 10, 1989, but the game was actually played in New Orleans as a ploy to relieve the franchise of sagging hometown attendance. Luckily, such low attendance would only last another decade or five.