NBA Peaks: Prime Performance Timing (Part 8: NBA Stats Series)
The next drill down would be on the column named :
The Usg% matrix is that calculates what percentage of team plays a player was involved in while he was on the floor, provided that the play ends in one of the three true results:
- field-goal attempt
- free-throw attempt
- turnover
As we can see from the table above, the same James Harden we talked about before, leads the league in this category with his consistency, with almost 40% over his 2018 season!
During the seasons 2018 and a year afterwards, Harden had remarkable seasons with 36.1 and 34.3 points. In addition we can notice, James Harden, appears in this list 5 times between the 2016 to 2020.
In the table above we wanted to find out what is the average points for a player during their first 4 seasons in the league and to compare this result to the average points of the same player in his veteran years in the league, in their 4 last four years.
As we can notice from the results above, we are able to separate the results into 2 groups.
The first group of players is a group which presents players who finished strong in their last 4 seasons. In this case, the player’s scoring points have been substantially increased - players as James Harden and Giannis Ateokounmpo doubled their points in their first 4 seasons.
The second group of players is a group which presents players who entered into the nba league by storm, during their first 4 seasons. And over seasons, their points number had decreased in double digits. In this group we have Jerry Stackhouse, Elton Brand, Paul Pierce , Vince Carter and Juwan Howard and Steven Smith.
Now we need to explain the difference between the 2 groups:
The first group presents us players who are playing so far 6-10 years in the league. Therefore, those players now reach their pick by scoring at the highest level - James Harden has an average of 31.5 points , Giannis Ateokounmpo has an average of 28.5 points in their last 4 seasons playing.
The second group represents different kinds of players. I mean a different era of players which have already retired from NBA basketball. Therefore, Their scoring board points, after 15-16 years in the league, is much lower than the players who are in their prime now, and still playing.