Dunk Numbers for all Players in the NBA in 2007-08

Slam dunks are one of the most attention-grabbing plays in basketball, as proved recently by a meeting between Blake Griffin and Kendrick Perkins, and they become a hot topic quickly but there is a surprising scarcity of cold facts about them. CBS Sports has a nice leader-board… but they don’t include attempts and links to previous years don’t work anymore. Regarding dunks in the last 6 regular seasons in the NBA you can find this breakdown for 2010-11 by EvanZ but it includes only 30 top players and some non-dunkers, this copy of leader-board for 2009-10 and… flashback to days of activity on 82games.com which doesn’t even cover entire 2005-06 season. That’s just wrong, isn’t it? So I’d like to change that sad state.

UPDATE: Just one week after this post (!) invaluable basketball-reference.com introduced Play Index+ which allows us to find those numbers quickly. So the good news is fantastic new data became available! The bad news is it made this post somewhat obsolete ;-)

I started this project as usual with ESPN’s play-by-play data… but after I’ve finished and compared to aforementioned sources I discovered a shocking fact: ESPN’s version has a nasty habit of changing dunks into 1-foot shots! And it’s not a small issue either – we are talking about difference of around 3000 plays per year! So those files landed in trash along mine time spent on it and I had to start from scratch.

For my second attempt I used play-by-play data from basketballvalue.com… and even though their numbers looked fine it wasn’t a smooth ride either because of another nasty habit – they identify players only by surnames… but in some games they added a first letter to make a distinction between players on different teams. Such situation creates a litany of possible identification conflicts, for example just note how many players in the NBA are named Williams or Johnson, but through battery of tests and corrections by hand I think I sorted it all out successfully.
With that said keep in mind that there could be a couple of mistakes here, especially with players who played little or those who had the same name on the same team, but overall I think it should be accurate.

So here is a full version of dunks leader-board in the NBA in 2007-08
[it's sorted by made dunks then by attempts and then by minutes played so you can also easily find at the bottom players who didn't dunk. All non-dunk data is from basketball-reference.com]
You can also check other seasons: 2005-06, 2006-07, 2008-09, 2009-10 and 2010-11.

 

NBA Dunks Data 2006-07 Best, Worst, Attempts

Slam dunks are one of the most attention-grabbing plays in basketball, as proved recently by a meeting between Blake Griffin and Kendrick Perkins, and they become a hot topic quickly but there is a surprising scarcity of cold facts about them. CBS Sports has a nice leader-board… but they don’t include attempts and links to previous years don’t work anymore. Regarding dunks in the last 6 regular seasons in the NBA you can find this breakdown for 2010-11 by EvanZ but it includes only 30 top players and some non-dunkers, this copy of leader-board for 2009-10 and… flashback to days of activity on 82games.com which doesn’t even cover entire 2005-06 season. That’s just wrong, isn’t it? So I’d like to change that sad state.

UPDATE: Just one week after this post (!) invaluable basketball-reference.com introduced Play Index+ which allows us to find those numbers quickly. So the good news is fantastic new data became available! The bad news is it made this post somewhat obsolete ;-)

I started this project as usual with ESPN’s play-by-play data… but after I’ve finished and compared to aforementioned sources I discovered a shocking fact: ESPN’s version has a nasty habit of changing dunks into 1-foot shots! And it’s not a small issue either – we are talking about difference of around 3000 plays per year! So those files landed in trash along mine time spent on it and I had to start from scratch.

For my second attempt I used play-by-play data from basketballvalue.com… and even though their numbers looked fine it wasn’t a smooth ride either because of another nasty habit – they identify players only by surnames… but in some games they added a first letter to make a distinction between players on different teams. Such situation creates a litany of possible identification conflicts, for example just note how many players in the NBA are named Williams or Johnson, but through battery of tests and corrections by hand I think I sorted it all out successfully.
With that said keep in mind that there could be a couple of mistakes here, especially with players who played little or those who had the same name on the same team, but overall I think it should be accurate.

So here is a full version of dunks leader-board in the NBA in 2006-07
[it's sorted by made dunks then by attempts and then by minutes played so you can also easily find at the bottom players who didn't dunk. All non-dunk data is from basketball-reference.com]
You can also check other seasons: 2005-06, 2007-08, 2008-09, 2009-10 and 2010-11.

 

Worst Game Stat Lines in the Last 20 NBA Seasons

Yesterday on RealGM Forum someone asked about Worst Game Stat Line of All Time and since it wasn’t the first time and I’m a sucker for unique stat-lines I’ve decided to dig into this topic. Although I was more realistic with a timeframe because we don’t have box scores for more than a half of NBA history ;-)

I started with record books but those 14 turnovers by Kidd happened in a game with triple-double so it wasn’t exactly a disaster. The same thing can be said about another negative record Most Field Goal Attempts With None Made by Tim Hardaway because he did have 13 assists, 2 steals and FT=2/2 so it was a dead end.

Initially I wanted to do it in a organic way so I used Player Game Finder and it was fun to find such gems like Gordan Giricek’s FG=0/10 without a single rebound, assist or steal or horrible display of shooting by Terry Cummings with 21 misses from the field and 6 from the line or even stunning 27 misses from the field by Jerry Stackhouse but the problem with such searching was I couldn’t decide which one was the worst!

So I dusted off my old tool for searching through player’s game logs [over 8100 of them] from Yahoo [Last 5 seasons] and basketballreference.com [previous 15 seasons] and used two measures:
Game Score where the formula is PTS + 0.4 * FG – 0.7 * FGA – 0.4*(FTA – FT) + 0.7 * ORB + 0.3 * DRB + STL + 0.7 * AST + 0.7 * BLK – 0.4 * PF – TOV and Win Score which is calculated by the following equation: PTS + REB + STL + 1/2*BLK + 1/2*AST – FGA – 1/2*FTA – TO – 1/2*PF.

So who had The Worst Stat Line in the Last 20 Regular Seasons?
Here’s a Bottom25 for Single Game Stats according to Game Score:

 

Which Teams are The Most Suspected for Tanking?

In my second piece about incentives to lose in the NBA I’ll focus mainly on extremes. Because even though it is a well known strategy I don’t think there is any research on… pointing fingers to actual offenders!
In other words, are there teams which tank more often than others?
Or is it simply year-by-year case-by-case strategy?

The data, timeframe and [simple] methodology used is exactly the same as in my previous post about tanking so I won’t repeat myself here and I’ll go straight into IMHO interesting curiosity…

# Worst Record	Total Difference	Biggest Minus	By Team	During Season
1	6	-9	Blazers	2005-06
2	-19	-9	Warriors	2000-01
3	-14	-6	Bucks	2006-07
4	-12	-10	Nuggets	1991-92
5	-32	-8	Clippers	2003-04
6	-10	-9	Sixers	1993-94
7	-35	-10	Cavs	2000-01
8	-3	-9	Clippers	2009-10
9	-7	-10	Lakers	2004-05
10	29	-7	Bucks	1996-97
11	-7	-4	Nets	2008-09

Conventional wisdom, and frankly my assumption before this project, was that teams tank mostly for the worst record in the league but according to this measure it’s not true. Worst record usually belongs to either actually really bad team or one which started tanking very early so other teams can’t catch it… and the real tank-fest goes on between 2nd worst and 7th worst team each year.
When you check example of odds for Top3 pick it makes a lot of sense. First of all, there are a lot of ties in that range and second of all, team can almost double it’s odds for Top3 by moving up just one spot!

OK, and into the main point of this post [Warning! Some long tables ahead!]: