What's the explanation for all the huge NBA individual scoring performances this season? Why have they increased in frequency over the past few weeks?
On Monday, hours after Donovan Mitchell scored 71 in an overtime win against the Chicago Bulls -- the most by any player in a game since Kobe Bryant's 81-point performance in 2006 -- Klay Thompson tallied 54 in a double-overtime win against the Atlanta Hawks.
Those games highlighted a recent high-scoring trend. Near the midpoint of the 2022-23 season, the NBA already has 14 50-point games -- tied for seventh-most we've seen in an entire regular season. Seven of those came in December alone, also tied for seventh-most ever in a month. Let's break down why players are going off so frequently.
Throughout the NBA season, I answer your questions about the latest, most interesting topics in basketball. You can tweet me directly at @kpelton, tweet your questions using the hashtag #peltonmailbag or email them to peltonmailbag@gmail.com.
In addition to the main question, this week's mailbag also tackles how many minutes it takes before lineup stats should be considered reliable measures of their performance and shots made with a foot on the 3-point line.
"Some of these stat lines have been wild. What's causing this uptick in scoring?"
-- JM
The obvious explanation is that scoring has been going up in general over the last decade. This season's 113.8 points per game would be the most since 1969-70, up 1.7 points from the previous post-merger high of 112.1 two years ago. However, that doesn't totally explain the 50-point surge.
After all, scoring is just 7% higher than it was in 2017-18 -- the last time NBA teams averaged fewer than 110 PPG. By contrast, 50-point games have been more than twice as common as 2017-18, when there were 13 total that season.
As it turns out, the relationship between league-wide scoring and 50-point games isn't linear. They quickly become more likely as scoring increases above 110 PPG.
Besides that, another factor might be lifting big scoring outings this season. Back in November, I discussed on the Hoop Collective podcast with Brian Windhorst that the record number of players averaging 30 PPG (currently five, which would tie 1961-62 for the most ever) could be explained in part by stars logging more minutes than in recent seasons.
Naturally, longer playing time for stars means more points. One way to look at this is what percentage of his team's points the leading scorer in a game puts up. In 1961-62, when Wilt Chamberlain averaged more than 50 PPG, the leading scorer was responsible for nearly 28% of his team's points -- a record high. More recently, when scoring bottomed out in the early 2000s, this mark was around 26%.
With teams putting more emphasis on resting their stars in the regular season, that percentage dropped in recent seasons despite the trend toward heliocentric, high-usage play. In 2014-15, the leading scorer produced just 23.5% of team points -- an all-time low. That mark was still just 24% last season but has jumped back up to 25% so far in 2022-23 -- the highest in 12 years.
As stars score a higher percentage of points per game at the team level, it will inevitably result in more big scoring performances.
"I hear a lot of references to plus-minus stats for various lineups (e.g. 'these two are plus-14 in 52 minutes'). That seems like an incredibly small sample size to discern anything. What is an appropriate number of minutes to be able to evaluate rotations?"
The randomness in lineup stats is something I've struggled to quantify, but I want to try a new approach. For two-player combinations this season, I used NBA Advanced Stats lineup data to compare their net ratings at home and away. (Why two-player combinations? Because there are many more of these than full five-player lineups, and they tend to play far more minutes.)
Here's how the difference between net ratings at home and away looks relative to the average minutes played at home and on the road.
Unsurprisingly, these differences converge toward the average home-court advantage (about 7.6 points per 100 possessions this season, shown dashed on the chart) as minutes increase. But we still see large discrepancies between the net ratings at home and on the road, which almost certainly reflect the randomness of both opponents faced and results. (We know that opponent 3-point shooting tends to drive a lot of these differences, as it has for the Golden State Warriors' home-court advantage as a team.)
It's not until two-player combinations reach at least 500 minutes played in each location that their average distance from the overall home-court advantage goes below five points per 100 possessions. To consider how high this bar is, no five-player lineup has played 500 minutes this season yet and just three did so in the entire 2021-22 campaign.
People intuitively realize that lineup combinations with fewer than 100 minutes are unreliable, but what's dangerous are ones with somewhere in the neighborhood of 250 minutes played. That seems like a lot, right? It's several 48-minute games' worth, and player stats do tend to normalize by this point. Lineup stats don't.
The average distance from the overall home-court advantage for duos with between 250-300 minutes played at home and on the road is still nearly eight points per 100 possessions, with some as far as 25 points away at either extreme. If that can happen when the only difference is whether we look at home games or road games, it's worth handling lineup stats with caution.
"Back in the day, Kevin Calabro used to call Nate McMillan the king of the 2.5-pointer since he regularly had his toes on the 3-point line. Who is the current king of the 2.5 shot and could benefit the most from shooting a few inches farther back?"
-- Shaun
I too fondly remember McMillan's tendency to make the longest possible 2-pointers back in the 1990s. Today's king appears to be Caleb Martin of the Miami Heat. Per Second Spectrum data, he's made 13 2-pointers from at least 22 feet this season -- the most of anyone in the league by four shots.
It's not just Martin's wide lead on the field, it's also the fact that he's not nearly as prolific a 3-point shooter as the other players in this group. Buddy Hield leads the league in 3s, while Anthony Edwards and Zach LaVine are both in the top 25, so it's not surprising they might end up with their foot on the line a few times.
By contrast, Martin is outside the top 100, meaning the missing 3s he's lost with a foot on the line (and video reveals that to be the case on nearly all of these attempts rather than legitimately being inside the arc) would add to his total by about a fourth.
Nobody dominated this category the same way in 2021-22, when Young's 24 2-pointers from 22 feet or beyond led the NBA according to Second Spectrum.