Latrinsorm
09-25-2014, 02:43 PM
Power-speed number (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power%E2%80%93speed_number) is a somewhat obscure sabermetric stat for baseball. It is designed to find the players who are best at both power (in the form of home runs) and speed (in the form of stolen bases), so a Mike Trout rather than a Billy Hamilton or Jose Bautista. A player who has exactly 0 in either category gets a 0 for PSN.
I thought, why not apply this to dunks and three pointers made? Because trying to find an accessible database for dunks is really frustrating, that's why. I made do with top 50 lists for dunks the past three seasons and found an interesting phenomenon there already, so let's go with that. Here are the top 5 PSNs for the past three seasons:
psn name
166 Kevin Durant
124 LeBron James
100 Paul George
89 Gerald Green
75 Chandler Parsons
126 Kevin Durant
120 LeBron James
108 Andre Iguodala
100 Paul George
82 Josh Smith
115 Kevin Durant
73 Andre Iguodala
72 Rudy Gay
71 LeBron James
63 Paul GeorgeIt shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone that Durant and LeBron are on these lists, but the dominance of Durant is pretty surprising. He does have a 14% edge in total FGAs and *24% in % of baskets assisted, but still. I'm not surprised George made one list, but his making all three is a very big surprise. As we can see with some of the more notorious names, though, some people made it by chucking, so I thought it would be interesting to do an aggregate for KD/LeBron/PG:
psn dn% 3p% name
407 97.1% 39.7% Kevin Durant
318 97.5% 38.5% LeBron James
265 91.0% 36.7% Paul George
I had initially planned on trying a power-speed kind of analysis on dunk% and three% but Durant and LeBron would clearly run away with that category too so there's no point. It reminds me of some soccer analysis I saw that put Messi and Ronaldo not only ahead of everyone but lapping the field, and certainly from a percentage standpoint that's what we would see here. Also notice that 318 * 1.14 * 1.24 = 450, so a more rigorous approach should probably factor in usage and being assisted, but for a casual frivolity I think it's fine as-is.
I thought, why not apply this to dunks and three pointers made? Because trying to find an accessible database for dunks is really frustrating, that's why. I made do with top 50 lists for dunks the past three seasons and found an interesting phenomenon there already, so let's go with that. Here are the top 5 PSNs for the past three seasons:
psn name
166 Kevin Durant
124 LeBron James
100 Paul George
89 Gerald Green
75 Chandler Parsons
126 Kevin Durant
120 LeBron James
108 Andre Iguodala
100 Paul George
82 Josh Smith
115 Kevin Durant
73 Andre Iguodala
72 Rudy Gay
71 LeBron James
63 Paul GeorgeIt shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone that Durant and LeBron are on these lists, but the dominance of Durant is pretty surprising. He does have a 14% edge in total FGAs and *24% in % of baskets assisted, but still. I'm not surprised George made one list, but his making all three is a very big surprise. As we can see with some of the more notorious names, though, some people made it by chucking, so I thought it would be interesting to do an aggregate for KD/LeBron/PG:
psn dn% 3p% name
407 97.1% 39.7% Kevin Durant
318 97.5% 38.5% LeBron James
265 91.0% 36.7% Paul George
I had initially planned on trying a power-speed kind of analysis on dunk% and three% but Durant and LeBron would clearly run away with that category too so there's no point. It reminds me of some soccer analysis I saw that put Messi and Ronaldo not only ahead of everyone but lapping the field, and certainly from a percentage standpoint that's what we would see here. Also notice that 318 * 1.14 * 1.24 = 450, so a more rigorous approach should probably factor in usage and being assisted, but for a casual frivolity I think it's fine as-is.