playing an extra game that they would not have played otherwise

or did it give them (and everyone else) tacit permission to only play in 65 games?

it reminds me of the freakonomics story where a daycare instituted a monetary fine for picking up your children late, and it backfired because instead of incentivizing on-time pickup, it gave parents a sanctioned alternative (paying $X) in exchange for picking up their child late.

now instead of playing the games because you’re a basketball player and it’s your job, the nba has said as long as you play 65 games, you’re good to go. you have implicit approval to skip 17 games.

Per game average stats encourage sitting out a whole game. You don’t want to play 10 minutes and have your averages go down. 

Counting stats would mean even only playing 5-10 minutes on an off night will help your totals

Joking probably played a decent amount more because he came back from that injury

they will care if those 3 minutes are the difference between their team winning or losing, which is the case for most of these load bearing offensive engines.

he strained his hammy in his 64th game. tech or no, he’s still gotta play his 64th game sometime. not sure why this hypothetical assumes that the minutes and wear/tear he would receive against the wizards is a total freebie. he would end up with the same wear and tear but one game earlier.

Why can fans in every other major sport understand totals over per game stats but NBA fans get confused

Luka still leads in total points

Regularly? Probably not. But if you’re trying to get back into game shape after an injury? I bet you’d see it a lot more.

Thats silly. Unless you are playing 40 minutes its completely irrelevant

It should be per 48 minutes or per 12 minutes, but I agree on principle. Similar to baseball pitching stats being per 9 innings or per inning pitched 

Have a look at basketball reference’s per 36min stats.

But 1800 points in a season playing 55 games is WAY more impressive than in 82. Id take the 55er any day of the week but if you’re just looking at cumulative they look too similar. Even with the games mentioned, it’s not abundantly clear that it’s over a 10ppg difference

I was thinking something like “Normalized PPG” and do 50%*PPG + 50%*Total Points/Total Games

So at the end of the season, 30 PPG with 65 games played (1950 pts) would give 26.89 NPPG = 0.5×30 + 0.5×1950/82

Someone who scored 27 PPG and played all 82 games would have 27 NPPG = 0.5×27 + 0.5×2214/82

The person who had 27 NPPG wins the scoring title thanks to his longevity.

You could also modify the percentages if you wanted to reward longevity or PPG more, instead of a ⁵⁰⁄₅₀ split.

Formula could be simplified to NPPG = PPG * (50% + 50%×Games Played/Total Games)

I agree but I think that’s only because we aren’t used to it in the NBA.

That’s not the only reason. It’s also just because they’re larger numbers that don’t necessarily align to clean round numbers.

Baseball is probably the best example here. People can conceptualize what a good home run season is because the numbers are relatively small. People can conceptualize what a good RBI season is, because conveniently around 100 was historically considered a good amount.

But how many times should somebody get on base? Even if you know their plate appearances, it’s tough to just intuitively know that without doing the math. People understood that 200 strikeouts was a lot, but now that strikeout totals don’t peak at a round number, it would be hard for people to conceptualize what a great season is. But 10 K/9 is pretty easy to grasp. I assume that’s also part of why the most popular versions of WAR/VORP ended up winning out. They happen to be scaled so they can be comprehended easily. It’s a lot easier to understand 5 WAR being a star and 10 WAR being an historically great season than it is for some of the earlier, less popular versions.

I think you can get people to care about some raw totals in some categories in basketball. But I don’t know if people will buy into the idea that a 1700 point season is incredibly impressive, compared to a nice simple 25 PPG (although maybe a 2500 point season being historically elite could catch on). 700 rebounds just isn’t as nice of a number as 10 RPG is.

It’s not like that we can’t count the data, it’s what has been used previously to try to contextualize what we’re seeing.

Football has always been based on counting stats, so when we’re trying to do historical comparisons we continue to use counting stats.

Basketball has always been based on average stats, so when we’re trying to do historical comparisons we continue to use average stats.

There’s been talk in the NFL social media realm about switching to average stats, because as we increase games played then counting stats will theoretically go up. But it’s just really hard to compare when NFL has never been based on average stats.

Oh.. Im European, I know nothing about american football.. Was thinking about other football.. We all know that scoring 30 goals per season is pretty great. 

It’s way easier to contextualize 20 sacks or 50 touchdown passes or whatever than it is to contextualize 2000pts or 600 rebounds or whatever.

I know you know this

Really get granular. Let’s do points per second.

I think the point is:

• SGA needed 26 points to tie for most points in the NBA
• SGA needed 193 points in one game to have the highest PPG in the NBA

He didn’t play the last 2 games so that is easily achievable while the second one isn’t.

Incidentally SGA also played 30 less minutes than Luka and had a slightly higher PTS/36.

Jaylen Brown needed 105 points to tie for total and 194 to win on PPG. Unlikely, but possible for the 2 games he missed.

But how cool would it have been to see Durant, Shai, or Jaylen go full David Robinson in the last week to pass Luka? One of them probably would have tried for it if it wasn’t based on ppg

The extent and effectiveness is way overblown by fans who are bitter that their own agendas aren’t the ones being pushed

Yeah I’m saying when something occurs fewer than once a game, it’s much easier to use cumulative.

The NBA added the 3 point shot 36 years ago.

I will set an alarm to check this thread in 36 years, and your idea will still not be adopted. Nobody wants it.

The rule itself was fixing something that didn’t need to be fixed.

The reason minutes played doesn’t work is because it doesn’t fix what is one of the leagues biggest flaws. And that is fans shelling out thousands of dollars to get to games only for their favourite players to be sitting out. I like that they have the 65 game cap load management makes the league look like a bit of a joke. Realistically they should be making the season shorter but they never would because that is revenue.

So what. He didn’t contribute for almost 25% of his teams games. That doesn’t deserve recognition

So you think someone other than a player that leads the league in both ppg and total points scored for a season should get to be crowned the scoring champ?