Being a Duke fan I’ve kept my eye on Maggette’s career and have seen a lot of lines like the one above, where Maggette scores a lot of points per field goal attempt. He shoots a good percentage from the field, and gets to the free-throw line very often where he shoots a high percentage.
I cherry-picked a few other notable players and ran their career numbers to see how they compare to Corey’s efficiency.
Carrer points per field goal attempt:
Kobe Bryant: 1.309
Dwayne Wade: 1.374
Shaquille O’neal: 1.467
Corey Maggette: 1.484
I invite you to run the numbers for some of your favorite players to see how they stack up. To ensure we’ve got a decent sample size, please only include players with at least 400 games played. They don’t have to be current players.
He’s been getting to the line like crazy this year, and in the past 4 games or so particularly. I have him on my fantasy team and picked him up just before he blew up.
Well, the first person that came to mind for me was Amare Stoudemire, given his combination of Nash-dunks and good FT% for a big guy over the last few years. Sure enough he comes up a 1.503. A lot of other players are pretty low, though, even someone like MJ or LeBron.
All of that said, this is a pretty basic way to look at efficiency, and I think ultimately it leads down the road to something like Hollinger’s PER on ESPN.com. Maggette fares well there, as well, putting up a career high of 20.99 through last night’s games (if you’re not familiar with PER, 15 is theoretically calibrated to be a league average player, and that number puts Maggette 22nd in the league).
Nice find on Stoudamire, Kiros - I never realized he was that good a free-throw shooter.
In the same fashion that I’ve noticed Maggette’s efficiency, I took notice of how inefficient Antoine Walker was in his career. I always hated that guy and never understood how much respect he got around the league. The numbers tell the story - here he is with a few other notables thrown in for fun:
Michael Jordan: 1.316
Larry Bird: 1.257 (didn’t get the to line enough)
Dominique Wilkins: 1.235
Allen Iverson: 1.226 (led the league in field goal attempts a few times) Antoine Walker: 1.064
I wonder if there was anyone less efficient than Walker who took more career shots?
With that “the numbers tell the story” you’ve taken a leap from finding a weird stat to using it as a measure of a player’s actual value, which isn’t warranted.
Shaq is a career 1.47, Dwight Howard is 1.62. They have similar games, but who’s the better offensive option? Karl Malone 1.408, Andrei Kirilenko 1.42; if you have to pick a Utah forward to bet on to score on the next possession (NBA Finals jokes notwithstanding), you wouldn’t really pick AK.
That isn’t to say it’s a worthless statistic by any means, but there are other factors that need to be considered, too.
As far as the hunt for the least efficient, all we’d need to do, I think, is build the right profile. Maggette’s a big muscular swingman who never shoots from the perimeter and basically makes a very good player out of himself by banging into the lane and converting free throws at a high clip. So what’s the opposite of that? Antoine Walker played like a guard and shot a billion threes at a low percentage and never got to the line. And when he did get to the line he didn’t even make them. So he’s a good start. Others with that kind of game:
Jason Kidd, 1.13 (free throws saved him)
Jamal Crawford 1.16 (even more so)
Baron Davis 1.13
Jason Williams 1.08
Jamal Tinsley 1.05 !
Rafer Alston 1.07
So Antoine’s still looking pretty good. Part of it is the fact that he was very good at doing the things that he refused to do and thus earned that $100 million contract, so he stuck around long enough to keep doing his own especially terrible thing for awhile. If he hadn’t put up those 22/9/6 type seasons early in his career maybe it wouldn’t have taken so long for him to be drummed out of the league.
Keep an eye on Corey Brewer and Adam Morrison, though. Brewer’s at a cool 1.00 for his three year career thus far, and Morrison’s below that. Now he just has to convince somebody to put him in the game so he can qualify.
Nice analysis, Jimmy. It’s understandable that Kirilenko’s rate would probably regress quite a bit if he were somehow able to take a Karl Malone-like number of shots per game. Hehe - maybe not that much if he had Stockton feeding him the ball.
This is the first time I’ve ever looked a players career rates to try to compare them. It’s just something that’s easy to notice when you’re reading the boxscores in the morning.
ETA: The headlines would always read “Iverson scores 50” and then you look at the boxscore and notice he took 35 shots.
Iverson’s a perfect example of how it gets complicated. In his second tour with the Sixers, he’s averaging 15 points and his P/FGA has been hovering right around 1.4; almost Maggette-esque. While he was in Denver he was at 1.39 and still scoring 26 a game, but he was basically considered to have ruined the team.
During his MVP season he was a little above 1.2. He also had much worse teammates offensively during his MVP season, and they went to the Finals and beat the Lakers in the first game. You’d have Iverson 13-31 for 37 points, and then nobody else on the team took 10 shots. Eric Snow would be 2 for 4, Tyrone Hill 5 for 8, etc. They were the same way when Iverson wasn’t on the court, too. The team just wasn’t put together with scorers.
But I can also say that he took a lot of dumb shots, period. So on an individual level, it definitely tells something; I’m just not sure how much.
It’s the same thing with Jordan, who was a clearly superior player in every way, and yet that 1.3 only puts his career a few ticks above Iverson’s career. You just can’t be the guy who takes all the shots and be as efficient as the guys who don’t.
I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around the usefulness of this stat without factoring in 3PA at the very least… Is someone who makes one career field goal attempt but shoots 10% on 1000 threes a historically efficient scorer? It’s really strange to me how this only counts FGA.
3 pt attempts are a subset of field goal attempts in official NBA stat-keeping. Your hypothetical player would have 302 points on 1001 FGA, which is lousy by anyone’s measure.
Ah, thanks. I’m embarrassed to have never noticed that before. Now I’m wondering how that could have happened.
Best I could come up with for least efficient was Ben Wallace (1.15) and Flip Murray (1.10). My first guess was Rasheed Wallace (since he so perfectly fit Jimmy Chitwood’s profile), but he’s a scorching 1.18.