Wayne Gretzky, Michael Scott, and an Analysis of the NBA

“You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.”

- Wayne Gretzky

- Michael Scott

Happy Monday evening, /r/nba. I know we’re all excited that at long last the basketball drought is finally coming to an end, but before it does I thought I’d slide in just under the wire with one last offering to the offseason gods.

About a month ago in this post about the fictional player Ivan Renko, /u/HikmetLeGuin proposed the creation of a new stat based on this sage piece of advice from ~~Wayne Gretzky~~ Michael Scott. But what if it were how we judged our players? If we considered every time a player did something other than shoot the ball (ie. pass or commit a turnover) as a missed shot, who would be the best shooter in the NBA? Who would be the worst? Well this week, armed with a rudimentary understanding of Python and a few hours of spare time I set out to answer that question.

For those who just want the numbers, you can skip to the Results and Ranking sections.

The Scope

As far as I can determine, the NBA has only kept track of passing data since the ‘13-’14 season. As such only players who have played since that season will be eligible. If it transpires that passes are tracked in some earlier play-by-play data from earlier then I may revisit this idea again in the future.

I did not track individual seasons. I just didn’t have the time to review that in depth. But with a tweak to the code it wouldn’t be hard to separate the seasons out and see if there is a meaningful change over a player’s career. It might be something I do in the future. For now though, these are career numbers.

##The Math

The equation itself is simple: A player’s Gretzky-Scott Percentage (hereafter referred to as GS%) is equal to their made field goals divided by the sum of their field goal attempts, passes made, and turnovers:

#####GS% = FGM / (FGA + Passes + TOV)

Fortunately for us all of this information is readily available from the NBA’s website for my terrible script to trawl through.

##The Results

Let’s get the obvious out of the way: the FG% of the league went down. Way down. We’re talking so far down it’s a tripping hazard in hell. Teams average about 3 passes per possession, so we expect the GS% to be about 1/4 of the FG%. Factoring in turnovers takes it down even further and that is exactly what we see: While the average FG% of the league hovers around 43%, the GS% is a pitiful 9.5%

	League Average FG%	League Average GS%
Regular Season	0.429859	0.095253
Playoffs	0.419931	0.098095
Total	0.420053	0.0954245

In the playoffs we see that the GS% actually goes up (albeit only to 9.8%) compared to the regular season. Maybe this is a reasonable deviation but if you wanted an explanation for it, it could be that the pace of the game slows down in the postseason and we see fewer turnovers, fewer possessions, and fewer idle passes. While scoring rates dip as well it is outweighed by better players moving the ball with purpose.

##The Ranking

Who’s the best? Who’s the worst? I’m limiting this to players who have played a minimum of 1000 minutes in the regular season or 500 minutes in the playoffs. Otherwise we end up with oddities like Ahmed Caver who played a single minute for the Indiana Pacers scoring one basket and never touched the hardwood again.

Of the 1443 players considered, 813 met this criteria over their career…

The top five:

Rank	Name	FG%	GS%
1	Shabazz Muhammad	0.461	0.207
2	Antonio Blakeney	0.406	0.187
3	Al Jefferson	0.499	0.186
4	Zion Williamson	0.605	0.181
5	Klay Thompson	0.448	0.180

The bottom five:

Rank	Name	FG%	GS%
1	Pablo Prigioni	0.360	0.032
2	Phil Pressey	0.170	0.038
3	Steve Blake	0.314	0.040
4	Ronnie Price	0.351	0.041
T5	Nix Daishen	0.355	0.044
T5	Facundo Campazzo	0.375	0.044
T5	Ron Baker	0.358	0.044

Playoff Performers:

Rank	Name	FG%	GS%
1	Brook Lopez	0.517	0.184
2	Devin Booker	0.485	0.174
3	Javale McGee	0.668	0.172
4	Klay Thompson	0.436	0.166
5	Deandre Ayton	0.629	0.165

These are the rankings based solely on playoff numbers. It is also the most interesting spreadsheet because it contains players that most people have heard of.

Captains of Consistency:

Rank	Name	FG%	GS%	% Point Change
1	Garrison Mathews	0.198	0.114	-8.44
2	Armoni Brooks	0.183	0.09	-9.27
3	Svi Mykhailiuk	0.202	0.108	-9.41
4	CJ Elleby	0.195	0.091	-10.42
5	Troy Williams	0.225	0.120	-10.43

These are the players who saw the smallest change in their shooting percentage. A sub 10 percentage point drop in efficiency is impressive. Even ignoring our minutes restriction, only 12 players who had greater than 0 FG% managed it. However it only appears on guys who are already terrible shooters. Indeed, the first player that’s within the same galaxy as league average shooters is our friend Antonio Blakeney (at 40.6%) from our Top 5 and he ranks 140th with a change of -21.9 points.

##Super Stars

Because this is really what you’re here for, isn’t it? How does your favourite player stack up against the rest of the league? For this section I used Bleacher Report’s 10 years Top 50 of the 2010s as a rough guide as well as including other notable players. Because the cutoff is 2013 you might be seeing some players at the tail ends of their careers, though I’m not sure how much that matters.

Bigs:

Rank	Name	FG%	GS%	% Point Change
7	Hassan Whiteside	0.59	0.179	-31.87
27	Amar’e Stoudemire	0.520	0.154	-36.48
34	Anthony Davis	0.526	0.151	-37.48
107	Joel Embiid	0.481	0.131	-33.03
150	Chris Bosh	0.0495	0.125	-37.04
161	Dirk Nowitski	0.455	0.123	-33.14
235	Bam Adebayo	0.540	0.115	-42.46
247	Dwight Howard	0.588	0.114	-47.38
351	Rudy Gobert	0.656	0.104	-55.26
358	Blake Griffin	0.485	0.104	-38.08
387	Tim Duncan	0.511	0.100	-41.13
462	Pau Gasol	0.473	0.093	-37.98
580	Marc Gasol	0.438	0.083	-35.51
587	Kevin Love	0.417	0.098	-31.92
644	Nikola Jokic	0.541	0.096	-44.47
534	Domantas Sabonis	0.552	0.088	-43.73
785	Draymond Green	0.452	0.053	-39.98

Wings:

Rank	Name	FG%	GS%	% Point Change
18	Jaylen Brown	0.478	0.159	-31.87
21	Kawhi Leonard	0.502	0.157	-34.46
22	Kevin Durant	0.501	0.157	-34.41
41	DeMar DeRozan	0.445	0.149	-29.56
88	Anthony Edwards	0.455	0.134	-32.04
96	Paul George	0.433	0.133	-30.01
109	Jason Tatum	0.451	0.131	-35.03
121	LeBron James	0.520	0.129	-39.06
124	Giannis Antetokounpo	0.532	0.128	-40.43
187	Lauri Markkanen	0.455	0.12	-33.46
235	Bam Adebayo	0.540	0.115	-42.46
247	Jimmy Butler	0.465	0.114	-35.08
254	Pascal Siakam	0.473	0.114	-35.86

Guards:

Rank	Name	FG%	GS%	% Point Change
23	Devin Booker	0.473	0.156	-31.69
55	Donovan Mitchell	0.440	0.142	-29.71
67	Bradley Beal	0.452	0.137	-31.48
134	Kobe Bryant	0.366	0.128	-23.79
138	Dwyane Wade	0.464	0.127	-33.72
180	Steph Curry	0.467	0.121	-34.57
186	Kyrie Irving	0.465	0.12	-34.46
201	Shai Gilgeous-Alexander	0.465	0.119	-34.62
218	Ja Morant	0.461	0.117	-34.40
226	Luca Doncic	0.470	0.116	-35.33
306	Russell Westbrook	0.421	0.108	-31.28
313	Trae Young	0.420	0.107	-31.26
326	James Harden	0.432	0.106	-32.54
347	Damian Lillard	0.426	0.105	-32.07
368	Paul Pierce	0.443	0.103	-34.01
378	De’Aaron Fox	0.448	0.102	-34.59
477	Manu Ginobli	0.429	0.092	-33.66
563	John Wall	0.426	0.085	-34.06
575	Chris Paul	0.478	0.084	-37.50
682	Kyle Lowry	0.421	0.071	-37.50

An intersting observation from looking at these three tables is that, on average, wings rank much higher than bigs and guards. This is likely due to bigs collecting the bulk of defensive rebounds (which leads to a pass) and guards being assigned the majority of playmaking duties.

Other Notes

Disregarding minutes, two players are tied for first: Jordan Sibert and the aforementioned Ahmed Carter. Both scored the only shot they ever took and made one pass each for a GS score of 50%! No one else even comes close.
Klay Thompson has by far the most minutes played in the top 20 (24,349) until you get to his teammate, Andrew Wiggins (23,499 mins), who is ranked 17th.
The man who’s % fell the most was Greg Stiemsma who shot a blistering 0.792 from the field but has a GS% of 0.048 - a fall of 74 points.
Draymond Green has made the most passes with 47,921 to his name. He’s followed by Kyle Lowry, Chris Paul, LeBron James, and James Harden. Amazingly, despite having a 2-year handicap in this sample, Jokic is in sixth. Unsurprisingly all of these guys rank very low.
James Harden leads the field in turnovers with a whopping 3545. He and Russell Westbrook are the only two players to break the 3k barrier.
I was curious to see how rebounding affected the GS score but it doesn’t really seem to. Good rebounders get rebounds on both sides of the floor and on offence they almost always take the put-back shot anyway. Unless your name is Nikola Jokic who ranks 7th in rebounds but 644th in GS%.

##Takeaways

What can we learn from this little experiment? Probably nothing useful. If you want to score big in this stat the best advice I can give you is be a very good shooter and very selfish shooter. Team basketball is for suckers.

For those who want to explore the data themselves feel free to make a copy of the spreadsheets here that contain the complete results. They are separated into Regular Season, Playoff, and Total and sorted by GS%.

Huge thank you to contributors of the nba_api repository for making the data collection so simple, and to /u/HikmetLeGuin for the inspiration. And thank you for reading! Here’s to another great season of off-court drama, trade rumors, fake beefs, oh… and basketball too I guess.