Been digging into dunk stats recently. Less because I’m interested in dunks, more because I’m interested in this weird sorta data anomaly.

Officially, Rudy Gobert holds the single-season dunk record with 308 dunks in his 2018-2019 season.

Dig a little deeper and you discover that the NBA only started recording dunk stats in 1996. You may note that Shaq was drafted to the Magic in 1992. This means that Shaq’s first 4 seasons of dunks don’t count.

And then I found this Topps Frequent Flyer basketball card that lists Shaq’s rookie season dunk total as 322. Seems kinda bonkers. He blew away the record in his rookie season, and it was just mostly forgotten to time? I figured the card was a misprint or something.

Curious though, I tracked down a copy of the 1993 Sixers Media Guide on EBay. Sure enough, on page 146, it lists Shaq’s 1992 dunk total as 322. It also lists his season high single-game dunk total as 13 (debatably, another record). If you’re not familiar with the Sixers Media Guide and Harvey Pollack, this stuff is very reliable.

So now, Dwight Howard is typically credited as the career all-time dunk leader with 2,950 dunks. If you take Shaq’s official career dunk total and add just that rookie season total, you get 2,948 dunks. Pretty sure he knocked down those 3 dunks and then some in the 3 additional seasons he played before dunk stats were introduced.

I just find this super interesting. We’re awfully obsessed with data these days. It’s getting to the point where we can analyze an entire playing field at specific timestamps. But for the majority of pro sports history you had to scrape together what you could from newspapers, books and memory.

And yet, in an attempt to frame discussion and debate in NBA media, it’s convenient to just dismiss the numbers that you can’t bring up on bballreference. And I get that we have to draw the lines somewhere, but this is data collected and printed by a very highly regarded NBA employee who basically set the bar for statistical analysis in the NBA.

There’s a similar story that comes up with the triple-double debate. Long story short, Wilt probably had more triple-doubles than Westbrook by a lot, and they were almost all on blocking. But there’s much less proof of that one.