From King of the North to King of the Fourth
Charting the clutch genes of players in the 2021-2022 NBA Season
Hi all,
I recently got into data science and as an avid watcher of the NBA, I always loved seeing how stats, visualizations, and basketball all intertwine. After dipping my toes into learning R and Python, I figured I should give writing a basketball newsletter that has a splash of analytics a try. Thanks for reading and hope you enjoy my first post!
-Joe
Unless you have been living under a rock, you may have heard about someone being the first to hit back-to-back buzzer beaters on consecutive days. A couple of days later, there was another buzzer beater in the NBA with RJ Barrett’s “I Called Game” moment to finish a 25-point comeback against the Celtics. Besides these official buzzer beaters (where the game clock expires when the shot is made), the NBA season has been full of exciting last second shots to swing the momentum towards one team’s favor, so I decided to see how good players have been during crunch time so far this year.
Using the NBA’s definition of clutch time, which is the last 5 minutes of the game where the point differential is within 5 points, I filtered for the top 20 crunch time scorers and plotted their scoring efficiency against the number of points they scored.
As we can see, Joel Embiid is alone on the far right as he leads the league in clutch points with a whopping 98 points! He is practically on an island by himself and on good efficiency too at 62.6% TS. As for the man with back-to-back buzzer beaters, DeMar has been shooting at a higher efficiency at 70.5% TS, though with only 72 points. Aside from that, the other top 20 scorers include other perennial all-stars to no one’s surprise aside from a select few. If you haven’t been watching the Wizards, Kyle Kuzma might have raised some eyebrows, but he has been really clutch shooting from 3-point range this season and he even went toe-to-toe with DeRozan in the game he hit his second buzzer beater. I also plotted True Shooting Percentage against True Shooting Attempts and there wasn’t much of a difference, but if you’re interested, the plot is at the end.1
Besides using the NBA’s definition of clutch, I took a look at crunch time numbers using PBPStats’ leverage tool, which is based on win probability. I filtered for high and very high leverage to see how NBA players did in the biggest of moments. Below we see that there is a slight difference between this chart and the first chart.
Here, the King of the North clearly looks like the King of the Fourth, as though DeRozan is still behind Embiid in points, he only trails by 2 now, yet he’s scoring much more efficiently at 73.3% TS compared to Embiid’s 54.2% TS. Kuzma also remains at the top of the charts with an even more absurd 78.6% TS than before (75.1% TS using the NBA’s definition). I also plotted True Shooting Percentage against Attempts for the PBPStats chart, which you can see at the end if interested.2
Finally, since PBPStats classified each bucket as assisted, unassisted, and points made from free throws, I also took a look at the scoring distribution of each player in high and very high leverage situations. Here we see that DeRozan leads all clutch time scorers in unassisted points with 39, which is over 60% of his clutch points. Seeing the numbers, it does make sense that DeMar gets more of his buckets his own way, considering his playstyle is heavily influenced by the likes of his favorite player Kobe and his predecessor, MJ. That is not to say Joel is a slouch, as he has been the key cog for the 76ers, so getting a few more buckets via post entry passes or free throws is never a bad thing and besides, he can get his own too. On the opposite end of the spectrum, you can see that Kuzma clearly leads the field in assisted buckets with a total of 43 assisted points, as he’s thriving off catch & shoot 3’s from the Wizards breaking down the defense.
If there’s one takeaway from these charts as a fan, it’s an exciting time to be watching the NBA as the stars and a few lesser-known names are getting buckets in a variety of ways when the game matters most.
By the way, if you want to learn more on how DeRozan scores, check out this neat graphic by Todd Whitehead of the Crumpled Jumper.
If you made it this far, I appreciate you reading till the end and I want to give a shoutout to a few select people for helping me get started on my data analytics/science journey.
Owen Phillips of the now defunct F5 for his great R tutorials
Daniel Bratulić who has great Python scripts for NBA data
Both have great resources in helping people who have an interest in NBA analytics, but don’t know where to start!
Not much of a difference visually besides the huge difference in True Shooting Attempts between Joel and the rest of the field.
Similar story for the chart using PBPStats as Joel leads the league in True Shooting Attempts though KD follows closely behind.
Awesome charts! I didn't know Embiid was the most efficient scorer in clutch time.