Stats and Lowry

 

                            Stats and Lowry

A regular NBA game has about 90 shots per team, or 180 all together. Let’s say, generously, each shot takes about two seconds (a period of time that also includes almost every rebound and assist too). That’s 360 seconds, or a nice tidy six minutes, that overwhelm the box score. Those six minutes make almost every highlight, GIF, and meme from the sport. The players who excel in those six minutes make the most money, have the biggest endorsement deals, and are must-gets for your fantasy team. 

Meanwhile, two teams x five players x 48 minutes means a game is 480 minutes of work. Six minutes is 1.25 percent of the time. That massive 98.75 percent of the game is “little things.” 

From an article on Kyle Lowry that argues this:

In this year’s playoffs, we’ve seen a tale of two Raptors: the team with Kyle Lowry and the team without. If you watch every second Lowry has been on the floor, you’ll see a Toronto cakewalk. They have a shot at a title outscoring opponents by eight points per 100 possessions. If, on the other hand, you watch the minutes Lowry has been on the bench, it’s just about a tie, and the Raptors are not elite at all.

This might be surprising for a player who—when you mash his box-score stats together into PER, emerges as the 57th best player in the NBA this season (somewhere beneath Marquese Chriss, D’Angelo Russell, and Dwight Howard). It’s less surprising if you look at any team-performance based stat. Real Plus-Minus ranks 400 or so NBA players every season. This year, Lowry finished sixth overall, ahead of players like Kawhi Leonard, Luka Doncic, Jayson Tatum, Joel Embiid, Damian Lillard, Jimmy Butler, and Anthony Davis. And it’s no outlier. By that same measure, Lowry’s average finish over the last five years had been fourth in the entire league.

The thing is, we tend to measure basketball performance with things we are used to tracking, like points and rebounds. Kyle Lowry is OK at those things, and was great in Game 6. But if he’s a top five or 10 NBA player at winning, while being only OK at those easy-to-measure things … he must be a genius at the other things, which we often mistakenly call little things.