Kobe Bryant's buzzer beater against the Bucks on Wednesday once again won him acclaim as one of the best closers in the game. Henry Abbott from True Hoop points out today that the stat geeks tell a different story when it comes to crunch-time scoring than the Kobe fans do. Let me put on my stat geek hat, then, and look at how some of the best perimeter players in the game perform in the clutch. How do they stack up with Bryant?
I will be using 82games.com for my clutch scoring stats, and their definition of "clutch" is in the last 5 minutes of the 4th quarter or overtime with the score within 5 points. They normalize their stats per 48 minutes so that we can compare how the players are doing on a per-48 minute basis. The numbers are more meaningful with a larger sample size, which means the further into the season you go the better. But we're more than a quarter of the way in, so we can at least get a general idea of how things stack up so far.
LeBron James: 77.4 points, 54|PERCENT|, 40.9 FGA, 0|PERCENT| of shots assisted
Vince Carter: 57.9 points, 38|PERCENT| FG, 39.2 FGA, 25|PERCENT| of shots assisted
Kobe Bryant: 56.8 points, 43|PERCENT| FG, 39.8 FGA, 11|PERCENT| of shots assisted
Carmelo Anthony: 55.8 points, 43|PERCENT| FG, 32.9 FGA, 18|PERCENT| assisted
Steve Nash: 54.3 points, 55|PERCENT| FG, 23.6 FGA, 9|PERCENT| assisted
Dwyane Wade: 35.9 points, 41 |PERCENT|FG, 31.3 FGA, 9|PERCENT| assisted
Chris Paul: 33.1 points, 39|PERCENT| FG, 22.1 FGA, 20|PERCENT| assisted
Brandon Roy: 32.5 points, 45|PERCENT| FG, 25.8 FGA, 7|PERCENT| assisted
Paul Pierce: 27.2 points, 37|PERCENT| FG, 19.9 FGA, 14|PERCENT| assisted
Kevin Durant: 20.6 points, 20|PERCENT| FG, 19.3 FGA, 33|PERCENT| assisted
Ray Allen: 19 points, 50|PERCENT| FG, 10.6 FGA, 80|PERCENT| assisted
Deron Williams: 13.1 points, 25|PERCENT| FG, 15.7 FGA, 67|PERCENT| assisted
Some of my take-away thoughts:
|STAR|Kobe, LeBron and Carter are taking the vast majority of their team's shots down the stretch of close games. They are all attempting almost a shot per minute, and most of their shots are coming off the dribble with very few of them assisted. This is a common thing among most of these perimeter players, that they are creating the shot for themselves and not being set up by teammates.
|STAR|LeBron is ridiculous. Kobe and Carmelo are effective scoring late, but LeBron is by far the best clutch scorer in the NBA thus far this season. Carter is scoring at a similar rate to Kobe and Carmelo, but at a lower percentage.
|STAR|Nash is also ridiculous. Nash's scoring average looks very similar to Kobe's and Melo's, but he's doing it on a lot fewer shots. He is shooting a ridiculous percentage for a jump-shooting point guard that creates his own shots, especially considering that he is also creating shots for others at the same time.
|STAR|Wade is having a down year so far. Last season he was right there with LeBron and Kobe for crunchtime scoring, but this year both his shot attempts and his percentages are down.
|STAR|Paul and Williams are also having down years in cruncthime thus far. Neither are shooting well at all, though Paul has a solid advantage here. I didn't include the assist numbers in this post, but if I would have that would have helped Williams' stats because he has dished a lot of assists late. Paul has not, but that could be due to the lackluster play of his teammates as well.
|STAR|Durant isn't quite there yet. His scoring average is dropping a lot in crunch time with shooting percentages that fall through the floor. He is going to have to pick that up quite a bit if he wants to be mentioned in the same breath with the other elite scoring wings in the NBA.
|STAR|The Celtics are sharing the crunchtime responsibilities. Pierce and Allen are both considered elite clutch scorers, but on the Celtics they share the ball late with each other as well as Kevin Garnett and Rajon Rondo. As such, none of them have the volume of points as the other elite wings. It is clear that Pierce is doing more shot-creating than Allen late when you look at the percent of their shots that are assisted, and this could tie into why Allen is hitting his shots at a higher clip than Pierce.
Side note: I plan to do big men in a separate post, but had I included them Dirk Nowitzki would have also scored well on this list. In fact, his numbers look more like the guards than they do to most of the other bigs in the league. This makes sense because he does so much of his scoring from the perimeter, but he is still a 7-foot tall power forward so I will include him with the big guys.