Almost Time For Tip Off – Jump Ball Stats

Jump balls start each NBA game and help decide other situations when neither team has possession, but it’s a challenge to find statistics about them. As part of 82games.com‘s fantastic commentary page, they once published some numbers that are now a decade old. There’s also a collection from 2012 that covered jump balls from 2008 to 2011, but four seasons have concluded since then. It shouldn’t be that difficult to learn more about jump balls, so since they’re included in play-by-play feeds I looked at every one from 1998 to last season. We can now find out who was the best and worst at them over the last 18 seasons, what skills might explain jump ball success, which player six feet tall or shorter has been the biggest pain to defeat, and much more. These are the important basketball questions.

The first thing I did after getting all of the jump balls was to find out who was the best and worst at them. Below are career totals, minimum 100 attempted, or contested? Battled? Minimum 100 jump ball battles since 1998:

Rudy Gay was a surprise to be one of the best let alone have 100 jump balls[3. Vince Carter currently has 99 and a win percentage of 63. If he could, like, intentionally force 12 jump balls with J.J. Barea, he could crack the top 10 here.], but most of his were ones I called ‘live’ where they occurred in the middle of the game and usually at one free throw line or the other. Using DraftExpress’ height measurements[4. When DraftExpress didn’t have the player I was looking for (probably just with a different name like Chuck Hayes vs. Charles Hayes), I used Basketball-Reference. I also changed the height of a few players, because J.J. Barea is not 6’0” or even 5’10”. I put him at 5’8”. The player heights I altered did not have decent-sized samples anyway.], the average height of the players involved in ‘live’ jump ball situations was three inches shorter than those in ‘open’ jump balls named after, well, the opening tip and ones that start overtime. So Gay’s winning percentage was helped a bit by going up against players his size rather than around 6’11”, but it’s still impressive and probably has a case for being the most valuable when ‘live’ ones can happen in the fourth quarter.

We also cannot ignore JaVale McGee and the great Jerome James, who had only 11 jump balls after his time with the SuperSonics. What a top 10. 

Jason Kidd sticks out in the worst, third in total jump balls among players under 6’6″ behind Steve Francis (116) and Dwyane Wade (114). One trait with some of the other worst nine players was a lack of shot-blocking to go with their size. It’s the one stat that seemed to have an effect, producing a not great but still meaningful r^2 of .12 when looking at the last 18 years and just last season. That helps explain why a pretty athletic but not super long player like David Lee has struggled in these situations, but he and Luis Scola have also given up a couple inches on average. 

Rebounding didn’t show anything. Age doesn’t seem to matter either, but as most bigs get older they either might not take the open tip or they’ve declined overall to where they come off the bench. Neither of those reasons applied to Tim Duncan, arguably the weirdest result from last season, minimum 20 jump balls:

Not only did Tim Duncan win 71 percent of his jump balls last season, but he’s been involved in more of them as he’s gotten older, three times as many from 2007 to 2015 as he did from 1998 to 2006. I’m not sure what to say other than his win rate in 2015 reminded me of this article from The Onion, except calling out the exact height the ball needs to reach before tipping it to Tony Parker. As for the rest, we now know the Thunder are probably going to start the first quarter with the ball against the Timberwolves, Chris Bosh is great for yet another reason, and the Lopez brothers were on opposite ends with Brook going 6-3 against Robin since 2010 and 2-0 last season. Samuel Dalembert, back when he started for the Knicks, was another interesting result, but we probably won’t see that repeated since Zaza Pachulia should be starting for the Mavericks.

Between the best and worst from last season, shot-blocking seemed to be a difference again, but the biggest factor overall, of course, is height. Just how often does the taller player in jump balls win the tip? It turned out that despite players being closer together in ‘live’ jump balls and the potential of the taller player to tip the ball to where an opponent can get a hand on it, being more than a few inches taller has led to a higher win percentage than in ‘open’ jump balls. (Warning: Incoming chart from Excel.)

So what gives after the three-inch height advantage in ‘open’ jump balls? We now know that Sabonis, Shawn Bradley, and Zydrunas Ilgauskas had some of the best win rates, but the player most often in these height mismatches was Yao Ming, who won just 43 percent of his jump balls and only a slightly higher rate against, um, players who were still around seven feet tall. It also doesn’t help that the data I have goes back to 1998 and not 1997[1. I realized NBA.com has play-by-play data back to 1997, but by then I had everything ready to go and for a lot of reasons it is a bit of a pain to work through data that old. Some other day I’ll include that season.], so we missed out on stats from the last healthy season of the 7’7” Gheorghe Muresan.[6. Also, the sample sizes for advantages greater than 6 inches in ‘open’ jump balls and 11 inches for ‘live’ ones got pretty small, between 50 and 200. There were over 45,000 ‘open’ jump balls and over 28,000 ‘live’.]

But the chart still showed that the underdog wins a decent amount of the time. Who had the biggest upsets? Even the shortest of players have won a jump ball, but that might be because the taller one tipped the ball to the wrong guy. Regardless, below are the 10 biggest wins in terms of height difference, measured in inches. I also included the game IDs in case anybody wanted to look them up on NBA.com:

The one with Muggsy Bogues was the only jump ball he won since 1998, going 1-3. Earl Boykins was 2-5 while Nate Robinson isn’t bad for his height at 12-20. The best win-loss record for players six feet tall or shorter, minimum 10 attempts, is actually Raymond Felton, going an improbable 21-15.[7. He’s just 4-7 since 2012, though.] Damon Stoudamire is currently the worst of the bunch, just 5-26, but he made about $100 million during his career so it’s hard to feel bad for him.

Does winning jump balls really matter on the team level? Regardless of who wins the opening tip, each team is still going to have an opportunity to start and end two quarters with the ball. When it could help is in the fourth quarter and any in overtime. A player who dives on the floor for a loose ball late in the game, but also has good success in jump balls could probably save their team a timeout, but those situations happen so fast it’s hard to know who else would be forcing a held ball. As for opening tips in overtime when each team only has about 10 possessions to work with, winning the tip increases the odds of winning the game by 4.2 percent, according to Inpredictable, a site that charts win probability over the course of NBA games. Chris Bosh has a pretty big sample of ‘open’ jump balls in overtime and has gone 44-16. Nene is another active player who has been solid with a win-loss record of 14-5.

Neither Bosh nor Nene can match Eric Montross, though. In the 1995 Rookie Challenge, Montross finished with six points, four rebounds, and won the tip in overtime where the first team to score three points won. His team ended up victorious, but Eddie Jones was named the MVP after finishing with 25 points and six steals for the losing team. Whatever. 

You can view jump ball win-loss records over at Nylon Calculus’ ‘Our Stats’ page.

Jump ball statistics were according to NBA.com. Height measurements, with the exception of a dozen or so, were from DraftExpress. Hat tip to Darryl Blackport for the play-by-play data.