Jump Ball Tidbits: 12/14-12/20
By Matt Femrite
Welcome to the second post about jump balls! This series is dedicated to looking at a play that happens in every basketball game but almost always has no major impact. That doesn’t mean they should go unnoticed, though. Win-loss records back to 1997 can be found over at our Stats page while these posts look at more notable ones from the past week. Some jump balls turn out to be pretty strange (or maybe I just make them that way) while other times milestones are reached. A few players also take part in a jump ball for the first time in quite a while. They are then added to the win-loss stats where they will live forever or something.
Okay. Here’s what I noted from last week:
Notable Wins and Losses
Below are the 10 jump balls with the highest change in win probability, according to Inpredictable, a site that charts win probability. Unfortunately, last week did not have one with a big shift in win percentage like in the first post where Milwaukee got a 17.2 percent boost and ended up winning their game against Portland.
So Andre Drummond won all four opening jump balls in the Pistons’ four-overtime win over Chicago. Since 1997, it looks like he’s the first player to do that. For three-overtime games, a player winning all of the first three has happened 13 times in 64 instances, but those teams have gone just 6-7.[1. If you wanted to, I guess you could throw ties in there since, until the third open tip, it led to one more overtime.]
On Thursday, Bismack Biyombo won the opening tip, a ‘live’ jump ball[1. Tie-ups in the middle of the game usually settled at one free throw line or another.], and the opening jump ball to start the overtime. I don’t know what to call this, but it was the 80th time that’s happened since 1997. The most recent one before Biyombo’s was on December 9 with Karl-Anthony Towns in a win over the Los Angeles Lakers. Biyombo didn’t win or even record a ‘live’ jump ball in overtime, though. Throw that into the equation and that’s happened only 14 times, the last one being in 2014 involving Anthony Davis.
Lastly, in a battle of the Gasols on Wednesday, Pau Gasol was victorious and the Bulls won the game.
Milestones
Nikola Vucevic reached 100 open tip wins on Wednesday, joining 77 other players. He should be able to move up six spots until reaching Jerome James, who retired with an open tip record of 116-54 and most of those coming in Seattle.[1. Love you, Seattle.]
Meanwhile, Josh Smith won his 100th live jump ball on the same night. For a player his size, Smith has a lot of jump balls over his career, 821 and the 14th-most since 1997. DraftExpress had him listed at 80 inches tall (6’8”), and he has exactly 500 more jump balls than the next player at his height or shorter[1. Which is Brian Grant.].
Notable First Timers
On Tuesday, Iman Shumpert had his first jump ball since 2014 and won against James Young, who had the first jump ball of his young NBA career.
Udonis Haslem and Chris Bosh had their firsts of the season on Sunday. Both of them lost, but obviously this was by design since the Heat won the game.
Tiago Splitter went 0-2 on Wednesday. Same logic here as with Miami. It’s all part of the game plan. Has to be.
In the table above, Kyle Singler’s name also appeared. On Thursday, he won his first jump ball of the season while also recording his first assist that same night. Kevin Love, who lost to Singler, is now 26-51 for his career.
Kyrie Irving came out on top against Kendall Marshall on Sunday. Welcome back.
One last note: NBA.com logged an open jump ball for Jared Sullinger on Wednesday, but this seemed too good to be true as it would’ve been the first of his career. It turns out that it was as available video in their play-by-play logs showed it was instead Amir Johnson, Boston’s regular go-to guy in those situations, who took the open tip.
Until next Monday. Have a wonderful week.
Jump ball stats are compiled from play-by-play data at NBA.com.