Last week, I caught up with some single-season NBA records that had been on pace, back in November, to get shattered. This week, a look at all of the records that emerged over the course of the season that are now, with a handful of games to go, on the precipice of getting broken.
I spent hours searching the nooks and crannies of Basketball-Reference’s Play Index in hot pursuit of anti-records — historical new lows, unprecedented degrees of struggle. Aside from Rashad Vaughn’s low-PER watch, which was investigated last week, I couldn’t really turn up anything. The league is too good now: every team is smart enough that players are no longer allowed to drop miserable statistics night in and night out. Even if they are a lottery pick, like Emmanuel Mudiay, they will be sat, and somebody else will be given a chance to prove themselves.
Look at how talented even the very worst team in the league is, the Brooklyn Nets. Despite lagging well behind every other team in the league, the 2016-17 Nets are competing and innovating in ways that lottery-sentenced teams of a decade ago probably couldn’t conceive of. This year’s Nets are among the top ten teams, ever, in 3-pointers made per game. They are also pushing forward with the fastest pace among all 21st-century teams — yes, even faster than Don Nelson’s manic Golden State Warriors and so many teams coached by Mike D’Antoni — a strategy that requires true intention and commitment from everybody on the team and in basketball operations. The Nets have to be a contender for the best worst team of all-time.
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The only thing approaching an anti-record that I could find: Milwaukee Bucks rookie Thon Maker is about to post the lowest minutes per game average (8.4) among any player who has started at least 20 games (Maker has started 27). Far from being a statistic to be ashamed of, I think this is a hugely innovative strategy from the Bucks: young Maker gets a chance to cut his teeth against highly competitive opposing starting lineups, but in the low-leverage opening minutes of the game. I dig it.
So, as much as I wanted to include a few pointed roasts in here, consider this a celebration of all the things that have gone so remarkably right this season:
Honorable Mention: Nikola Jokic and Kevin Durant join the 30/60/80 club.
There are good reasons why the vaunted 40/50/90 club is considered to be the inner sanctum where only all-time great shooters reside. It’s been done 22 times before, with C.J. McCollum currently the only player on pace to join the club this year. That’s pretty rare — less than once a season since in the invention of the three-point line.
But what’s even rarer is being a member of the 30/60/80 club, featuring hyper-efficiency at what is still the game’s most common shot, the 2-pointer. To clarify, this is at least 30 percent on 3-pointers, 60 percent on 2-pointers, and 80 percent on free throws. Before this season it had only been done twice, and both by white guys in the 1996-97 season: Chris Mullin and Steve Kerr. Obviously this is a tremendous feat of efficiency on the part of both Mullin and Kerr. Both Jokic and Durant, however, are accomplishing the feat while handling the ball a much larger percentage of the time — they both have more than twice the total shots that Kerr had in 1996-97. So, while this isn’t brand-new territory, look for basketball’s new generation of unicorns to join the 30/60/80 club for years to come.
8. Phoenix Suns: Youngest starting lineup ever.
On the one hand, it seems like the Suns are cheating: I don’t remember any other team just straight-up saying they’re just going to shut down their veteran players for an early vacation. On the other hand, the NBA’s youngest-ever starting lineup didn’t even feature the injured Dragan Bender, the league’s very youngest player at 19 years and 134 days old.
When Tyler Ulis, Devin Booker, Derrick Jones, Marquese Chriss, and Alex Len all took the floor together for their record-breaking night on March 23, they got blown out by those Nets. Whoopsie. The very next night, though, the same five guys worked to produce one of the most bananas box score lines in history: Booker’s 70-point barrage.
The Suns have not returned to this lineup in their subsequent three games, bringing in the ancient, 23-year-old T.J. Warren into the mix.
7. James Jones: Highest 3PT% with at least 50 attempts.
This one will teeter on the brink until the last ragged gasp of the regular season, when Jones will inevitably get 30 minutes in the last game of the regular season while Cleveland rests the starters. At this moment, though, Jones has drained 30 of his 54 3-point attempts for a lay-up-esque 55.6 percent — about one make/miss ahead of Kyle Korver’s unfairly forgotten 53.6 percent in 110 attempts for the 2009-10 Utah Jazz. Jones also cracked 50 percent in 2013-14 for the Miami Heat, with 54 3-point attempts all year. As much as we might want to make fun of the dude for professionally being LeBron James’ friend, the man is impressively ready to get off the bench and start ripping net.
Somehow, in hot pursuit of Jones: Pau Gasol, who is 47-for-88, good for 53.4 percent. In the previous 15 years of his career, Gasol shot a combined 29.7 percent from deep. Gregg Popovich, my word.
6. Klay Thompson: Most points in 30 minutes or less.
In Game 82 of last year’s regular season, Steph Curry dropped 46 points on the Memphis Grizzlies before watching the fourth quarter of win No. 73 from the bench. This tied the record set by — of course — Gilbert Arenas in some dark, mid-2000’s night. This season, Curry’s Splash Brother Thompson used the non-historical setting of a December night against the Indiana Pacers to blow the record out of the water, with 60 points in 29 minutes.
Thompson made the whole thing look, for some reason, very easy — a logic puzzle that was as difficult as beginners’-level Sudoku — converting a surprising number of slowly banked-in reverse layups from well below the rim. It was the perfect modern NBA game: race out to a 30-point lead at halftime, then rest the starters for the next one.
5. Houston Rockets: Most 3-point makes in a season.
Since the Rockets have, for years, pushed the boundaries of what’s possible to do from behind the 3-point line, it can be easy to miss that they’ve blasted into another stratosphere this season. This year’s Rockets are shooting nearly seven more 3-pointers per game than the next-most prolific team, ever. Houston officially passed last year’s Golden State Warriors for most total makes just last night, an accomplishment that was all but inevitable given the Rockets’ unprecedented amount of attempts.
4. DeMarcus Cousins: First-ever to average one block, one 3-pointer, four assists, and ten rebounds per game.
Only about a dozen players in history — the first being Charles Barkley — have ever managed to combine one 3-pointer per game with ten rebounds per game. This is already rarified air. Only two other players — Shawn Marion (three times) and Karl-Anthony Towns (this year) — have ever added the block per game on top of that. And finally, Cousins stands alone in his ability to pour on the additional assists on top of that. For all that is deeply wrong with Cousins’ approach to the game, he’s also something entirely unprecedented as a basketball player.
3. James Harden & Russell Westbrook: Total turnovers, turnovers per game.
Yes, both of these players are exploring new territory when it comes to turning the ball over. But, like I said above, there are no anti-records here: both Harden and Westbrook have set these records incidentally, while shouldering outsized offensive responsibilities for their teams. Neither player is approaching the lead for highest turnover percentage among players this season, never mind all-time.
2. Russell Westbrook: Highest usage percentage.
…In fact, Westbrook has been handling the ball more often than any other player in league history. Kobe Bryant had set the record in the post-Shaq year when he, among other things, scored 81 points one night. Unlike Bryant’s model of ultra-usage, though, Westbrook is distributing the ball like no scorer ever has. Among the 181 player-seasons with a usage percentage greater than 30 percent (since the statistic was tracked in 1977-78), Westbrook also holds the lead in assist percentage (with Harden in second place) by about a mile.
Next: The Boston Celtics are falling apart when Isaiah Thomas goes to the bench
1. James Harden & Russell Westbrook: A cornucopia of triple-double fun facts.
At this point, either Harden or Westbrook or both of them are adding a new page to the history of triple-doubles on like a weekly basis. Among the things that have happened so far:
In December, Harden tied Wilt Chamberlain’s record for most points in a triple-double, with 53.
Westbrook bested that just this week with 57 points in a triple-double against the Orlando Magic. (Yeah, the game went into overtime. But still.)
Now both Harden and Westbrook have scored 50 points in a triple-double twice this season — something that no other player had done before.
Just a few days before his 57-point night, Westbrook went for the first triple-double in history without missing a single shot from the field or free throw line.
With eight games left in the season, Westbrook has 38 triple-doubles. That’s more than eight teams have in their team history, and it’s within striking distance of the 41 triple-doubles that Oscar Robertson had in his historic 1961-62 season.
The cherry on top: as of today, the Rockets an Thunder are slated to face each other in the first round of the playoffs.