Nylon Calculus: Not all 50-point games are created equally

In a season full of sparkling individual performances, Damian Lillard just raised the bar significantly.

Damian Lillard has thrown up some monster games before, but his 61-point effort against the Warriors on Monday night was exceptional. He earned those points, the most anyone has scored in a game this season, on 17-of-37 from the field, 11-of-20 from behind the 3-point line and 16-of-16 on free throws. Oh, and he also had 10 rebounds, 7 assists and a steal, with just two turnovers.

The volume was amazing, the efficiency was impressive but the stakes are what made it perhaps the best individual game of the year. The Blazers escaped with a five-point overtime win and 13 of Lillard’s 61 points were scored in the clutch (last five minutes or overtime, score within five points).

Inpredictable uses their live win probability model to estimate a player’s Win Probability Added. This metric is highly tuned to clutch situations — a made shot in the fourth quarter of a close game is worth more than in the fourth quarter of a blowout. It also only includes makes, misses, turnovers and free throws:

"WPA deliberately allocates more credit to a player for clutch shots, and penalizes them more for failing to come through when the game is on the line (e.g. missing a shot late in the game with your team trailing by 1 point)Win Probability Added, as I’ve defined it, sums the win probability contributions of each player’s missed shots, made shots, turnovers, and free throws. It does not include WPA added via other traditional box score stats such as rebounds, assists, blocks, and steals. That’s not to say I don’t think those stats are important. Rather, I was aiming for stats where it is easy to assign both credit and blame for what a player does with his team’s possessions. It’s easy enough to credit a player for grabbing a rebound, but how do you debit a player for not grabbing one?"

The metric then doesn’t represent the totality of a player’s contributions but is a nice estimate of their impact as a scorer and finisher in the high-leverage moments that separate winning from losing. The graph below shows the 11 50-point games that have happened this year, marked by the Win Probability Added.

Lillard’s 61-point game had a Win Probability Added of 94 percent, leading every other high-scoring game by an enormous margin. The two most significant shots that he made were the game-tying 3-pointer with 15 seconds left in regulation and the game-tying pull-up 3-pointer he hit with 58 seconds left in overtime. Those two shots added 28.3 and 24.9 percent to the Trail Blazers’ win probability, respectively.

By raw box score stats, there may have been a few other more impressive performances this season. But there have only been three games where a player posted a higher Win Probability added — Tyler Herro against the Bulls, Brandon Ingram against the Jazz, and Zach LaVine against the Hornets. None of those players outscored Lillard, none had as many combined rebounds and assists as him and only Ingram’s WPA mark was unaided by a game-winning shot.

You can quibble about the specifics of the best performance of the year but, of the highest-scoring games of the year, no one had as more riding on an extended streak of hot shooting than Lillard did on Monday night.