exitcreative

Over the last few days at UC, we’ve gathered a couple interesting piles of information to help us understand what’s happening to the NBA dunk contest. Using three “advanced metrics” for NBA player performance, we found that the dunk contest features more scrubs today than it did in the past. With that said, it’s not all bad news.

• Average PER is slowly declining. PER measures a player’s total per-minute effectiveness on both ends of the court. If you’re Ben Wallace, and you don’t score much, you still do well on PER because you contribute a lot in terms of rebounding and defense.
• Average Win Shares is steady slippin’. Win Shares calculates how many wins a player contributed to during the season. High-PER players who spend a lot of time on the court (i.e. Michael Jordan) do very well here.
• Average Win Shares per 48 minutes is on the rise! This is where we see that we’re getting more benchwarmers (even if they’re very good benchwarmers) in the dunk contest. If you play 5 minutes a game, but are very effective on a per-minute basis, you’ll do well here. I’m looking at you, Nate Robinson.

Anyway. More interesting stuff to come from us shortly.