Breaking Down Special Nights By Amare and Parker
Hollinger
By John Hollinger
ESPN.com
(Archive)
I watched nearly all the Suns' 113-103 victory over Indiana, in which Amare Stoudemire scored 49 points while missing only four shots, and while it was happening I was thinking that this might go down as the best performance all season. Within a matter of hours, however, it was debatable whether it was even the best performance of the night.
San Antonio's Tony Parker, who entered the game leading the league in PER, didn't appear intent on giving up his lead anytime soon. He pumped in 55 points and threw in 10 assists to help San Antonio get off the schneid with a 129-125 double-OT win in Minnesota capping a night where several star players blew up. In addition to Parker and Stoudemire, LeBron James (41 points, nine boards, six assists, four steals) and Dwyane Wade (29 points, and two blocks shy of a rare "five by five") also had impressive evenings.
So where do all these performances stand in relation to each other -- not to mention the other top performances of recent seasons?
Glad you asked. It turns out we have just such a tool for measuring a player's single game performance, and we'll be launching it in the coming weeks.
In the meantime, Wednesday's unusual outpouring of impressive individual efforts makes it a perfect time to offer a sneak preview. What I've done is modify my original game score formula -- a back-of-the-envelope means of evaluating a player's single-game performance -- to adjust for pace, leaving us with a more advanced metric that more closely mimics the PER formula while having the benefit of being far less complicated. I call it adjusted game score, or AGS.
Thanks to the wizardry of the crew back in Bristol, we have the AGS of every player in every game over the past seven seasons. Not surprisingly, the best AGS score of that period (dating to the start of the 2001-02 season) belongs to Kobe Bryant thanks to his 81-point explosion against Toronto on Jan. 22, 2006; for that effort he earned a 63.37. No other player has come within 10 points of that mark (see chart), though Bryant has occasionally come close -- he has three of the top four marks and five of the top 14. The only other player with more than one top-20 performance is James, with five, though his almost all rank lower than Bryant's.
Top AGS since 2001-02
Rank Player Date Pts. FG-FGA FT-FTA Reb Ast TO AGS
1, Kobe Bryant 1/22/06 81 28-46 18-20 6 2 3 63.37
2. Manu Ginobili 2/13/08 46 15-20 8-9 5 8 1 52.58
3. Kobe Bryant 4/15/07 50 18-25 11-13 8 3 1 50.91
4. Kobe Bryant 3/16/07 65 23-39 11-12 7 3 2 50.42
5. S. Abdur-Rahim 11/23/01 50 21-30 8-8 12 5 2 50.35
15. Amare Stoudemire 11/5/08 49 17-21 15-15 11 6 4 47.21
43. Tony Parker 11/5/08 55 22-36 9-10 7 10 4 43.63
OK, enough about the history -- where do Wednesday's efforts rank?
Let's start with Parker. In raw terms, his performance was amazing -- nobody had hit the milestones of 55 points and 10 assists since Michael Jordan did it 16 years ago, and he was three rebounds shy of a triple-double as well. Until Wednesday, only Bryant has managed to post a raw game score (the old formula) over 50; he did it in his 81-point game, of course, and again in his 65-point effort against Portland in March of 2007. Parker's 50.1 became the third.
However, once we adjust for the two overtimes and the game's generally fast pace, Parker's effort loses some of its luster -- at least relative to other recent great performances. His AGS of 43.63 ranks 42nd, which is still impressive ... but not the night's best.
The more impressive performance belonged to Stoudemire. He didn't have quite as gaudy a point total, getting downgraded to 49 after scorers removed a field goal, but he was devastatingly efficient. Stoudemire piled up his points while missing just four shots from the floor and shooting a perfect 15-of-15 from the line, and he added 11 boards, six assists, five steals and two blocks. He became just the seventh player in the past two decades to have a 40-10-5-5 game, and the first in seven years.
Amare's raw game score isn't as strong as Parker's, but because he did all his damage in regulation his AGS of 47.21 ranks much higher. It places him 15th on the list and is easily the best of his career; his previous mark was the 29th-rated game when he rang up the Hawks for 43 in 2007.
To really put what both Parker and Stoudemire did in perspective, though, it's helpful to check out what Wade and James did. Both players played extremely well, and on any other night their performance would have been the lead story. But neither player's AGS cracked the top 200 of the past seven seasons.
There's a reason for that -- it takes an extremely strong game just to get at the back of the list once you're dealing with so many games. In an average year, we'd expect only seven games or so to crack the top 50.
The fact that two of them happened on one night is amazing, and even moreso this early in the season -- since offense tends to improve sharply as the season goes on, most of the top AGS marks come later in the season. Six of the top 11 AGS scores were in March or April; prior to Wednesday, only six October or November games were even in the top 50.
Anyway you slice it, both performances were incredibly impressive. Using AGS, however, shows us that Stoudemire's was the more dominating of the two.
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