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Friday, January 19, 2007

Pro Basketball's 2000 Points Club

Pro basketball's "2000 Points Club" is one of the most elite statistical groupings in sports, as I note in the opening paragraph of my most recent NBCSports.com article:

Scoring 2000 points in an NBA season requires a rare combination of productivity and durability. If a player participates in all 82 games he must average 24.4 ppg to reach this milestone. Every missed game requires an extra .3 ppg to stay on pace for 2000 points. Pro basketball's 2000 point club has operated under these rules for decades, unlike some of the "clubs" in other major sports. For instance, when Jim Brown first rushed for over 1000 yards he did it in a 12 game season, necessitating an average of better than 83 yards per game; today's running backs can crank out 1000 yards in a 16 game season by averaging just 62.5 ypg.

Here is a link to the article:

Pro Basketball's 2000 Points Club

posted by David Friedman @ 1:08 AM

1 comments

1 Comments:

At Friday, January 19, 2007 2:51:00 PM, Blogger David Friedman said...

A simple chart should make it pretty clear that my math is correct:

2000/82=24.4
2000/81=24.7
2000/80=25
2000/79=25.3
2000/78=25.6
etc.

You can continue this process all the way through; for every game missed, a player must average an extra .3 ppg above 24.4 in order to stay on pace for 2000. The fallacy in what you did is that the points become magnified relative to the games as the number of games decrease. There probably is a mathematical term for that, but I don't know what it is. Basically, what I'm saying is that if you only played two games, you obviously would have to average 1000 ppg to reach 2000 points--but that's assuming you start from zero. I'm starting with someone averaging 24.4 ppg in 82 games and then, subtracting one game at a time, indicating how many ppg BASED ON 82 GAMES he would need to add to his average to maintain a 2000 point pace (I don't mean to shout with the all-caps; I just wanted to emphasize that part). Each game missed requires an extra .3 ppg. I think that what you are doing is not accounting for the 24.4 ppg that I'm using as a given. That is where your extra, missing points are coming from.

 

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