So Kobe Bryant buries a shot late in the game and LeBron James misses a free throw and a buzzer shot to drop a game to the Lakers last night. And the story is about James ending his streak of getting:
at least thirty points,
at least seven rebounds and
at least five assists.
He had accomplished this feat seven games straight. Oscar Robertson and Wilt Chamberlain are the only other players to have accomplished that feat.
What in the world prompted someone to care enough to know how many players have gone seven straight games with 30 points, 7 rebounds and 5 assists?
It's probably not someone caring specifically about it, but instead the huge possibilities in data mining that make such statistics relatively easy to follow. I'd imagine most NBA stats going back to the early 20th century are now computerized and all it takes is a few keystrokes to match up which players meet any number of criteria, so such obscure combos as 30 points/7 rebounds/5 assists can be dredged up in a matter of minutes.
Nowadays, they probably even have algorithms in place to spot such trends and pull up historical matches automatically.
Sports statistics are pretty crazy but soon they won't necessarily require the encyclopedic historical knowledge of a team or a sport the way baseball stats did, say, before the last five or 10 years. I guess that's both good and bad; we won't necessarily have to use so much brain space for arcane bits of trivia, but the value of being the Sports Trivia King at the next night out at the bar will go down as well.
Posted by: Don Nunn | January 13, 2006 at 15:35