Brainy - ESPN Insider looks at some data concerning why James Harden is one of the best players in the league, and puts his free throw shooting in context:
Entering Monday, he has attempted a league-leading 510 free throws. That puts him 45 ahead of second-place Kevin Durant (465). More impressive is that only five other players have even attempted more than 300 free throws this season — Dwight Howard (411), Bryant (374), Russell Westbrook (336), James (312) and Anthony (302). Harden is attempting a league-best 10.0 free throws per game and shooting 85.5 percent from the line, giving Houston a big advantage in the final minutes of close contests.
Brainier – This article by the San Diego State University MBA program breaks down the statistical improbability of what the Rockets did to the Warriors last week. Put your thinking cap on:
Statistically speaking we can expect a majority of our outcomes to fall within two standard deviations of the mean (our average). This means, that if the Rockets took 40 threes, we could expect them to make, on average, 14. But, if the Rockets shot 40 three-pointers a game for a whole season we could expect to see a majority of the results fall within plus or minus two standard deviations of our average; meaning the majority of our results would be in the range of 9–20 three pointers made per game when attempting 40 threes (note: our exact range is 8.1 to 20.1, but because our low range number is greater than 8 we cannot use 8 in our assumption).
This means the Rockets would only have a 2% chance of hitting our ‘high’ range number of 20 made threes. The Rockets’ 23 makes were three standard deviations above the average. As proven above, that has a 99.8% chance of NOT happening.
Brainiest – Jeremy Lin went to Harvard, y’all.
Tweet That Double Feature – Question:
[blackbirdpie url="https://twitter.com/pdpatt/status/301191037328707585"]
Answer: get some more rebounds, and we’ll talk.
[blackbirdpie url="https://twitter.com/Highway_30/status/300827671900860416"]
He’s baaaaaack! – Royce White has probably broken the record for number of interviews given by a guy who’s about to start playing for the D-League. Here’s his interview with the local ABC affliate, and here he is chatting with Truehoop:
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