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By: Richard Li
I'm going to break the rule I laid down for myself about 12 hours ago. Apparently Lebron James and Kyrie Irving had something that fell between "healthy conversation" and "spat" after the Cavaliers lost last night, mainly related to Irving's ballhog playing style (23 shots, 0 assists). Since the topic was selfishness, I couldn't help myself but look at some early small sample size data.
You may recall that I was really interested in this issue last year. I developed some selfishness measures and even created a ball stopping index. Admittedly the latter results were skewed to make point guards look bad since they naturally touch the ball a lot, but even so Irving was the #1 ball stopper in the league. This year?
No index yet, but I did run some quick figures for touches per pass (TPP), which was the measure I developed last year. Higher numbers indicate that the player tends to do something besides pass when he touches the ball (i.e., shoots). Lower numbers indicate that the player tends to pass a lot when he touches the ball. For reference, last year's high was Klay Thompson, who was a hair under 2.0 TPP, meaning he passes only 50% of the time when he touches the ball. The theoretical low is 1.0 TPP, meaning that player always passes the ball upon touching it. Anyways, here's some early figures:
| Last year | This year | |
| Irving | 1.46 | 1.46 |
| James | 1.58 | 1.50 |
| Love | 1.44 | 1.36 |
| Harden | 1.62 | 1.62 |
The data seem to agree with Lebron. Both he and Love have reduced their selfishness while Irving has not, despite having exponentially better teammates compared to last year. Because this is a Rockets blog, I threw in James Harden, who looks pretty consistent thus far.
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