Basketball Reference's Stathead section allows you to come up with lists that are informational, super interesting, and that make for awesome, awesome trivia questions. For instance: who are the six players in NBA history to have scored over 16,000 points but who never made an All-Star team? Easy, thanks to Stathead.
Pretty cool, eh? I'm available to emcee your next sports bar trivia event, just as a little FYI.
You can also come up with all sorts of statistical lists, groups and clusters of players to help you prove a point or win an argument. And for the most part, the specificity with which you can create these lists will allow you to prove any point you're trying to make. Oh, you don't think that Brian Scalabrine is as good as Kevin Durant? Well I don't see Kevin Durant on the list of players, including Scal, who had at least 29 points, 10 total rebounds, 4 offensive boards, a block, a steal and a perfect percentage from the free throw line in a single game, do you?
Yeah... those are the oddly specific lists I'm referring to. One such list that focused on Thaddeus Young made it on air and was particularly memorable for the utter randomness of it all.
I mean, that's a pretty exclusive crew right there. And it's not that Young isn't proud of his membership, but he finds it all just a little too convenient.
"This is such a horrible graphic," Young said on the "Called Game" podcast with Kenny Beecham at the 43:10 mark. "The graphic is so specific to just me, like as a player, so it was a bit of a reach. But I think it's hilarious. I always, when I see graphic and stuff like that, I laugh at them and keep it moving... I just think it's all funny. I wanna know who made that graphic, who came up like, 'oh, we should do this!'
"First of all, Bird averaged 20 something. LeBron averaged 20 something. Magic averaged 20 and 10, 11, whatever. Like, I'm averaging 13, like, no man! Like who came up with this graphic? But it's okay, I think it's funny. I [see] people toss it around and they'd be like, 'Thad's the GOAT.' I'm cracking up. It's super funny to me."
My turn to come up with a ridiculously Thad-tastic stat: how about the group of players that averaged at least 12 points, 6 rebounds, 4 assists, 1 steal and 0.6 blocks in their age-32 season or later while shooting better than 55 percent from the field? Would you look at that... an even more exclusive group than the infamous Indy graphic.
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