Box Score Oddities: PHI vs. NYK (1/13/19)

Bizarre box scores are among my absolute favorite things about sports. Luckily, the most recent game against the Knicks provided me with fodder for a few entertaining excursions deep into Basketball-Reference (you should all subscribe) and NBA.com. For your reference, here is the full traditional box score for the game. Fancy stats available here.

Item of Note #1: Ben Simmons 20 points / 22 rebounds / 9 assists

This is a monstrous game. For a player who routinely puts up hilarious box scores, this one is certainly up there. With that being said, below is the list of players who have accomplished 20p/22r/9a since 1990 (data is up to date through about a week ago).

I strongly encourage you to click through those players and the games - some truly incredible lines. Based on some quick math, there have been about 68918 regular season games since the start of the 1990 season and let’s add on about 4250 playoff games for a total of about 73168 games. Four games like or better than Ben’s have occured, ao approximately 0.005% of all games played from 1990 have had a player with the same or better line. Also, note Ben is the only G on the list. I’m somewhat surprised Russ hasn’t put this line up to be honest.

Item of Note #2: Furkan Korkmaz 9min/0p/0r/0a/0tv/0stl/0blk/0pf

Our dude Furkan was one field goal attempt away from a huge nine trillion. Basketball Reference wouldn’t let me apply enough filters to drill this down, so the following is only data from the last ten seasons. I grabbed every line that had the same near trillion (only one attempted and missed 2pt shot) with nine or more minutes and the same or worse plus minus of -7 while still winning the game. Props to Daequan Cook for the full victory nine trillion.

Item of Note #3: Kevin Knox 44min/31p/7r/23fga

I honestly didn’t notice that Knox had such a crazy game until I was looking at the post game stats. Dude went off. With the same stats filtering (or better) combined with rookie year and age 19, you get the following table.

Interesting. Now if you take off the 19 year old restriction, you get the following bizarre list of truly incredible titans of the game and then other guys.

Pretty cool. Two current Bulls players and two current Knicks players which is interesting.

Item of Note #4: Potential Future Sixer Noah Vonleh’s -32

According to Liberty Ballers’ own Jackson Frank, Vonleh has “been legit good this year”. That is likely accurate and only serves to accentuate how absurd his -32 plus minus was. Below are the only players to equal or exceed that number in a game decided by three points or less in the last ten years. Someone is going to have to explain the Al Jefferson line to me, because that seems legitimately impossible, especially because he was pretty good and his actual stats weren’t horrific.

That concludes my first edition of Box Score Oddities. If you all like it I can certainly write more of these as interesting box scores crop up.