On March 17th, 2022, Detroit Pistons 2nd year player Saddiq Bey scored 51 points vs the Orlando Magic. This was pretty shocking for all NBA fans as Bey was only a sophomore and wasn’t a high-volume scoring machine. The NBA is full of surprises anything can happen in this league. This game made me think about a few questions and inspired me to look at some high-scoring game trends in a historical context.
I got all stats from NBA Stats and they start from the 1983-84 season.
Are players more likely to have high-scoring games today?
To begin, I looked at the number of unique (different) players to have a 50-point game every season.
This season, 14 players have scored 50+ in a game. This is the highest number ever! From 1984 to 2016, the highest number of players that scored 50 in a game was 8. Since then, every season has featured at least 11 players to have these high-scoring games.
Between 2010 and 2014, there were only 3.2 players on average every season. We can clearly see how rapidly that number has risen in the last 5-6 years.
In 1999, there was 0 player who had 50 that season, the only season since 1984 with no player to score 50.
Here’s the total number of 50-point games every season. A pretty similar trend, pretty moderate numbers from 1984 to the mid-2000s, followed by a decline in the early 2010s, followed by a big rise. In 2019/20, there were 27 games with a player scoring 50 points or more.
The average number of 50 games each season is approximately 9. If we remove seasons after 2016, that average drops to approximately 7.
It’s cool to see how certain seasons have a lot of 50-point games despite the relatively low number of unique players to score 50. This happens when one player scores a high percentage of all 50-point games that year.
Kobe Bryant in 2006-07 had the highest number of 50-point games in a single season since 1984. He scored 10 out of the 17 total games that season. The 2019 season had a lot of high-scoring games, but James Harden accounted for 9 of those. In 1986-87, a season after breaking his leg, Michael Jordan scored 8 50-point games. Interestingly, none of these players won the MVP for that season.
What about 40-point games?
The 2020-21 and 2021-22 seasons have seen the highest numbers of play scoring 40 points in a single game. 50 different players in 2021 and 47 different players in 2022 had themselves a 40-point game!
When we look at the trend over the last few years, there’s again a big rise in high-scoring games post-2015. In the last 4 years, there have been nearly 20 more players every season scoring 40 a game.
The number of 40-point games in the last 4 years is close to double that of what it was in the early 2010s.
So are players more likely to have high-scoring games today?
It seems like more players are having high-scoring games now, and there are more high-scoring games in general. In fact, these numbers are at all-time highs and considerably more than the numbers in the last 30 years.
There are a lot of reasons for this. Firstly, there’s simply a greater talent pool in the league now. There are a lot more talented players today than there were 25-30 years ago. And that is normal and expected. But this only explains the comparison between 1985 and 2021, what about the other years? The shots taken by teams play a huge role in this.
Everyone knows about the 3-point revolution in basketball, and it’s a big reason why players and teams are able to score more now. Today, approximately 40% of all shots are 3s, in 2015 that number was around 27%, in 2000 that number was around 17%. 3 pointers also lead to better spacing and less rim resistance, in turn making it easier to generate points in the paint.
The high number of 3-point shots can also lead to nights when “hot shooting” comes into play and is a big reason for a player scoring a lot of points. It is fairly common for a player to have a night where he simply can not miss and that leads to him scoring 40 or 50. Taking a lot of 3s does increase the variance in-game to game output, but it also raises the high end for scoring for most players.
Another big part of this is, officiating. Players, volume scorers especially, get a few easy points because of the officiating and high amounts of free throws per 2-point attempt rates. There are higher rates of fouls for interior shots in recent seasons than there were before. Despite the efforts to reduce easy points for players, getting to the line now is easier than ever.
Even though it was really surprising seeing Saddiq Bey score 51 points in a regular-season game, I realize that it’s time to expect more players to score big now. On average, 45-50 players will have a 40-point game over the season, which is a lot of players. Considering there are around 25 all-stars in the league, what’s really fascinating is that there would be around 25 non all star players who have huge scoring nights every season.
With the talent pool and dynamics of the league, we are going to see a lot of different players have a lot of high-scoring games.
Boardman 