Kobe's stat line tonight against the Dallas Mavericks. (He didn't play in the fourth quarter)
Minutes 33
FG-A 18-31
FT-A 22-25
3P-A 4-10
Off 3
Reb 8
Assists 0!
Steals 3
TO 2
Blocks 0
PF 3
Total Points 62!!!!!!!! (Career High, Season High, top Laker ever not named Baylor, Chamberlain or West) (At the end of 3 quarters Kobe Bryant 62 points, Dallas Mavericks 61 points)
UPDATE: They changed the stat line slightly from 2 offensive rebounds to 3. Also just to mention his 62 was high for the season for any player, and his 30 in the 3rd quarter has been rarely eclipsed (The Iceman owns the NBA record of 33 in a quarter)
UPDATE, Part Deux: I was joking about the selfish remark, Kobe's performance was magnificent, this jerk was being serious (I think, and his whole piece is behind a paid subscription link, but a few people at the LATimes Laker's blog have excerpted some bits)
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Because I'm here for you, here's the meat of Hollinger's analysis - note, he doesn't make any normative claims, (though he does note that this season Kobe has an unusually low "effective FG%" for a star player. Which IMO makes sense if your teammates blow. Which his do.)
As I was saying, Usage Rate allows us to see that Kobe wasn't the ball hog that some expected in 2004-05. Yes, he had the ball a lot, but he actually used fewer possessions per 40 minutes than he had done two years earlier with Shaq and, believe it or not, he averaged fewer points and more assists in 2004-05 than he had in 2002-03.
In 2005-06, on the other hand, it's been a different story. Bryant is hoisting up 26 field-goal attempts per game, even though the Lakers have played at a fairly slow pace. Overall, his Usage Rate of 34.9 (all stats through Tuesday's games) is leading the league by a comfortable margin. In fact, it's one of the highest of all time. We can calculate Usage Rate starting only in 1977-78, when the NBA started calculating turnovers, but since then only 10 players have posted a higher Usage Rate than Bryant. Additionally, only one of those 10, Allen Iverson, had his high-usage season in the last dozen years. Clearly, then, Bryant's been calling his own number unusually often.
But on a historical basis, how unusual is Bryant's Usage Rate? One thing about Usage Rate is that comparisons between seasons aren't as clear as we'd like, because it partly depends on the pace of the league as a whole. Since the league played at a faster pace in the 1980s than it did today, players from that era tend to have higher Usage Rates than players of the new millennium.
We need a way to adjust for that, and it's a relatively easy one. All we have to do is divide a player's Usage Rate by the league average Usage Rate in that season. That way, we get a player's Usage Rate Multiple (URM) -- how many times more frequently than the league average he uses possessions.
And looking at URM, Bryant is dominating the ball like few ever have. Of all the players in the past 28 years, nobody has been a more, shall we say, enthusiastic offensive participant than Kobe has been this year.
Usage Rate Multiple -- All-time leaders*
Player Year URM
Kobe Bryant 2005-06 1.89
Michael Jordan 1986-87 1.88
Allen Iverson 2001-02 1.86
Michael Jordan 2001-02 1.84
Allen Iverson 2003-04 1.79
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