Arbitrary timing and misleading definitions often skew NBA data. Discover why guard-heavy scoring leads and lack of context might deceive fans during the league’s most pressured moments.
Adam Silver is no stranger to making changes in the league, and one of his more recent additions is the Clutch Player of the Year award. This made its debut at the end of the 2023 season, despite the NBA’s tracking data having stats for “clutchness” since the 1996-1997 season.
De’Aaron Fox got the inaugural trophy, followed by Stephen Curry, Jalen Brunson, and most recently Shai Gilgeous-Alexander. Have you noticed a pattern yet?
Ball-handling guards will obviously have a lot of opportunities in those situations. The winner also seems to be a bit predictable, with each of them being right at the top of clutch points per game, based on NBA Stats.
I can’t say there’s any major snubs yet, as they’re all objectively phenomenal and clutch players — but it is worth noting that DeMar Derozan scored 0.2 more clutch points per game in 2024. What does that even mean though?
While this part is completely arbitrary, the league decided that clutch games were defined as any game within five points with five minutes or less left in the fourth quarter and overtime.
This can make any clutch stats a little misleading, as I don’t think there’s really any way to quantify clutchness. It’s more of a feeling. There’s clutch plays in the first half to halt an opposing team's run. To keep the game in reach to begin with, long before any official clutch time.
In some extreme cases, a team could be up double digits, even up 20 points for the first three and a half quarters. If the opposing team hits five threes in a row and cuts the lead to five with 4:59 remaining, it’s a clutch game.
They could completely fall apart in the next minute and be down 15 again with four minutes left. Still a clutch game at one point, despite it never really being that close.
At the end of the day, that’s no different than any player’s three point percentage being misleading. Or the Rockets as a team, for that matter. They had a top 10 percentage in the regular season, but shot the third lowest number of threes.
Similarly, a player who gets two uncontested threes a game might shoot 50-percent on the season. That doesn’t mean they’re a better shooter than Stephen Curry taking 10+ threes while being double teamed.
Numbers don’t lie, but they can deceive you. It’s always important to remember context when looking at any stats, with Clutch Stats being a newer one to keep an eye on.