2010-11 NBA power rankings through the games played on December 9, 2010:

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The title says it all:

Keeping Score: Why the Knicks Are Winning

Look for the column in Friday's print edition as well.

I was messing around with the database this morning, and I decided to check out the 2010-11 leaders in the percentage of team points produced by a player while he's on the court:

No doubt that this has been a good season so far for Kobe, but if he's producing 34% of L.A.'s points at age 32 on a team with Pau Gasol, Lamar Odom, Ron Artest, & co., what must his % have been around 2006 or so, when he was lining up with guys like Smush Parker and Brian Cook?

Curious, I dialed up the post-1977 single-season leaders in this stat:

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Here's a quick mailbag from "Imadogg", who writes:

"I was wondering who the best 'one-sided' players of all time are. For example, when thinking of the best offensive players ever, a name like Jordan or Wilt might come to mind, but no one would dare call them one-sided or only offense. On the other hand, when I think of Steve Nash, I think of perfection on one side of the ball and nothing at all on the other. On defense, guys like Dennis Rodman, Ben Wallace, or Dikembe Mutombo come to mind as amazing defenders who you would prefer never to give the ball to."

Imadogg went on to suggest looking at the percentage of a player's Win Shares devoted to offense vs. defense, so I'm going to take that approach when determining the most "one-dimensional" players in post-1952 NBA history.

I should note, one issue with using Win Shares is that they can sometimes be negative, which totally wreaks havoc on an exercise like this. But as a kludge, I just zeroed out the negative OWS/DWS, and took the percentage of those totals devoted to each side of the ball.

Among players with 10,000 career minutes, here are the players most extremely biased toward offense:

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This layup comes courtesy of S-R president Sean Forman, who wanted me to give a shout-out to his alma mater Grinnell College for setting an NCAA record -- namely, the record for most players to make at least one 3-pointer in a single game. They had 19 different guys make a three in their 137-103 rout of Faith Baptist Bible College, going 29-for-88 from downtown in the game. Apparently they had the record in sight at halftime:

"The Pioneers play a rotation with three shifts of five players, and shift changes on the first whistle after 35 seconds. Ahead 88-38 at the half, [Grinnell coach David] Arseneault told his team to go for the record.

'Nobody in the stands knew what we were doing,' he said. 'There were times when someone would have a wide-open layup and then just dribble past the basket and pass the ball out. People were looking at us like, "What is he doing?"'"

Facing his former team in Cleveland last night, LeBron James played like his vintage Cavs-era self, pouring in 38 points on 15-25 shooting with 8 assists in 30 minutes. That had me wondering, where did James' performance rank among historical instances of a player facing his ex-'mates the season after he left town?

So I ran a database query on all games since 1987 where a player was facing a team he had played for the previous season. And for the performance metric of choice, I want to introduce an adjusted plus/minus-based game score-style metric called "APMVAL". I basically ran an intercept-free regression between APM value over replacement (minutes * (APM + 6)) and raw box score totals, coming up with this formula:

APMVAL = 45*pts - 35*tsa + 18*reb + 30*ast + 72*stl + 41*blk - 75*tov - 39*pf

The best APMVAL game of the overall 1987-2010 period was Michael Jordan's 69-point outburst vs. Cleveland in 1990 (Kobe's 81-point game was 2nd). Here were the best games against a player's former team in the first season after his departure:

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2010-11 NBA power rankings through the games played on December 2, 2010:

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Here is this week's offering for the New York Times:

Keeping Score: Who Is the N.B.A.’s Best Point Guard?

I think the answer is obvious, but Mark Jackson and Jeff Van Gundy, among others, disagree:

With so many good guards, the NBA could be in somewhat of a golden age for the position. ABC/ESPN analysts Jeff Van Gundy, brother of Magic coach Stan Van Gundy, and Mark Jackson debated the merits of the position Wednesday night and concluded that the NBA’s deepest position is now at the point.

And the top fives for Jackson (1. Deron Williams; 2. Chris Paul; 3. Derrick Rose; 4. Rajon Rondo; 5. Russell Westbrook) and Van Gundy (1. Deron Williams; 2. Chris Paul; 3. Rajon Rondo; 4. Steve Nash; 5. Derrick Rose/Russell Westbrook/Chauncey Billups/Tony Parker) featured a lot of the same names.

As usual, my column will also appear in Friday's print edition.

Here's a fun layup from May that I didn't find until this week... As an exercise in counterfactual history, Roger Pimentel of How To Watch Sports used our own SRS to re-shape the NBA's 1990s landscape if Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls hadn't dominated the league so thoroughly. It's all for kicks, of course, but it is interesting to think of what might have been for Portland, Phoenix, Seattle, Utah, and Indiana, had #23 hadn't been standing between them and the championship.

This post is a follow-up to this morning's piece about LeBron James & Dwyane Wade's current slumps, so should probably read that one first, if you haven't yet.

In response to the hand-wringing about Wade & James' sub-standard production thus far, some have suggested it's merely a pair of slumps that just happened to coincide with the duo joining forces in South Beach. How legitimate is this theory? Well, thanks to the magic of Monte Carlo simulation, I can test exactly how likely that explanation actually is.

Specifically, I'm going to simulate 10,000 18-game samples based on the career distribution of James & Wade's Hollinger Game Scores. (Yes, there are countless other, better metrics, but hey, this is a quick-n-dirty study.)

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