Judging any team or any player by one game is a tricky proposition. With so much random variance due to luck over the course of any 90-100 possessions, you never know quite what you’re going to look at after the night’s first game. Sure enough, after the Brooklyn Nets beat the Toronto Raptors 107-100 on day one, some stats look just slightly out of whack.
Here’s some of my favorite instances of Brooklyn Nets #SmallSampleSizeTheater:
- Reggie Evans, who devoured 13 rebounds in 15 minutes (or 29.3 per 36), finished the game with a rebound rate of 50% — which would be exactly the league average for an entire team. Even better: Evans’s defensive rebound rate of 78.6% (meaning that any time a rebound was available with Evans on the floor, he got 78.6% of them) would’ve led the league last year… among teams.
- C.J. Watson blocked two shots last night, giving him a block percentage of 5.4%. For comparison, Hakeem Olajuwon’s career block percentage: 5.4%.
- Brook Lopez put up a PER of 28.4 last night. To stick with the Hakeem comparison, Hakeem’s highest career PER for any one season was 27.3.
- In the seven minutes that C.J. Watson, MarShon Brooks, Joe Johnson, Reggie Evans, and Andray Blatche shared the floor, the team allowed 47.5 points per 100 possessions, well below half the league average.
- Kris Humphries and Andray Blatche finished last night with PER’s of 6.2 and 3.1, respectively. Only one player in NBA history has played more than 500 minutes in a season with a lower PER than 3.1: former Nets center Jason Collins, who produced a 3.0 PER in 1,844 minutes in 2006-07 with New Jersey.
