Jalen Brunson is more than just the leading scorer in the 2024 NBA playoffs. He is the centerpiece of the best New York Knicks team in decades and the epitome of one of the biggest trends in the NBA from the 2020s. Over his past five games, Brunson has scored a staggering 210 points. You have to go back to 1993, when Michael Jordan scored 215 points in a ridiculous five-game playoff run, to find the last time an NBA player has had a more prolific postseason scoring run than this.
That’s Peak MJ, and while some bing-bonging Knicks fans might assert that Brunson is the second coming of his airness, that’s not what’s happening here. Brunson’s gaudy box score numbers are awesome by any measure, but they are also the by-product of one of the biggest stylistic movements in the NBA right now; today’s NBA offenses are more concentrated around perimeter stars than ever before.
In a post-Moneyball NBA, teams continue to arbitrage holy efficiency wherever they can find it, and recently that’s meant just handing the ball to your star player over and over again and letting him cook. Usage rates for the game’s brightest stars are soaring, and you don’t need to be Neil deGrasse Tyson to understand how this stellar trend is fueling more and more “big nights” and 40-point outbursts around the association.
For better or for worse, the so-called heliocentric era is here, and when you layer its impact over the 3-point revolution that turned the NBA inside out in the 2010s, you can start to understand how today’s best perimeter scorers are putting up some of the craziest stat lines this league has ever seen. In my new book, Hoop Atlas, I explored the origins and impacts of heliocentric hoops in the NBA. Here is a short excerpt from the book that connects what we are seeing from stars like Brunson back to players like Jordan and Kobe Bryant …
All images courtesy of Harper-Collins
On January 2, 2023, in Cleveland, Donovan Mitchell, the Cavaliers’ 26-year-old all-star guard, scored 71 points in an overtime win against the Chicago Bulls.
Mitchell’s outburst was the most points scored by any player in the NBA since Kobe Bryant scored 81 against the Raptors on January 22, 2006.
Bryant’s legendary night came within one of his most unusual seasons. In 2005–2006, the Lakers weren’t very good. But that season Bryant set career highs in many per-game metrics, including field goals made, field goals attempted, free-throw attempts, and points. He also gave the league a preview of its future.
That season Bryant averaged a ridiculous 35.4 points per game, but he had to. The roster was thin. There was no Shaq. Pau Gasol had yet to arrive in town. Faced with an uncharacteristically shallow Lakers depth chart, Bryant took matters into his own hands … a lot. By the end of the season, Bryant had attempted 2,173 shots, a full 350 more shots than LeBron James, who ranked second in the league by taking 1,823.
The best metric to quantify Bryant’s most shot-heavy season is usage rate, which estimates the percentage of team possessions “used” by a single player when he is on the court. Most of these “uses” are shots, but turnovers and fouls are also counted. In a perfectly egalitarian team environment, every player on a five-person team would have a usage rate of 20, but that’s not the world we live in, and of course some NBA players shoot the ball and use possessions at much higher rates than others. Usage rate is designed to measure this effect.
That year Bryant logged a usage rate of 38.7, which set a new record in the NBA. Estimates of usage rate date back to 1977–1978, when individual turnovers became an official stat, but nobody ever touched that figure until Bryant did it.
Only two players even came close: Michael Jordan in 1986–1987 (38.3) and Allen…
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