H-Index Points and why SGA is the NBA's Best Scorer
The best scoring players are the ones who score a lot, often. And while Embiid may have the highest average, on the average night, SGA is better than him. W
No matter how sophisticated we get about basketball analysis, we can’t get away from a simple truth: if you score more points than your opponent, you win. Scoring matters in basketball.
You want a player who can score a lot of points on any given night. And you want a player who can score points consistently.
Scoring a lot of points on any given night matters because it goes to how capable a player is at impacting a game. A player who can score 25, 30, 35, 40 or more points means a lot more to your team than a player who is only capable of putting up 15 or 20.
At the same time, you also need to be able to depend on a player game-in and game-out. A player who can score 30 points occasionally, but mostly scores 8 to 12 points, is less valuable than a player who usually scores 20. You’ll lose games, waiting to win the one game where they explode onto the stat sheet.
There’s a simple way of measuring this approach, most well known from academic bibliometrics, called H-Index.
To find the H-Index for an academic, we find the maximum number H, such that they have H papers with H or more citations.
In basketball terms, this would be the maximum value of H, such that a player had H games with H or more points scored. For example: Allen Iverson scored 43 or more points, 43 times. Iverson’s H-Index is 43. Kobe Bryant scored 45 or more points 45 times. Bryant’s H-Index is 45.
Career H-Points
To demonstrate that H-Index applied to points, H-Points, makes sense as a metric, we can look at the top all-time players by H-Points and verify that it captures the top scorers. And indeed, we find the best scorers at the top of the list.
Wilt Chamberlain tops the list and owns 5 of the top 7 highest scoring games in NBA history. Michael Jordan, the best player ever, finishes second. Kobe Bryant, who comes in third, scored 60 points in his final NBA game. James Harden, LeBron James, Steph Curry, and Kevin Durant—the games current greats—all make the list as well.
One shortcoming of this metric, is that it’s impossible to reason from just the H-Points number, how big the gap is between two players. For example, LeBron James has an H-Points of 43 and Jordan has an H-Points of 47. We might assume that the two are close by this metric. But where James has 43 games with 43 or more points, Jordan has 108 games with 43 or more points.
James would need another entire career to match Jordan in this stat.
Of course, the stat is limited to scoring. There is no magic to scoring 48 points versus 46 points—unless of course—those two points win you the game.
2023 H-Points
This season, two players are running away with H-Points: Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Luka Doncic. They are already ahead of their rivals across the league by 2—which as we just discussed, can be a misleadingly large gap.
These are also the two players who we’ve said will need to shine the most—should their teams make a serious run at the title. Oklahoma City has young talent and Dallas has a more potent roster than at any point during Doncic’s tenure, but SGA and Luka will singly determine their teams’ destinies.
Down the list, Jokic makes an impressive—if not stunning—appearance. At only 25.5 points per game, Jokic has one of the highest H-Points in the league. The others at or around that number are scoring 30 points per game or above. This points to Jokic having off-nights and on-nights. In the playoffs, expect him to have more on nights than off.
2023 Team H-Points
We can also perform this same analysis, but instead of looking at a single player—we can look at teams. This is useful, because it tells us how likely it is that a team will have a player who—on a given night—can take over a game.
Topping the list, as we might expect, are the two-headed dragon teams: Philadelphia (Embid, Maxey), Milwaukee (Giannis, Dame), Dallas (Doncic, Irving), Boston (Tatum, Brown), and Phoenix (Booker, Durant.)
Again, does H-Points show us perfectly which teams are the best on offense? Maybe not. Maybe we prefer the Celtic’s versatility to the Buck’s two-man show. And maybe we prefer SGA’s creativity to Luka’s isolation game.
But the numbers are close to right. And the metric is simple, easy to understand, and impossible to game.