Welcome to the Boxscores of the week! Every week I run down my picks of the five top boxscores of the week. For good measure, I also look at the bottom three. While production -- we use the Points Over Par metric -- does play a role in who I select, I also allow some subjectivity into my selection. With that in mind, here are our lists!
The Top Five Boxscores of the Week
| Player | Date | Minutes | PTS(TS%) | TRB | AST | TOV | STL | BLK | PF | PoP |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Anthony Davis | 1/9 | 37 | 38(79%) | 13 | 7 | 1 | 2 | 4 | 1 | 19.6 |
| James Harden | 1/11 | 30 | 43(74.5%) | 10 | 12 | 4 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 17.8 |
| Ben Simmons | 1/13 | 37 | 20(72%) | 22 | 9 | 2 | 0 | 0 | 4 | 16.5 |
| Kawhi Leonard | 1/8 | 35 | 31(73.5%) | 4 | 6 | 1 | 6 | 1 | 2 | 15 |
| Luka Doncic | 1/9 | 36 | 30(71.3%) | 6 | 5 | 4 | 3 | 0 | 1 | 8.8 |
1. Anthony Davis puts up the best game of the week by quite a large margin. He pretty much did it all, yup.
2. James Harden put up an amazing forty point triple double. It's fair to say the Rockets have needed his recent performances to stay afloat. We'll see if he keeps it up (spoiler alert from the future, he does)
3. Ben Simmons puts up a 20-20 without making a three! He was an assist off a triple-double, but we won't hold that against him.
4. Kawhi crushes it on both ends of the court. On offense, he scored thirty points on fantastic scoring. On defense, he racked up six steals.
5. I really wanted Doncic to make the list, and he put up a solid performance against the Lakers to justify it. He put up a standard Doncic game, good at everything but slightly high turnovers. If he gets those under control, he'll leap from star rookie to MVP caliber!
Honorable Mentions:
On January 11th Steph Curry put up eleven made threes. There was a time making that many threes guaranteed spot on the list. Sadly Curry and Harden have raised the bar enough that it's no longer the case!
On 1/11 and 1/9, Donovan Mitchell did put up two very good games. They weren't close to the level of the games that made the top of the list and were roughly as good as Doncic's. I have to give him his due for having a good week.
The Bottom Three Boxscores of the Week
| Player | Date | Minutes | PTS(TS%) | TRB | AST | TOV | STL | BLK | PF | PoP |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| DeMar DeRozan | 1/10 | 49 | 16(33.1%) | 8 | 11 | 4 | 1 | 1 | 5 | -14.9 |
| Kyle Kuzma | 1/7 | 37 | 13(29.3%) | 5 | 3 | 2 | 0 | 0 | 2 | -14.9 |
| Jae Crowder | 1/12 | 25 | 6(20.3%) | 3 | 1 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 3 | -11.9 |
1. The Spurs and Thunder went the distance in a double OT battle. LaMarcus Aldridge emerged the hero. That said, the game only went that long thanks to horrendous shooting from DeRozan. He's having a good year, but this game wasn't a good one by any means.
2. Kyle Kuzma has not been shooting well this season at all. At least he stayed consistent going 2-10 from two and 2-10 from three. That said, the Lakers still emerged victorious, which lead me to this week's bad list theme.
3. Jae Crowder is also playing poorly this year. He went 1-13 against the Chicago Bulls and kept one of the worse teams in the league within ten points of the Jazz. The Jazz still won though, so no hard feelings?
Honorable Mention:
I was sure Donovan Mitchell's performance on 1/7 against Milwaukee would make the list. He went 2-12 from two and put up seven turnovers. That said, Jae Crowder "bailed him out" by playing even worse against a worse opponent. Mitchell gets the honor of being an honorable mention on both lists this week!
The Top Boxscores Leaderboard
Reminder, I'm using an MVP voting scheme for, well, no reason in particular. So the best boxscore of the week gets 5 points, 2nd best 4, etc. For the bad boxscores, I'm doing -3,-2,-1. Here's an update of how things look (minimum two boxscores to place). And since we're starting to cook, we can drop from ten names to five (well, six, thanks to ties!)
| Player | Points | List Appearances |
|---|---|---|
| Giannis Antetokounmpo | 17 | 4 |
| Nikola Jokic | 12 | 3 |
| Anthony Davis | 12 | 3 |
| Stephen Curry | 10 | 4 |
| LeBron James | 9 | 3 |
| James Harden | 9 | 4 |
Giannis holds his lead, but Anthony Davis and James Harden both make pushes! I did have to resolve another tie-breaking procedure though. Jokic places in front of AD for having the best individual game between the two this season. This week was pretty standard on MVP names on the list; we'll see what next week holds!
Alright, those are our lists. As always, let us know in the comments or on Twitter if you have any suggestions. You can also let us know if our selections were wrong, but it's too late to change things now! See you next week!
* Reminder, the Points over Par metric is just the Wins Produced formula translated into point margin. The way to think of it is -- how many points would a team win (or lose) by with our player's performance if they played next to an average team against an average opponent.