Tapp-ing Into The Numbers: Westbrook Could Take 2,000 Shots This Season
Russell Westbrook is the favorite to win the NBA’s MVP Award this season. He is averaging a triple-double this season (31.7 points per game to go along with 10.7 rebounds and 10.4 assists per contest). On Friday night, he became only the second player (Oscar Robertson was the first) to average a triple-double in a season. Westbrook also has 41 triple-doubles this season and needs one more to set the record he shares with the “Big O”.
Here’s another stat about Westbrook: With three games remaining, Westbrook has attempted 1,899 shots, or 24 per game. He would need to fire up 101 shots in his final three contests to become the 11th player in NBA history to attempt 2,000 or more shots in a regular season.
Here’s a look at some other stats re: players to have attempted 2,000 or more shots in a season:
- The last player to attempt 2,000 shots in an NBA season was Kobe Bryant in 2005-06. He took 2,173 shots that year.
- There have been 21 seasons where a player took 2,000 shots. That was accomplished by 10 players (Westbrook could become the 11th player). Wilt Chamberlain had the most 2,000-shot seasons with six. Elvin Hayes is next on the list with three campaigns.
With 1,899 shots this season, Westbrook became the 42nd different player to reach 1,750 shots in a season (it has happened 90 times in the history of the NBA). Michael Jordan did it 10 times to top the list, followed by Wilt with seven, Kareem Abdu-Jabbar, Elgin Baylor, Alex English and Dominique Wilkins with five such seasons, and Elvin Hayes and Allen Iverson with four seasons each with 1,750 shot attempts.
Of the 90 occasions/seasons when a player attempted 1,750 shots, Westbrook’s .424 field goal percentage ranks as the 11th lowest of the 90. Kobe Bryant is also the last player to reach 1,750 shots in a season; he did it in 2006-07.
It doesn’t look like any other player this season with join Westbrook in the 1,750-shot club; New Orleans’ Anthony Davis has taken the second most shots this year with 1,526 and DeMar DeRozan follows with 1,530. Nine other players this year have attempted 1,400 or more shots this season.
The most players to reach 1,750 shot attempts in an NBA season is seven. That was done twice … in 1962 and 1973.
Jerry Tapp
Jerry Tapp is a freelance writer from Racine, WI with a major concentration on sports statistics and numbers that define sports teams and players. He began his foray into sports stats-focused writing as a regular contributor to the “Numbers” column in Inside Sports magazine in the mid-1980’s and then began writing a weekly “Stats on Tapp” column for the Racine Journal Times. That column was eventually nationally syndicated by Universal Press Syndicate. He later wrote sports stats items for the Washington Post under the “Stat of the Day” heading. After launching his blog, www.statsontapp.com in 2011, Jerry turned his sports stats attention to sports websites. He wrote regularly for Bleacher Report, BallHyped, football.com and Heavy.com. Today he keeps busy writing weekly columns of stats-centric articles for three sports websites, Today’s Pigskin (NFL), Today’s Knuckleball (MLB) and Today’s Fastbreak (NBA), and as a monthly contributor to the Milwaukee Brewers “GameDay” publication that is distributed to fans attending games at Miller Park.