TODAY’S SPORTSTAT– Knicks’ Porzingis takes his game to another level
By JERRY TAPP
If you take a look at the list of NBA players who are averaging 20 or more points this season, you will see a lot of familiar names. In fact, of the 25 players averaging 20 or more points per game (ppg) this year through games of November 28, 21 finished last season with a points-per-game average of 20 or more.
The four players who did not average 20 or more points per game last season but are averaging 20 at this point this season are Kristaps Porzingis (27.0 this year/18.1 last season), Victor Oladipo (23.0/15.9), LaMarcus Aldridge (22.2/17.3) and D’Angelo Russell (20.9/15.6). Of the 25 players who are averaging 20 ppg this year, Porzingis has the biggest jump… 8.9 ppg from last season to this year.
Of the 25 averaging 20 ppg this year, Russell Westbrook has the biggest drop, 10 points over last season… he is at 21.6 ppg this year and finished last season at 31.6.
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.