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As Bill Simmons tweeted: “48 points, 3 missed shots total (FG + FT). We need a stat like ‘points per miss’ to see if that’s a record for a 40+ point game.”

For the evening, Dirk’s “points per miss” (or PPM as we’ll refer to it henceforth) was 16. 16! 16 points for every missed shot. That is astounding, and it is a terrific way to appreciate what was one of the best single-night shooting performances on any level of basketball ever.

And as I went to bed last night, Simmons’ tweet had me thinking. Just how useful of a stat would PPM be? So I decided to get up this morning and investigate it a little further.

First off, let’s assess what we’d hope to ascertain by comparing players’ PPM values.

By analyzing the number of points a player is able to score for every shoot he misses, we are assessing one component of his offensive efficiency. There are a number of ways to do this already, and PPM would simply add another layer to how we view a player’s worth to his team.

Specifically, because a missed shot equates to a missed scoring opportunity that could have perhaps been capitalized on by another player, PPM should give us some measure how efficient a player turns the shooting opportunities he takes for his team into points.

Points per game is an oft-cited stat, but it provides little in the way of efficiency. A player could score 40 points per game and lead the league, but if he just does it because he chucks up half of his team’s shots, his team probably is not very good or balanced on offense. Another player who scores only 25 points per game but who is highly efficient at turning shooting opportunities into points is maximizing his own scoring chances while, theoretically, not wasting his team’s scoring opportunities shooting lower percentage shots (by comparison) than what his teammates could get.

floppymoose wrote:I thought if there is an offensive rebound, it was still considered the same possession. I've often wondered what the stat landscape would look like if every miss really did terminate a possession, and we counted an offensive rebound as a new possession. It would simplify a lot of things statistically, but it would also mean that the two opponent teams would not necessarily have similar numbers of possessions.