Wilt Chamberlain Shot Chart + Various Stats

[Dipper 13]

I realize this is a small sample size. But it is all that is available, unless someone can upload the 1973 game that was recently shown on MSG Network. I have used the following games:

Spoiler:

1964 NBA Finals Gm. 4 Celtics vs. Warriors (2nd Half)
1967 EDF Gm. 4 Sixers vs. Celtics (2nd Half)
1969 NBA Finals Gm. 7 Celtics vs. Lakers (4th Quarter)
1970 NBA Finals Gm. 5 Lakers vs. Knicks (Incomplete)
1970 NBA Finals Gm. 7 Lakers vs. Knicks
1971 WCSF Gm. 6 Lakers vs. Bulls
Jan 9, 1972 - Lakers vs. Bucks
1972 NBA Finals Gm. 5 Knicks vs. Lakers (Incomplete)

Various statistics I kept track of:

Spoiler:

Fouls Drawn
With Ball: 18
Loose Ball & Off Ball: 8
Shots Created: (Passes leading to clean shots & fouls, including direct half-court passes, outlet passes, and hockey assists) *Not all assists are necessarily counted as shots created, and vice versa.
Total Fouls Called: 5
Outside Paint- 30
In Paint - 19 (At Rim) - 15
Half Court Touches: 172
Turnovers: 14
Team Offensive Possessions: 568
Blocks: 22
Assists: 26
TO's Forced: 13
Steals: 4
FT: 17/43
Total Rebounds: 104
Off: 34
Def: 70

Charts:

At Rim: 42/51 FG (82.4%)
In Paint (Overall): 42/61 FG (68.9%)
Midrange: 3/10 FG (30.0%)
Slam Dunk: 18/19 FG (94.7%)

Spoiler:

Adjusted for 2012-13 pace (92.0), this is what Wilt averaged in the specified games above:

17.3 pts, 16.8 rbs, 4.2 ast, 3.6 blk, 2.3 tov, 63.4 FG%, 39.5% FT, 59.5 TS%


To me it is clear that Wilt's team offenses in the early years were playing below capabilities in part due to his foul shooting, but also because they didn't get the ball into him enough. The culture back then was to push the tempo and get up as many shots as possible. Whereas to get the ball to Wilt you had to not necessarily slow the pace down, but make a concerted effort to get the ball in his hands, which goes against the culture. After all it is the main reason they lost both in 1966 & 1968. It's something I'm sure the guards had trouble doing in a half court setting, if not due to full court pressing defenses, then because of backcourt fouls, when all backcourt fouls resulted in a trip to the FT line. We all know what Coach Hannum told Wilt in 1967, but what did he tell the others? The ball goes inside every single time. Rookie Matt Guokas even noted how if you didn't get the ball to Wilt, you would be benched. Given the pace adjusted statistics above from all available Wilt games, there is no reason to believe that a high assist low turnover center couldn't get a teammate a good shot more often than not. He also could get himself a good shot too. Despite the trendy belief here, he actually had the ability to score points in the low post in professional basketball. Who would have thought? He only scored 28,212 pts from the field in his career during regular season & playoff competition, most of which came inside the paint.

[colts18]

Did you keep track of his defense?

[Dipper 13]

Did you keep track of his defense?

What specifically on defense? Offensive rebounds given up? That is a bit too subjective. Besides steals an blocks I tracked turnovers forced. Perhaps points allowed in the paint?

[colts18]

Did you keep track of his defense?

What specifically on defense? Offensive rebounds given up? That is a bit too subjective. Besides steals an blocks I tracked turnovers forced. Perhaps points allowed in the paint?

Points in the paint allowed would be good. I'm mostly concerned about his 1 on 1 defensive stats or how his defense was in the PnR.

[Dipper 13]

^ I will also make a distinction between the team's half court defense & transition D.

[colts18]

^ I will also make a distinction between the team's half court defense & transition D.

It's interesting that your data is all 67 or later except for 1 half in 64. I would have loved to seen how different pre 67 Wilt was to post 67 Wilt. I bet he took more shots closer to the rim after 67. I can't believe the NBA doesn't have video for that era.

[penbeast0]

One conjecture I have made, although I have not found a way to prove it, is that the Warriors version of Wilt when he was scoring at unprecedented levels suffers from the Adrian Dantley issue. That is to say, Wilt, like Dantley, was the most efficient individual scorer in the league even at ridiculous volumes but that the time he took off the shot clock might be an issue.

The only evidence I have is anecdotal though. Wilt was playing such ridiculous minutes (he average OVER 48 mpg in his 50ppg season) that he was conserving strength by walking upcourt on offense. Meanwhile, Guy Rodgers would dribble around in circles while the rest of the team stood still waiting for Wilt to get there so they could set up their halfcourt offense. By the time it set up, the Warriors were working off a 15 second shot clock rather than the 24 seconds other teams had and so had to force more shots and use less ball movement. Thus, even with Wilt's incredible personal dominance, the way he was being used meant that his team offense was less efficient than you might expect.

I have zero evidence that this is true for either Wilt or Dantley but it's something I've been thinking about and would love anything you have that might bear on this issue for either player and either for or against this proposition. Thanks.

[Dipper 13]

I bet he took more shots closer to the rim after 67.

Maybe, we have no way of knowing how much he used the bank shot from the left block. But below there are a couple video clips from 1965 of him playing in the high post feeding Luke Jackson, and also shooting a hook shot (something I have never seen in any other footage of him anywhere). Look how high his release point is on the hook. He is almost shooting it down into the basket, though it's not as easy to notice in black & white footage.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wsEE9oivvM&t=13m27s

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wsEE9oivvM&t=14m38s


Who knows what the fans are missing with all that footage out there. Remember the 2005 article on the NBA's partnership with SGI? There is a more recent update from 2012 below. If all goes well, it will be available in the next few years.

Spoiler:

"SGI expects that it will take another two to four years to complete the archive project."

http://news.techworld.com/storage/34011 ... d-storage/


NBA digitizes 40 years of video footage with SGI visualized storage

The organization is now processing around 38TB a day of new and historical game footage

The US National Basketball Association (NBA) is leveraging technology typically used for genomics research, climate modelling and advanced scientific research to archive decades of footage and better communicate with its fans and teams around the world.

Seven years ago, the NBA was faced with the problem of how to breathe life into racks of decaying video and film that make up a 50+ year library of over 500,000 hours of basketball game footage. Not only did it need to preserve this content, but also repurpose it for multiple digital markets.

Transferring the whole lot onto a spinning disk array was out of the question. It would have been prohibitively expensive – not only in terms of the acquisition cost of the disk, but in terms of the power and cooling required to keep it running.

The NBA therefore decided to use a tiered storage visualization product from SGI, called Data Migration Facility (DMF), which ties together a relatively small amount of disk on the front end with the massive tape library where all of the content resides.

“To the users it all just looks like disk – it looks like one big file system – but to the administrators, it gives them the ability to expand the volume of tape in the robot only when they need it, and at a dramatically lower cost than it would be if it was on disk,” he said.

Each NBA game has about 9 cameras shooting a 3-hour long HD resolution file, so trawling through all this footage to find 15 seconds of the best shot has traditionally been a time-consuming operation.

DMF enables the user to zoom to a specific point on the tape and extract the 15 seconds that they need. This is because the headers (inodes) of the files are always on disk, so when a user clicks on a file or a link within a browser, the portion of the file that they want starts to stream.

“That's really what made this work for them. They could manage this rapid access to data tape in the same way that it would to disk,” said Christofferson.

By moving to SGI's system, NBA has been able to expand the monetisation of its archived content dramatically. A certain amount of content is free to download at from the NBA.com website, but both commercial customers (such as television networks) and consumers can also subscribe to custom feeds, or pay to use clips from games on their own website.

NBA teams also access between 1,000 and 3,000 clips a day just for researching other teams in preparation for future for games. So far, over 2.4 billion videos have been viewed in 215 countries, and the time between a live event occurring and any subscriber being able to receive a clip of video is now just 30 seconds.

However, SGI is still only half way through digitizing the 500,000 hours of historical content in NBA's library, and about 25,000 hours of new content are added each year from current season games. Moreover, new camera angles are constantly being added, and some games are now shot in 3D, tripling the volume of content.

SGI expects that it will take another two to four years to complete the archive project. The organization has already upgraded to a new digital content facility in New Jersey that is processing around 38TB a day of new and historical game footage.

NBA has an advantage over a lot of other leagues, according to Christofferson, because it has ownership rights to all the content. Baseball, for example, has a much more distributed ownership model, and the US National Football League also has a different system.

“None of these other sports are organized to manage and monetize content the way the NBA does,” he said. “Together with SGI, the NBA has really pioneered this.”

Meanwhile, Guy Rodgers would dribble around in circles while the rest of the team stood still waiting for Wilt to get there so they could set up their halfcourt offense. By the time it set up, the Warriors were working off a 15 second shot clock rather than the 24 seconds other teams had and so had to force more shots and use less ball movement.

Yes the ball monopoly was definitely a problem in the 1961-63 years, but what about 1964-66? When I said they may not have been getting him the ball enough, I am referring to how many half court touches he had relative to the team's total possessions. I suspect a large number of those "wasted" possessions had nothing to do with Wilt at all, which may be hard to believe given his averages. Of course it's possible a number of his points came in transition, on offensive rebounds, or from the FT line. How many times is it likely he was fouled in the backcourt on a loose ball foul under the boards? Those backcourt fouls automatically resulted in FT attempts, which meant the team didn't get a chance to run the offensive play.

[Chicago76]

I can't see how Chamberlain would have put them in tough positions with the shot clock despite monopolizing the ball. The Warriors were playing at around 125 poss/game, which means that each possession took less than 12 seconds to complete, which would include extended possessions on ORBs.

A shot, turnover, or FTAs in lieu of FGAs was occurring every 9.5 seconds. Even discounting fast break opportunities, I can't imagine the shot clock got down to 4 seconds left on more than a handful of possessions out of 125 in the game.

Re: Dantley. I do think your theory has a lot of merit there. There is definitely something to the fact that Dantley often got an entry pass 10 seconds in and often spent 8-10 seconds working on a shot.

[acrossthecourt]

With respect to Wilt/Dantley: it's simply the idea of optimal efficiency for an individual versus the group.

The most common example people give is an urban freeway. For individuals, the shortest route is the freeway, but because it's congested each additional car makes the time on the freeway longer. Since people operate out of their own urges (individual efficiency) the system is not operating at optimal efficiency. If a few less people drove on the freeway, overall (on average) more time would be saved. This is not a paradox (though it's famously called Braess' paradox.) This is just the notion of individual optimal levels versus group wide optimal levels. It's quite clear that individual and group efficiency will not always intersect.

With Dantley, he has the issue of catching the ball, surveying the defense, and then passing the ball back when he doesn't have a good opportunity. I'm not sure if he was deliberately jacking up his efficiency, but that's what happened.

Wilt? Well, he's a notorious stat-padder, if there ever was one, and I wouldn't be surprised if he looked for his own shot at the expense of the team. You can get a great individual player, but if it gums up the offense you can hurt your team -- or at least not positively affect it. Even when he stopped shooting 30 times a day, he did things like go for the assist title or FG% record.

[Sedale Threatt]

Interesting stuff. It's just a tragedy, relatively speaking, that so little film/video documentation exists from this era.

[Chicago76]

With respect to Wilt/Dantley: it's simply the idea of optimal efficiency for an individual versus the group.

I understand the concept, but I was specifically addressing one of the ways in which that could occur (the reason penbeast offered up), which is the shot clock constraint. At that pace, the shot clock constraint on others isn't what may be limiting efficiency. The greater issue still exists however, which is that Chamberlain's touches may have limited the touches of others in a way that is a drag on team efficiency. In simple economic terms:

Marginal efficiency of X touches gained by Chamberlain < marginal efficiency of X touches lost by his teammates.

Unfortunately, all we know based upon existing boxscore data was that Chamberlain's Warriors weren't winning toward the end. We don't know why (offense or defense).

It's entirely possible that teammates deferred too much and simply "forgot how to play" (one of the coaching observations of that time). It's also entirely possible that "feeding the beast" led to additional turnovers on entry passes or that teammates weren't getting the ball in spots where they could be most effective. The FG% of three of the four teammate holdovers from Chamberlain's last full season with them to the first full season w/out him did not change substantially. We don't even know the offensive efficiencies. We can extrapolate them based upon regression but applying the backwards to a different era/style has its dangers: fastbreak TOV rates vs. halfcourt TOV rates, ORB rates, etc. We don't even know the true impact of Chamberlain's FT shooting on the O because the FT rules were different then (and would have to some extent mitigated FT misses). It's also entirely possible that the offensive efficiency was markedly better under Chamberlain, but somewhat curiously, the defensive efficiency was not. Was that Chamberlain's fault? Was it the fault of his teammates who might have ignored this aspect knowing Chamberlain was there in the middle to support them?

We don't even know if Chamberlain's stat padding with the Warriors was a product of him being personally selfish vs. management requesting he shoot a ton to sell tickets. There is evidence of both, but apportioning the blame is impossible.

[lorak]

1967 EDF Gm. 4 Sixers vs. Celtics (2nd Half)
1969 NBA Finals Gm. 7 Celtics vs. Lakers (4th Quarter)
1970 NBA Finals Gm. 5 Lakers vs. Knicks (Incomplete)
1970 NBA Finals Gm. 7 Lakers vs. Knicks
1971 WCSF Gm. 6 Lakers vs. Bulls
Jan 9, 1972 - Lakers vs. Bucks
1972 NBA Finals Gm. 5 Knicks vs. Lakers (Incomplete)



Turnovers: 14

It seems too low. I stat tracked two of these three complete games and in 1970 finals G7 Wilt had 5 tournovers and also 5 in 1972 vs Bucks. That's 10 total in 2 games, so it's very unlikely he had only 4 turnovers during something like 4 games.

[Dipper 13]

In that case it's either 15 or 16, not too big a difference. I counted at least 4 in each of those two games. Though in some of the other footage there were a couple of 3 second calls in that could have been called on any number of players, but wasn't specified. Keep in mind he had 2 total in the in the 1964 & 1967 2nd Half footage, and zero in the 1972 Finals game vs the Knicks.

[Dipper 13]

colts18

Below are defensive FG stats for Wilt's teams. It seems he was weakest in pick & roll and iso plays away from the basket where he had to move laterally. But he was excellent at guarding the paint and rim area in the half court.

Spoiler:

Pick & Roll: 24/50 FG (48.0 %)


Isolation: 9/19 FG (47.4 %)


Low Post: 10/26 FG (38.5 %) Fouls: 3

*Kareem in the 1972 game shot 8/20 FG (40.0 %) in low post & drew 3 fouls on Wilt, 2 of which were reach in gambles on the entry pass


Help Defense/Rim Protector: 20/67 FG (29.9 %) Goaltending: 5 Fouls: 5

Spoiler:

*Team FG stats do not include his man's stats



FG allowed from opposing TEAM (HALFCOURT)

At Rim: 22/76 FG (28.9 %)
In Paint (Overall): 38/117 FG (32.5 %)
Midrange: 90/219 FG (41.1 %)



FG allowed from opposing TEAM (TRANSITION)

At Rim: 34/55 FG (61.8 %)
In Paint (Overall): 38/64 FG (59.4 %)
Midrange: 21/42 FG (50.0 %)




FG allowed from opposing MAN (HALFCOURT)

At Rim: 8/18 FG (44.4 %) *Includes putbacks on offensive boards
In Paint (Overall): 15/32 FG (46.9 %)
Midrange: 22/47 FG (46.8 %) *Includes baseline shots from close to the basket area




FG allowed from opposing MAN (TRANSITION)

At Rim: 3/3 FG (100 %)
In Paint (Overall): 3/3 FG (100 %)
Midrange: 2/5 FG (40.0 %) *One of these misses was a full court heave by Lucas at the buzzer

[tsherkin]

PnR and away-rim isos as a weakness; sounds like Shaq.

Great work, Dipper.

[colts18]

colts18

Below are defensive FG stats for Wilt's teams. It seems he was weakest in pick & roll and iso plays away from the basket where he had to move laterally. But he was excellent at guarding the paint and rim area in the half court.

Spoiler:

Pick & Roll: 24/50 FG (48.0 %)


Isolation: 9/19 FG (47.4 %)


Low Post: 10/26 FG (38.5 %) Fouls: 3

*Kareem in the 1972 game shot 8/20 FG (40.0 %) in low post & drew 3 fouls on Wilt, 2 of which were reach in gambles on the entry pass


Help Defense/Rim Protector: 20/67 FG (29.9 %) Goaltending: 5 Fouls: 5

Spoiler:

*Team FG stats do not include his man's stats



FG allowed from opposing TEAM (HALFCOURT)

At Rim: 22/76 FG (28.9 %)
In Paint (Overall): 38/117 FG (32.5 %)
Midrange: 90/219 FG (41.1 %)



FG allowed from opposing TEAM (TRANSITION)

At Rim: 34/55 FG (61.8 %)
In Paint (Overall): 38/64 FG (59.4 %)
Midrange: 21/42 FG (50.0 %)




FG allowed from opposing MAN (HALFCOURT)

At Rim: 8/18 FG (44.4 %) *Includes putbacks on offensive boards
In Paint (Overall): 15/32 FG (46.9 %)
Midrange: 22/47 FG (46.8 %) *Includes baseline shots from close to the basket area




FG allowed from opposing MAN (TRANSITION)

At Rim: 3/3 FG (100 %)
In Paint (Overall): 3/3 FG (100 %)
Midrange: 2/5 FG (40.0 %) *One of these misses was a full court heave by Lucas at the buzzer

Wow, great work. I wish we had data for those seasons so we can put those numbers in context. 28.9% at the rim in the halfcourt sounds absurd, even for that era. Is there a reason why the rim FG% is much lower than mid range? Did they pack the paint in that era?

And for his man D, it says he allowed 18 FGA at the rim and 47 FGA at midrange. Were his man making a conscious effort to spread out the court?

[Dipper 13]

28.9% at the rim in the halfcourt sounds absurd, even for that era. Is there a reason why the rim FG% is much lower than mid range? Did they pack the paint in that era?

Of course the game was played closer to the rim seeing as there was no incentive to shoot from distance (3 point line). Some were missed tip ins, but a lot of them were missed layups & point blank shots. The percentage for all half court paint shots that are not around the basket is 39% (16/41). So it was better to pull up for the short jumper than challenge him at the rim. Though this is a very small sample.

And for his man D, it says he allowed 18 FGA at the rim and 47 FGA at midrange. Were his man making a conscious effort to spread out the court?

A lot of those half court shots in the paint are from KAJ, and some of tip-ins from Boerwinkle, etc. Players like Jim Fox & Jerry Lucas preferred to stay outside to catch & shoot. Russell also hit one on him. Kareem preferred to play back to the basket, though he would mix it up & got quite a number of opportunistic baskets.

[Dipper 13]

I have added one made FG from the incomplete 1970 game that is not on the shot chart.


http://www.nba.com/video/channels/nba_t ... play1.nba/



Synergy Offense

[ceiling raiser]

I have added one made FG from the incomplete 1970 game that is not on the shot chart.


http://www.nba.com/video/channels/nba_t ... play1.nba/



Synergy Offense

Great stuff, thanks.

BTW not sure if you saw my conversation with CavsFTW on ISH, but 73 G5 should be on its way here (had to find another trader). How should I upload it when it arrives so both of you have access to it as quickly as possible?