Why Kevin Durant may be the most efficient scorer of active players in 2014? Distributions in NBA Scoring

In trying to analyze NBA data it is useful to know what the distributions look like for the metrics you are interested in analyzing. This exploratory data analysis is useful in seeing what the distribution for the points scored in a game for a given player. Histograms are a way of visualizing the frequency in which a metric like a given amount of points per games occurs. An example of this would be the histogram for points scored in a game for the point guard Goran Dragic.

From this histogram one sees that for Goran Dragic across his career he has been most likely to score in the high single digits. However a players minutes may change from game to game so maybe we should account for this by seeing what a players scoring rate was for a given game. To this end the amount of points scored in a game is divided by the amount of minutes played in the game. Lets see what the histogram looks like for this game points per minute.

In this histogram we see a distribution closer to a normal distribution than the game points in a game. We can then estimate the parameters for a gaussian fit for this histogram from this histogram. For Goran Dragic this results in a mean value of 0.464 with a standard deviation or spread of 0.228.

Now we have an idea of how a efficiently a player is scoring and how consistently he is scoring at that rate. So how does Goran Dragic stack up with the rest of the NBA league. In the following you see that Goran Dragic is an average scorer of 2014 active players as expected.

Who reigns supreme?

The top 5 is as follows

1) Kevin Durant (Avg GPPM 0.727 / GPPM 0.181 )

2) Lebron James (Avg GPPM 0.69034 / GPPM 0.191 )

3) Carmelo Anthony (Avg GPPM 0.68751 / GPPM 0.2 )

4) Kobe Bryant (Avg GPPM 0.67531 / GPPM 0.237 )

5) Dwyane Wade (Avg GPPM 0.645 / GPPM 0.205 )