Mar 3rd, 2010
Arizona State center Eric Boateng made 110 percent of his shots against Stanford last Thursday, leading directly to our one question on Rhetorical Tuesday:
Does this mean it really is possible to give 110 percent?
It seems Boateng has given a speck of truth to that trite comment made by athletes who don’t know what to say except that they’ll try really, really hard on game day.
“Now, come on,” you say, “nobody can shoot 110 from the field. Who’s twisting the numbers? I’m not Einstein, but I know that you can’t have more than 100 percent of anything – except the inflation rate in a Latin American country, I suppose. But not on a basketball court. Not in any sporting event. That would mean Boateng made more shots than he attempted.”
That is exactly what it would men, and that is exactly what Boateng did.
Follow the logic here:
Boateng took 10 shots against the Cardinal. No one disputes that fact.
The official boxscore says Boateng was 11-for-11 from the field. No one disputes that either.
Ergo (always wanted to use the word “ergo”), Boateng was 11-for-10 from the field on Thursday. (It even sounds funny when you say it. Go ahead and utter it aloud: “Eleven for ten.”)
The math on calculating the percentage is easy enough. Making 11 shots on 10 attempts gives you a shooting percentage of 110. Now there’s a record that will never be broken. We can push aside Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak, or Wilt Chamberlain’s 100-point game, or UCLA’s seven straight NCAA titles. Boateng will stand alone.
Officially Boateng’s 11-for-11 tied a Pac-10 record for most made field-goal attempts without a miss. But, folks, he took only 10 shots. He should get a page in the record book himself.
OK, OK, the fun is over. Here’s how Boateng had 11 field goals on 10 field-goal attempts. He was 10-for-10 with less than a minute left in the game, which is when Stanford’s Landry Fields went up to rebound a shot missed by the Sun Devils’ Derek Glasser. In his attempt to gain control of the ball, Fields tried to tip it to himself, but instead Fields accidentally tipped the ball into the Arizona State basket. In those situations, the player on the scoring team that was closest to the ball when it went in gets credit for the field goal. Boateng was the closest, so he got the field goal and the points.
But listen. Awarding Boateng two points seems fine, and giving him a field goal is probably the sane thing to do. There are no own goals in basketball like there are in soccer. But how can you give a field-goal attempt to someone who did not even touch the ball, let alone shoot it.
It makes more sense to award the basket without recording a field-goal attempt. That would more accurately represent what happened, and isn’t that what statistics are all about? (Rhetorical question).
Well, you say, everything has to add up on the bottom line of the stat sheet, and if every made field goal has to have a corresponding field-goal attempt, how can you credit a player with a field goal if he is not also credited with a field-goal attempt.
To that, I say this: A rebound must officially be awarded for every missed shot, but an individual player does not get credited with a rebound on each missed shot. There are numbers called team rebounds on the stat sheet that refer to missed shots that have no particular rebounder. An airball that simply goes out of bounds is an example of a situation in which a team rebound is recorded.
If you add up the rebounds of each player on the team at game’s end, it will seldom be identical to the team’s rebounding total. It comes out evenly only if the team rebounds are added.
So why not give ASU a team field-goal attempt in the Boateng example? The statistics geeks could reconcile the bottom lines and everybody’s happy.
Well, maybe not everybody. You still have Boateng going 11-for-10 from the floor, which would provoke some Caltech nerd to make a federal case out of it, saying it defies the laws of physics, or something like that. He might even take it to the Supreme Court insisting no one – not even Eric Boateng – can make more than 100 percent of his shot attempts.
We at JakesTakeOnSports wonder how the Supreme Court Justices would rule in such a case. We’re guessing conservative Justices Roberts, Scalia, Alito and Thomas would side with the Caltech nerd to keep the statistics rules the way they are, arguing that having more than 100 percent of anything is just not consistent with the way Americans have always done things. Liberal Justices Stevens, Ginsburg, Breyer and Sotomayor might vote against the Caltech nerd, claiming the traditional concepts in math and statistics are always open to new interpretations and that common sense should rule the day. It would be up to Justice Kennedy to cast the deciding vote.
We are more interested in the historical perspective. We would like to proclaim Feb. 25 “National 110 Percent Day” in recognition of the over-the-top effort Americans typically make in their daily endeavors and in remembrance of that game on Feb. 25, 2010, when a tall fellow named Eric Boateng made 110 percent of his shots.
Very interesting post thank you for writing it I just added your website to my bookmarks and will be back
By the way this is off topic but I really like your web page layout.