It is well known throughout the NBA community that Michael Jordan is considered the greatest basketball player of all time. While ESPN’s new documentary “The Last Dance” captured the emotional aspect of Jordan’s career, Jordan’s dominance as a player is best displayed by the numbers and statistics he put up as a player, especially when his numbers are analyzed and graphed in a unique way.
The first thing we will look at is an occurrence table. This table identifies the highest occurring statistics throughout Jordan’s career, and it helps show the consistency of Jordan throughout his career with different statlines.
We can see that the most common statline for Jordan would be 32 points off of 22 shot attempts, 4 assists, 6 rebounds, 2 steals, with only 2 fouls and 2 turnovers. We also can see that Jordan’s top seven most occurring points per game were all above 25 points, a value that most NBA players would consider a great game.
Comparing this statline to another player many consider to be the greatest of all time, Lebron James, Jordan outperformed James in every statistic except rebounds and assists, and Jordan’s top 6 highest point totals all exceeded James’ career average of 27.1 points. When compared to one of the best modern scorers, James Harden, Jordan outperforms Harden in every category by a large margin, displaying Jordan’s true success as a dominant scorer in his era where NBA teams were scoring less than they do now.
Using more visualization tools, the Sunburst chart below displays Jordan’s statistics for both his wins and losses.
Primarily, when looking at the bottom tier for each stat (i.e. <10fg), MJ hardly ever reached them, earning the highest percentages for most of the stat categories. Mostly, the highest percentages were for the upper tier (i.e. >15fg), which is expected from Jordan. This trend continued even in his losses, as Jordan consistently performed at a high level even when his team was not succeeding.
When looking at a Sunburst chart, the innermost ring displays the probability for a win and a loss in MJ’s career, with the darker shade representing a win. As the ring expands outwards, the various colors depict the probabilities for each section, which is why the outermost rings look more convoluted. For the purpose of the example below, we are only looking at an example up to the grey ring, so the probability does not become drastically unique.
An example of a pathway in the Sunburst chart is this statline above, which only made up 7.1% of MJ’s career. Using this pathway, all options were the highest in their respective category, but we are looking at 7 different statistics, revealing why such a statline would only occur 7.1% of the time.
Lastly, using predictive analytics, we looked at Jordan’s career stat log and predicted both how many wins would the Bulls and Wizards have won when Jordan played if his stats were the only factor and the stats that would most likely lead to a win.
For the former, using a Naive Bayes Learner, we predicted that given Jordan’s stats for 313 games, he would end with a record of 222-91, a blistering win percentage of 71%. Based on 833 out of the 1072 games MJ played (adjusted for more accurate data), MJ only won 66.7% of his games, meaning there was a 4.3% increase in wins when predicting using only his statistics as opposed to his actual career. This is expected, as there are innumerable factors in a basketball game, but having an accuracy of 71.246% means that for the most part the performance of Jordan was the direct contributor to the success of his team.
Lastly, using a decision tree (full image at the bottom), we compiled the most likely statistics for Jordan that would have resulted in a win. 32 out of the 33 games (91.9%) where Jordan played with this statsheet resulted in wins, with this pathway having both the highest probability and enough games played to be accurate for predictions. The statsheet is as follows:
>22.5 PTS at home (260 out of 323 games won), >.88.6 FT% (124/135), >25.5 FGA (40/48), <=4.5 TOV(37/41), and >45.3 FG% (32/33)
The main reason why the total games at the end reached 33 was due to the dip in games after evaluating FGA, which is understandable, as despite his stellar shooting ability, Jordan rarely shot over 25 shots a game. But when he did, his team would nearly always win, displaying the reliance the Bulls would have with Jordan as their primary scorer. (This model only had an accuracy of 67%, since many different factors impact the outcome of a game in the NBA, meaning predictions are often not entirely accurate)
Michael Jordan Decision Tree Pathway
After analyzing various facets of Jordan’s career statistics, it is clear that his consistent performance for the Bulls and Wizards was a generational talent all players should hope to replicate. Additionally, while one player does not lead to the success of a team and MJ needed all of his teammates and coaches to win as many championships he did, the direct impact his performance had on his team is something that will be rarely seen to such a fine degree.
Now enjoy some highlights of the GOAT.
Data courtesy of KDnuggets and Sports-Statistics
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