Last year didn’t have one single rookie that stood head and shoulders above the rest.  Rookie of the Year Malcolm Brogdon was great, but there were a lot of other rookies doing good things.  Here are five different top threes of NBA Freshmen from last year.  I’m including anyone who played at least 200 minutes (So apologies to any big Cheick Diallo fans, as he only played 199 minutes last year, according to Basketball Reference).

Hopefully you’ll find your favorite rookie below – and some hope that he will take this top three rating of NBA freshmen and continue to improve!

Offensive Rebounding Percentage

• Shawn Long (76ers) – 19.3%
• Jakob Poeltl (Raptors) – 14.1%
• Willy Hernangomez (Knicks) – 13.8%

Defensive Rating

• Joel Embiid (76ers) – 102 defensive rating
• Taurean Waller-Prince (Hawks) – 105 defensive rating
• Deyonta Davis (Grizzlies) – 105 defensive rating

Assists per 100 possessions

• Tyler Ulis (Suns) – 9.6 assists
• Malcolm Brogdon (Bucks) – 8.1 assists
• Wade Baldwin (Grizzlies) – 7.8 assists

True Shooting Percentage

• David Nwaba (Lakers) – .611
• Davis Bertans (Spurs) – .609
• Derrick Jones (Suns) – .604

Defensive Win Shares

• Dario Saric (76ers) – 2.2 Win Shares
• Domantas Sabonis (Thunder) – 1.8 Win Shares
• Rodney McGruder (Heat) – 1.7 Win Shares

*BONUS – Games Played

• Buddy Hield (Kings) – 82 games
• Jamal Murray (Nuggets) – 82 games
• Marquese Chriss (Suns) – 82 games

When a hard-fought basketball game comes down to five minutes of overtime, you usually assume the game is going to continue to be hard-fought. The teams have been equal up to this point – why wouldn’t it continue?

But, of course, that doesn’t always happen. In the history of the NBA, there have been four games in which one team outscored the other by 15 points or more in the five-minute overtime session.

Boston Celtics @ San Francisco Warriors (Jan. 2, 1963)

The 62-63 Boston Celtics were in the middle of the most dominant run in NBA history, headed toward their 5th of eight straight NBA championships.  The San Francisco Warriors were in the middle of their first season since moving from Philadelphia, and having a bad time of it, mainly because they lost their second best scorer, Paul Arizin, because he chose to retire rather than move to San Francisco with the team.

But on this day the two teams were equal for four quarters, as they came into overtime locked at 114 each.  Maybe the Celtics were toying with Wilt Chamberlain and the Warriors?  Or maybe they just got their second wind.  Either way the overtime was a blowout, with the Celtics coming out on top 135-120.

Dallas Mavericks @ Los Angeles Lakers (Dec. 12, 1990)

L.A. is never an easy place to play, especially when you are playing against a team that includes Magic Johnson and James Worthy (plus a very young Vlade Divac!) So the Mavericks must have felt pretty good about making it to overtime, tied at 89.

They probably didn’t expect to go into overtime and demolish the Lakers on their home court, scoring an incredible 23 points in the extra session to finish the game 112-97.  Hopefully they savored the feeling of the win.  It would be the last time the Mavericks won a Lakers game in L.A. for exactly 13 years – until they beat the Kobe / Shaq Lakers on Dec. 12, 2003.

New Jersey Nets @ Milwaukee Bucks (Dec. 4, 1977)

The 77-78 Nets were a bad basketball team – really bad.  They came into this game sporting a record of 3-19.  But a trade the month before had brought in Kevin Porter and Howard Porter (no relation), and on this day at least, that made all the difference.  Kevin Porter went wild in this game, scoring 40 points and leading the Nets to a 116-116 tie at the end of regulation.

Unfortunately for the hapless Nets, Porter’s magic must have all run out, as they went on to only score two points in their extra time, losing the game 134-118. The Nets would, later in the year, have a 15-game losing streak. It wasn’t the best time to be a Nets fan.

Portland Trailblazers @ Houston Rockets (Jan. 22, 1983)

Similar to the Nets, the Houston Rockets came into this game at a bad point in their history, with a record of just 6-34.  But they fought hard, with the trio of Allen Leavell, James Bailey and Calvin Murphy all scoring over 20 points, and made it to overtime with the score even at 96.

That’s when it all fell apart, as the Rockets failed to score even a single point in overtime.  The Trailblazers, for their part, scored 17 points and cruised to the win, 113-96.  It’s hard to feel too bad for the Rockets, though, as the next two drafts brought in Ralph Sampson and Hakeem Olajuwon.  Not a bad tradeoff.

The Basketball Hall of Fame inducted a new class last Friday, and as usual, it was a mixed bag of names you’ve heard, coaches and players from non-NBA leagues, and basketball pioneers.

One of the names that you might have recognized but not known much about was George McGinnis.  Known as Big Mac or Baby Bull, McGinnis was one of the best players of the 70s.  Coming in at 6’8″ and about 235 pounds (roughly the same size as LeBron James), McGinnis was a powerhouse in both scoring and rebounding, and excelled both in the ABA and NBA, including a shared MVP with Dr. J in 1975.

Let’s break down some key stats on Big Mac.  McGinnis was great right out of the chute, making the All-Rookie first team, and then making All-League first or second team for the next five years straight.

But 1974-75 was the year he really stepped up his game. He averaged nearly 30 points a game, 14 rebounds, and almost doubled his previous best to average 6.3 assists per game (which was 3rd in the ABA that year)!  Let’s take a look at the list of NBA/ABA players who have averaged 29/14/6 in a season.

• George McGinnis

That’s it – there’s no one else.  In fact, if you drop it all the way down to 25/12/5, the list still only has five additional players: Charles Barkley, Elgin Baylor, Wilt Chamberlain, Oscar Robertson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.  That is some rarified company.

McGinnis will forever sit atop the ABA’s career usage list, along with being 3rd in Box Score Plus/Minus, and 4th in VORP.  And though he didn’t win any more scoring titles, McGinnis was still great once he moved over to the NBA, averaging 20 points and 10 rebounds a game for his first four years.

His career wasn’t extremely long – he played 11 years combined between the ABA and NBA and was finished at the relatively young age of 31.  But, as they say, only the good retire young, and George was definitely one of the good ones.

During the Big Three run of the Miami Heat, they had three players who all did great things with the ball in their hand.  So their center, Joel Anthony, didn’t have to do a whole lot of ball handling.  His main concerns were rebounding and defense.  As a result, in 2011-2012, he had one of the lowest usage rates of any qualifying season ever.

But what if I told you there was a player who had FIVE qualifying seasons that were even lower!  Enter Theodore Roosevelt Dunn – the Usage Master.

T.R. Dunn played 14 seasons in the NBA. He was a solid role player in nearly 1000 games, for both Portland and Denver (as well as a quick stint with Phoenix).  But he wasn’t the type of player to stand out too much – or be too flashy.  But he was the type of player that you LOVE to have on your team. Dunn knew what he was in the NBA, and played his part very well.

Dunn made the All-NBA Defensive 2nd team three years in a row.  He’s currently 65th all-time in NBA career steals.  And he was a great rebounder.  Of players 6’4″ or shorter, he’s third all-time in rebounding percentage, behind only Russell Westbrook and Fat Lever.  This was a man who knew how to contribute to his team without the ball in his hands – an indispensable piece on any team that wants to win.

And when your team has such scorers as Alex English, David Thompson, Dan Issel and Kiki Vandeweghe, having a player like T.R. Dunn is key to success.  On the Denver Nuggets all-time lists, Dunn is still 4th in games played, 2nd in steals and 10th in rebounds.

Since retiring from the NBA, Dunn has been an assistant coach for four different NBA teams and also ran his own basketball academy.  I think graduates from the Dunn Basketball Academy are going to be the sort of player you want on your team.

Even good players have terrible games, forever etched in the Hall of Shame for all to see.  So with the caveat that an NBA player’s worst game is one million times better than my best pickup game – let’s take a look at some of these most terrible games.

We’re gonna use Game Score for this – it is a simple box score conglomeration stat created by John Hollinger that attempts to weight the various stats and come up with one number to explain how good the game was.  Here are the exact details:  PTS + 0.4 * FG – 0.7 * FGA – 0.4*(FTA – FT) + 0.7 * ORB + 0.3 * DRB + STL + 0.7 *AST + 0.7 * BLK – 0.4 * PF – TOV)

For reference, the greatest games by Game Score are Michael Jordan‘s 69-point game, Kobe Bryant‘s 81-point game, and a hyper-efficient 61-point game from Karl Malone.

Only three games since 1983 have scored lower than negative ten in Game Score. Here they are.

Thurl Bailey – November 15, 1986 – Utah vs. Denver (-10.4)

“Big T” Bailey was a solid contributor to the Utah Jazz for many many years.  He had a beautiful, high-arcing shot that Hot Rod Hundley liked to refer to as a “rainbow jumper”.  But when the shots don’t go down they just don’t, and on this day Big T couldn’t get anything going.  Though he did grab 8 rebounds and 2 blocks, the good parts were negated by five turnovers and a miserable 2 for 20 shooting day.

Delaney Rudd – November 2, 1990 – Utah vs. Phoenix (-10.8)

Another Jazzman, Rudd backed up John Stockton competently for a few years.  But in this game, he managed to cause a lot of problems in only nine minutes of play.  He just couldn’t seem to keep his hands on the ball.  And when the smoke cleared, Rudd had six turnovers, five personal fouls, four missed shots, and a dead partridge in a rotten pear tree.

David Wesley – April 12, 2001 – Charlotte vs. New Jersey (-11.7)

Wesley played 14 seasons in the NBA, amassing nearly 1000 games.  Hopefully, he has been able to block this one out of his memory.  As far as good parts, Wesley did grab two steals in the game.  But those were easily overshadowed by the four turnovers and 13 shots without making a single one!  He missed four shots in the 1st quarter, but that didn’t bring him down, in fact, he kept shooting into the 4th quarter – probably just trying to keep from having a full goose egg in the points column.

It’s difficult to say what exactly drives the creative process.  No one really knows exactly what goes on in the brain when an idea is born.  And it’s nearly impossible to define what “genius” is, or how “genius” works.  But I know it when I see it.

Someone, somewhere, at some point came up with the idea to create a shirt with Gollum in place of Jerry West as The Logo.  You’re either going to hate this or you’re going to love it – but it’s going to make you feel something.  And isn’t that what genius is all about?

There’s a metaphor in here somewhere about Kevin Durant and rings.

This shirt comes in sizes from small to 3XL, and has a men’s cut and a women’s cut.