Jalen Brunson isn't just the leading scorer in the 2024 NBA Playoffs. He was a central part of the best New York Knicks team in decades, and represents one of the NBA's biggest trends from the 2020s. Brunson has scored an astounding 210 points in his last five games. To find the last time an NBA player scored more points in the postseason, you have to go back to 1993, when Michael Jordan scored 215 points in a ridiculous five-game stretch in the playoffs.
That was peak MJ, and while some hardcore Knicks fans might argue that Brunson is the second coming of his mettle, that's not what's happening here. Brunson's gaudy box score numbers are impressive no matter how you look at them, but they're also a byproduct of his making one of the biggest stylistic moves in the NBA right now. Today's NBA offenses are more centered around perimeter stars than ever before.
In the post-money ball In the NBA, teams continue to arbitrage efficiency wherever they can find it, and these days that just means giving the ball to their star players over and over again and letting them cook. Usage rates for the game's brightest stars are skyrocketing, and it takes Neil to understand how this impressive trend is driving more and more “big nights” and 40-point explosions around the association. It doesn't have to be deGrasse Tyson.
For better or worse, the so-called heliocentric era has arrived, and when you combine its influence with the 3-point revolution that turned the NBA upside down in the 2010s, you can see how today's best perimeter scorers perform. You can start to understand what's going on. Some of the craziest stat lines this league has ever seen. In my new book hoop atlas, I looked into the origins and influence of the heliocentric hoop in the NBA. Below is a short excerpt from the book that connects what we see from stars like Brunson to players like Jordan and Kobe Bryant…
All images courtesy of HarperCollins
On January 2, 2023 in Cleveland, Cavaliers' 26-year-old All-Star guard Donovan Mitchell scored 71 points in overtime against the Chicago Bulls.
Mitchell's outburst was the most by an NBA player since Kobe Bryant scored 81 points against the Raptors on January 22, 2006.
Bryant's legendary night came during one of his most unusual seasons. From 2005 to 2006, the Lakers didn't have a very good record. But that season, Bryant set career highs in many metrics per game, including field goals made, field goal attempts, free throw attempts, and points scored. He also gave the league some perspective on the future.
Bryant averaged a ridiculous 35.4 points per game that season, but he had no choice but to do it. His roster was thin. Shaq wasn't there. Pau Gasol had not yet arrived in town. Faced with the Lakers' uncharacteristically shallow depth, Bryant took matters into his own hands…a lot. By the end of the season, Bryant attempted 2,173 shots, 350 more than LeBron James, who finished second in the league with 1,823.
The best metric to quantify Bryant's most shot-heavy season is usage rate. This estimates the percentage of a team's possessions that are “used” by his one player on the court. Most of these “uses” are shots, but turnovers and fouls also count. In a completely egalitarian team environment, each player on a five-man team would have a usage rate of 20, but that's not the world we live in. Of course, some NBA players shoot the ball and use their possessions at a much higher rate than other players. . Utilization is designed to measure this effect.
That year, Bryant set a new NBA record with a usage rate of 38.7. Usage estimates go back to his 1977 and 1978 when individual turnovers became an official statistic, but no one touched that number until Bryant did it.
Only two players came close: Michael Jordan in 1986-1987 (38.3 points) and Allen Iverson in 2001-2002 (37.8 points). What do all of these players have in common? They were very active perimeter scorers who loved creating their own shots all over the court.
Kobe was especially great the night he scored 81 points. useful. He used a whopping 55.3 percent of the team's possessions when he was on the floor. He made 46 shots and 20 free throws. He only had two assists, but Toronto was hopeless against his offense without them. Bryant got to the rim at will, scoring 26 points in the paint alone. His silky midranger was also down. And in a harbinger of things to come in pro hoops, Bryant's big night was helped by seven 3-pointers.
The Raptors attacked various defenders, but whoever tried to stop Bryant was unsuccessful. Kobe had all the answers everywhere in scoring position.
This masterpiece is rightly considered one of the greatest scoring performances of all time, but it also set the template. No player has scored more than 81 points since that game, but the league's biggest stars are scoring more than ever and racking up box score numbers. Part of that is because Kobe is playing like he did in his most prolific scoring season.
Bryant averaged 27.2 shots per game that season, more than twice as many as Lamar Odom, who ranked second on the team with 11.6 shots per game. Phil Jackson's offense was based on a simple strategy: give Kobe the ball and let him do his job. It sounded basic, but it was also futuristic. Kobe Bryant was ahead of his time in 2005-2006.
On a night when Donovan Mitchell scored 71 points, his usage rate was 40.9. Across the NBA, over 60.3 percent of made shots include an assist, but on Mitchell's career night, only four of his 22 buckets were assisted.
18 of them were created by me. He made 18 of 27 unassisted shots and 4 of 10 assisted tries.
Mitchell's performance was great. This was also a prime example of him demonstrating one of his NBA's defining trends in the 2020s. NBA offenses are increasingly just giving the basketball to their best players and letting them do their job. And in perimeter-oriented leagues, that work usually starts downtown.
Almost all of Mitchell's buckets that night started when he was outside the 3-point line. Of his 122 touches in this game, 112 were from beyond the 3-point line, and only two of his 22 makes started with touches inside the arc, including one with the remaining five. It was when he intentionally missed his own free throw with seconds ticking down. In regulation, he got his own rebound and put the ball back on his own. In almost every other case, Mitchell either brought the ball up the floor himself or got his first touch via a teammate farther from the goal.
Gone are the days when Wilt Chamberlain was scoring endless goals, when his first touches were all near the cup, in the low post or off a teammate's mistake. When today's superstars score 50 or more points, they start to look more like Kobe than Wilt. On his way to 71 points, Mitchell made 10 layups and two floaters. He also added five step-back jumpers, three pull-up jumpers, one 3-pointer on a ball screen, and one catch-and-shoot jumper.
Mitchell's big night was a modern masterpiece. Twelve of his buckets were in the paint and seven came from downtown. Only three of his shots went midrange. That night, with his teammate and fellow Cleveland backcourt guard Darius Garland out, Mitchell controlled the entire Cavaliers chessboard. He recorded a total of 666 dribbles. This is more than double his of any other player in this game. The Bulls had no answer to Mitchell's combination of off-the-bounce jumpers and driving rim attacks.
Mitchell played 49 minutes and 48 seconds in the overtime win. During that time, he drove the ball 29 times and scored 22 points, but that wasn't all. On many of his drives, Bulls defenders dropped down to help him — Mitchell was swarming — and his passes that night were also perfect.
In addition to his 71 points as a scorer, Mitchell contributed 28 more points for Cleveland with 11 assists. Those 10 cents led to six 3s and five inside shots for his teammates.
As both a scorer and a creator, Mitchell scored 99 points. This is the second-most points ever scored in an NBA game, behind only Wilt Chamberlain's historic 100-point game in March 1962.
As a player, Mitchell is emblematic of a new movement across the NBA toward overutilization of perimeter stars. In racing to 71 points, Mitchell used 41 percent of Cleveland's possessions while on the floor. His 40 percent threshold of usage is important here. As more of the league's top stars play like Kobe did in 2005-2006, we're seeing more players exceed that usage rate standard in more games.
It's no secret that Kobe Bryant is one of the most respected basketball players of the 21st century. Many of the league's best players of the 2020s cite him as their favorite hooper of all time, or a player who has had a major influence on their craft. From a stylistic standpoint, Bryant's game was clearly influenced by Jordan, showing the hoops world that perimeter players could control games with jumpers and win titles.
Jordan was famous for isolating defenders on the perimeter, beating them one-on-one and scoring goals in their faces. The GOAT may have been the league's first heliocentric superstar — leading the NBA in usage rate in eight of his 15 seasons — but tactically, especially in the 2005-2006 season, As for Bryant, he took it a step further.
Today's superstars had their eyes on Bryant when he won five titles between 2000 and 2010. After the Lakers traded Shaquille O'Neal to Miami in July 2004, Bryant became the centerpiece of the league's most storied franchise for more than a decade. He combined scoring and winning more than anyone in his 2000s era, and he did it all in the purple and gold. He was a rock star for a new generation of basketball-obsessed youth. The post-Shaq Kobe-centric season in Los Angeles set the template for many of today's top superstars.
Simply put, and we say this fondly, ball eaters are having a good time. Today's leading individual scorers are playing more like the Kobes of 2005 and 2006 than ever before. Like Phil Jackson, coaches are content to design simple actions that superstars practice over and over again. Bryant's influence is more pronounced than ever.
It's hard to overstate the influence Kobe Bryant had on Mitchell, Devin Booker, Jayson Tatum, and other players of his generation. Bryant was one of the best pure scorers this game has ever seen. When he won those five titles with the Lakers, millions of kids around the world took note, and several of them went on to his NBA and adopted the Mamba mentality as a scorer. . In his later years, Bryant coached many of the NBA's brightest young stars. He famously created his own game out of Jordan, but from a stylistic and cultural perspective, Bryant is arguably the most influential player of his generation, and that continues to be the case in the 2020s with hardwood scores. We're seeing it play out on both sides of the box score. .
Kirk Goldsberry was published by HarperCollins in “ hoop atlas. he new york times bestselling author of sprawl ball and former grantland Staff writer. He is currently a professor at the University of Texas and previously served as vice president of strategic research for the San Antonio Spurs.