If you expected a follow-up to a post with 4-Year data about jump balls then you know me well ;-)
Because when I collect some information it’s almost inevitable that I’ll explore it for as many nuggets as I can find.

This case is somewhat different because EvanZ found my post interesting enough to write his own, which by the way is always welcome and I consider it a job well done, so one angle is already covered.

Although for the sake of continuity I’ll make simple version of this data available for everyone,
here’s a table with data combined across last 4 regular seasons:

Among losers we basically have players who probably shouldn’t be asked to jump for it [although I didn’t expect to see Yao and Ibaka on that list, was it a timing problem?] but on the left we have a very interesting mix of giants, leapers and veterans so we probably should focus more on one factor missing – opponents.
EvanZ adjusted for their quality… but what about their size?
How much does size difference help players in winning jump balls?
Here’s how [I used listed height from basketballreference.com’s downloable database]…

winning jump balls height difference

So advantage of two inches is worth one additional jump ball win for every 10 attempts, then it is surprisingly steady at 65% winning percentage for the difference between +4 and +8 inches and finally there is an overwhelming advantage with 9 or more inches of height.

But keep in mind that the bigger difference in height the the smaller is number of such duels and I combined those above 13 into one. By my count there were five jump ball duels with a difference of 15 or more inches in height between players and because that’s a great curiosity here are links to all of them:

2009-10 Jumpball: Marc Gasol vs. Nate Robinson,

2009-10 Jumpball: Hasheem Thabeet vs. Aaron Brooks,

2008-09 Jumpball: D.J. Augustin vs. Zydrunas Ilgauskas,

2007-08 Jumpball: Nate Robinson vs. Joel Przybilla,

2007-08 Jumpball: Zydrunas Ilgauskas vs. Darrick Martin.

As you would expect it’s 4 wins for the giants right there… wait, what? 4 out of 5?
Yes, because somehow in the last one Darrick Martin’s team gained a possessions!
I have no idea how that happened but you probably have to credit his teammates which begs a question…
what can we find in data about players who catched the winning jump ball?

That’s probably more boring than I hoped for – mostly point guards who played with center very good at winning jump balls – and I published it because I think there’s one nugget here: have I stumbled into unknown skill by Steve Nash? I’m not only talking about the size of his lead but it seems that he catched basically every jump ball which his center had won… and there were 5 of them in the last 4 years!
So either he is very good at positioning or Suns have a very consistent strategy where the ball should go… have someone watched enough Suns’ games to let me know what’s going on here?