'Tis the season of giving.
Well, that might not be true for the NBA season overall, since assists are actually down slightly. But here at Insider, we're in the holiday spirit. And it's time to look at which NBA players give the most and least presents to their teammates. Using SportVU player-tracking data provided to ESPN.com by STATS LLC, we can examine precisely how many passes a player makes to his teammates while on the court together.
So after analyzing over 13,000 player combinations, who passes to whom the most?
Before we get into that, however, I made one consideration: an adjustment for positional averages. Why? Big-time rebounders tend to pass to their point guards way more than anybody, simply because of all the outlet passes that ignite the offense. That's not exactly what we're interested in here.
What we want to know is who gives the most to a teammate above expected, given their positions. That helps to avoid the outlet-pass boost and also reveal the gift-happy pairings that exceed the norms. Once we normalize for playing time (passes per 36 minutes), we can highlight the top passing partners in the NBA -- and all 30 teams, too.
So grab some egg nog and let's dive in.