Here Are The NBA Players Affected Most By The Post All Star Game Offensive Foul Enforcement
Rocky Widner. Getty Images.Ryen Russillo noticed a couple weeks after the 2024 NBA All Star Game that there seemed to be an obvious change in how refs were calling fouls. Offensive fouls that is. Particularly when players lunged into defenders like a lot of these little bitch asses tend to do in today's game. I ran the proper forensic accounting in the blog below to confirm this to be true.
It's been a little while now so I re-ran the numbers and while the trends haven't fallen much further, they did more or less flatten out post-rule enforcement. This means you can damn well confirm the NBA did something behind the scenes to curtail the absurdity that is NBA offense at least a little bit.
So, that led to me to wonder. Who's the bitch ass of the bitch asses that was affected the most by having to play actual basketball and not depend on crying for a call after a kamakaze attack on their way to shooting? That's the data dive I think is worth exploring. And that's the data dive I have done for this blog. I filtered to look at only starters who played at least 15 games before the All Star Game and 15 games after to give some sort of a reliable sample size. Using this split, I crunched their offensive efficiency outputs across individual games so we can compare before and after this obvious rule change.
With all of this said, I'm very much open in the possibility that some of these players on the top of the bitch-board have struggled for other reasons, so feel free to stand up for your guy if you think that's the case. But here they are in top-down order of most affected by the "hey you actually have to try to use some skill in scoring vs depending on the ref" post All Star Game point of emphasis. I included anyone at the level of James Harden or worse in terms of offensive rating differential post vs pre All Star Game which I feel is the right spot to cut it off.
Let's cover a select few from the list.
Duncan Robinson
Never trust a guy with two last names. That makes him the statistical bitch of the bitches with a -25 rating in offensive efficiency since the All Star Game. But in fairness, and as a bona fide NBA casual, I did a quick Google search to learn he has been dealing with back issues that likely confounds things. So let me know what's up Heat Culture if this is off base.
Jonas Valančiūnas
As a very clear NBA ball knower who totally knows how to pronouce this guys name but chooses not to, I am aware that most of the first page Google results reveal Jonas has actually played pretty well with an efficiency over 100 at least despite dropping by 21. So if that's the case then maybe this is all a bunch of bull hockey.
Tyrese Haliburton
I've been all over Haliburton's struggles as of late and I'm still in firm belief his post-All Star struggles had more to do with him having a leap day birthday hangover as that's where this all started. So, I'm offiically absolving him here too which makes sense as he pretty much just shoots threes anyway. Therefore, probably not dependent on drawing cheap fouls.
Kevin Durant
Little surprised to see him here. Maybe I'm way off, but I don't recall thinking of KD as a guy that leans on the refs for calls. He's so lanky and actually skilled, he shouldn't need to anyway. Am I just an idiot and dead wrong here?
OK Real talk - you might not be surprised to learn this wasn't actually the most statistically responsible research project for a litany of reasons including sample size, discriminant validity issues (ex: there's players that did BETTER on offense post rule enforcement which makes no sense if we're hypothesizing that these rule changes were the reason for those with poorer outputs), etc.
BUT - that doesn't mean it's not fun to see if these names pass the smell test. I'm a little sketch since Giannis isn't on there as that dude thinks he's Bo Jackson going to the rack. I guess maybe he's still getting away with it? Anyway, let me know which of these bitch suspects you think is valid.
Other than Harden. Because. Well, duh.