Sports Staturday - Was Yuki Kawamura The Shortest NBA Player To Ever Win A Jump Ball? Plus More Stupid Stats From The Past Week In Sports
Welcome to Sports Staturday. A light-read for your morning coffee looking back at the past week in sports through the lens of wild, weird, or just plain dumb stats.
Little note off the Stathole research desk. I'm happy to report that we should be all ready to lookup dumb stats for college basketball as I have my data systems ready to go with box scores on every game since the early 2000s. So, we'll get to some fun lookups there in the coming weeks. But there was really only one thing I cared to dive too deep into researching for today. We're leading off with something unprecedented in the world of meaningless stats. I need to know if Yuki Kawamura is the shortest player to ever win a jump ball, standing 5'7 dripping with sneakers.
This is Sports Staturday.
Let's get the small stuff out of the way. I think the answer is yes - Yuki Kawamura is the shortest NBA basketball player to ever win a jump ball. 5'7. I looked through the play by play and filtered to all jump balls going back to 2002. By the way, did you know there were over 44,000 jump balls just since then? Seems like a lot, but then again there have been a lot of games since then I guess. Still, that's a lot of balls in the air.
Anyway - the shortest player to ever be involved in a jump ball on record was Earl Boykin at 5'7. Shame we can't include Muggsy Bogues or Spud Webb - both shorter than Earl - in this research. If anyone has a clip of either of them winning a jump dear god please tag me on Twitter because I want to see it. They deserve their day if the did the damn thing.
Back to Earl. He had three jump balls in his career. His first was December 7, 2002 vs Nick Van Excel who was just 6'1. If he was going to win one, you'd think it'd been this. No dice. Then on March 28, 2003 he lined up against Aaron McKie who stood 6-5. Yeah, that went about how you'd expect.
Then the third one. Malik Rose. 6'7. A monster in comparison. On that fateful April 14, 2004 night the ball lifted up in the air and Earl Boykins sprung up with all he had to give. That all ended up being not even remotely good enough. 0/3.
And that's it. That's the only records of a player shorter than 5'7 taking a jump ball I can find. Damon Stoudamire was next at 5'10. And here I've been shunning my home town Chicago Bulls to spite Jerry Reinsdorf for giving us lukewarm soup with expired ingredients every year and they somehow made a little history. Hang the banner. If there's any room left next to the play-in first-round tapestries.
Pop quiz for you NBA casuals out there. Check out this stair-step graph of wins over games played and guess which team is the greyed out one. Go ahead and cheat even and try to play the process of elimination game with the other teams.
Data through February 5
That's right. You guessed it. The Charlotte Hornets.
Brian Babineau. Getty Images.
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Eight-game win streak for a team that was 16-28. That's wild. But not the worst team (record-wise) to do it. Let's print out that receipt.
By the way - shout out to the 3-20 Bulls for getting close with a seven-game streak back in 2017. Let me hit the ole CVS register one more time and print that out too.
Quick little NCAA session. We had a perfect shooting game this past week on January 31 when Aidan Kehoe went 11/11 from the field. But this wasn't the perfect game. He only went 1/2 at the line. But on that same night, Fredrick King of Murray State went 9/9 from the field and made all four free throws. Boom. Perfect shooting game. Trails Gabe Oldham (sick name) who has the most shots made on a perfect game this season (9/9 from the field and 6/6 from the line). I'm not here to tell you any of these guys were playing against good teams, but perfect is perfect. You can only play who's on the schedule.
Right, Patriots fans?
With that segue, let's get to the Super Bowl. Just had time for one prop unfortunately, but here it is.
Total players to attempt a pass 2.5 (over +160 / under -210)
Let's break this one down. At first glance - the Super Bowl always seems like it has that one extra passer on a trick play. +160 must be easy money, right? I'm not so sure. You might think the status of Drake Maye's shoulder might lead to him getting hurt. I don't know - it seems he's looking fine to me.
I looked back for both teams here. Dobbs came in and threw in Weeks 4, 7 and 17. Looking at the box scores, I'm presuming this was garbage time blowout wins since I don't recall Maye having much injury issues this season. The only legitimate non-Maye pass thrown otherwise was in the Wild card by Efton Chism on a Philly not so special to Drake Maye. Given the shoulder being even somewhat of even an idea of an issue, I don't think Vrabel runs that play back.
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As for Seattle - the only designed non-QB throw was a Cooper Kupp interception in Week 7. Drew Lock's only action was in Week 3 in a blowout of the Saints. It's possible Seattle blows out the Patriots and we get to brand them with the schedule merchant tag, but this one doesn't look like as good a bet as it might seem.
With that being said - you never know what teams have cooked up from the preseason and still sitting in the warmer.
Let's end with one little college basketball lookup request.
Answer: Davian Brooks of West Coast Baptist on November 4. Went 0-12 from the field. But a perfect 0-0 at the line.
