What The NBA DOESN'T TELL YOU: The DIRTY WORK That Nobody Mentions

https://stats.nba.com/players/hustle/

The NBA is tracking everything nowadays. Down to even the distance ran per game as I covered in a previous video.
And in this one I spotlight a few hustle statistics that nobody talks about, but are extremely valuable to a team. What up everybody my name is Stefan and this is Heat Check. Let’s get into it.
Take a look at this. Watch how wide open Donovan Mitchell gets off of Gobert’s screen and he knocks it down of course. Thing is Rudy isn’t being credited in the boxscore for his hard work. This is equally as beneficial to the team as a rebound or an assist. Luckily, the NBA is also keeping track of something called screen assists. And it is exactly what it sounds like. Counting how many times the team scores points off of a player’s screen.
And as you can imagine, Rudy Gobert led the league last season with 6 of these per game.
While you take a look at the full list, I gotta mention that I’m extremely surprised how this isn’t talked about at all. In my opinion, a screen assist is just as valuable as a regular assist and we all know who the top dogs are when it comes to this, but to see these screen numbers for guys like Rudy, Tristan Thompson, Jarett Allen or Cody Zeller, you’ll really have to dig deep and find the hustle stats page on nba.com.
Next up, is another extremely underrated category and one that teammates and fans definitely notice. And that is taking a charge.
I kinda touched on this in the playoffs when I talked about how Kyle Lowry led everyone in the postseason, but I wanted to feature a player who’s been doing this for his entire career.
And that is Ersan Ilyasova believe it or not. Last season Ilyasova took 50 charges. To me this is staggering how a player is willing to put his body on the line on a nightly basis in order to draw an offensive foul and get a possession for his team. Not to score points, or blow up his stats and numbers, but solely for the good of his team.
I mean, look at some of these collisions. This is a huge sacrifice on top of the regular wear and tear that NBA players put on their bodies within the 82 games, but especially considering that some players take a lot of possessions off and rest on defense.
Of course shoutout to Blake Griffin, Marc Gasol, Kemba and the rest of the guys, but it was eye opening how many more of these Ilyasova had, so I had to feature him in this video.
And finally finishing things off at least for this video is box outs per game. And this is very interesting to me. Usually big men like to get the rebound themselves since that’s the number that stands out and is easily accessible after the game, and can even possibly get a nice contract for a player.
Box outs are usually done however for a teammate to get the rebound. I’ve talked about how Steven Adams boxes out for Russell Westbrook to get the rebound, and although I was surprised to find out, I’m very happy to see that this is also being tracked by the league, and players who do the hard work, the dirty work get credited and awarded for it.
There are a couple more interesting statistical categories that are worth taking a look, and I’ll leave a link for you in the description so that you can go and take a look at the full Hustle Stats.
Hopefully this gave you a different perspective on some of the players and what makes them truly valuable to their team. That’s it for now, if you liked this video, subscribe and hit the notification bell so that you don’t miss my future in depth analysis. Talk to you in the next one. Peace out.