There has been a lot of virtual ink spilled this season about the NBA’s nearly unprecedented scoring explosion. The league as a whole is averaging 105.5 points per 100 possessions as of Thursday afternoon, per NBA.com, up from 103.9 last year and 103.0 the year before. The boom has of course been driven by a massive increase in 3-point shooting volume — an all-time high 31.4 percent of shots leaguewide have come from behind the arc, up a mile from 28.5 percent last season 26.8 percent the year before that. That particular factor has been discussed ad nauseam.
There is, however, another under-discussed factor driving the points through the roof — NBA point guards are shouldering more and more responsibility in the orchestration offenses, and they, in turn, have started looking for their own offense more than over before. (Rare is the point guard these days that brings the ball up the floor, passes off to a teammate, and gets out of the way for the rest of the possession.) While the so-called “pure” point guard is still fetishized in some circles, the actual guys at the controls for most NBA teams are scoring like crazy.
Take a look at the following chart. It shows (a) how many point guards ranked among the top-20 scorers leaguewide; (b) how many point guards averaged at least 20 points per game; (c) the scoring average of the player that led all point guards in scoring; (d) the scoring average of the player that was 10th among point guards in scoring; and (e) the collective scoring average of the top-10 point guards in scoring for each year since the turn of the century.
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The lowest number in each category is highlighted in red, while the highest is highlighted in green. See if anything jumps out at you.
So, yeah. That green line across the bottom of the chart is probably pretty damn noticeable.
An incredible nine point guards rank among the top-20 scorers in the NBA this season. (There are also three point guards among the league’s top five scorers, which is utterly ridiculous and would have been unthinkable at the start of the 2000’s.) That number, which had not been higher than four as recently as four years ago, actually reaches 10 if you count Giannis Antetokounmpo as a point guard rather than a small forward. Ten point guards are scoring 20 points or more per game, equal to the number that did it in the last two years combined — and that number hadn’t been higher than three before the 2013-14 season.
Russell Westbrook is leading not just all point guards, but the entire league in scoring at 30.6 points per game. That’s the highest scoring average for a point guard this century. Eric Bledsoe, the 10th-highest scoring point guard at 20.3 points per game, is in the top-30 in the whole league. His scoring average would have been nearly enough to lead all point guards as recently as seven years ago.
