The most justifiable part of the Thad Young graphic is the game count. The image aired Feb 28, 2018, on the night of Young's 800th game. And if we're celebrating Thad, it's fair to use an 800-game cutoff. Dropping the threshold down to 250 would've added Kawhi!
and Clark Kellogg.
2
6
2K
Replies
In defense of the most infamous stat combo in the history of on-air graphics, a thread 🧵
91
1K
25K
I've always assumed that these specific stat cutoffs were cherry-picked to include Thad and exclude as many other players as possible, but that's not quite right. Here's how the graphic would have looked if they used 10 PPG instead of 13.5.
2
2
1K
Same thing with the rebounds - dropping it down to 5 RPG instead of 5.9 would have yielded the same group. 13.5/5.9 were just Thad's career stats at that point.
2
3
1K
Dropping the quirky 1.4 steal cutoff in favor of a nice round 1 steal per game would have added just one player to the list - Paul Millsap.
2
3
1K
49% from the floor feels like the silliest part of the whole thing (you were this close🤏to 50). And they could have dropped FG%, too. It would have expanded the graphic by just three, adding Scottie Pippen, Clyde Drexler, and Shawn Marion.
1
2
881
Hilariously, Thad was 49.93% from the field for his career as of Feb 28, 2018. A less scrupulous graphic designer might have rounded up to 50 and called it a day. But! that would have crossed MJ and Bird off the list 😲
5
10
1K
30% from three is the only round number that was used in the graphic. And it's only fishy because it's such a preposterously low cutoff. Clearly it was tossed in to shorten the list a little, but who were we trying to keep out?
2
4
841
imo, a more natural cutoff might have been 33% 3P% (1 point per shot). So why 30? It wasn't for Thad!
1
9
1K
Incredibly, over the course of his 16-year, 1172-game career, Thad met the criteria for the infamous graphic for one night only 😂
He scored 11 points on Feb 28th dropping his career average to 13.499 points per game and he never got back to 13.5 again.
4
32
2K
Run the query today and you'll find that there are just 4 results (nobody has joined the list in the last 6+ years). And I think that's part of the reason the graphic endures - it's an amazingly selective combo of stats. Good on Thad for making the cut, even if only for 1 night.
19
25
2K
