Frustration Fouls in the NBA
Welcome to my blog. I am new to blogging, and this is my first blog post. One of my favorite players to watch in the NBA is Nikola Jokic of the Denver Nuggets. He is a super-intelligent player on both sides of the ball, sees angles on the floor like no-one else, and flings out many highlight-reel passes in a game. He brings an aspect of fun and joy to the game, as very few people do. The part of his game that I don’t like (probably so does Mike Malone) is his propensity to commit frustration fouls. This leads to him being in foul-trouble and playing fewer minutes because his coach doesn’t trust him to be careful with his fouls. So, I wanted to dig into how many frustration fouls Jokic commits in a season and compare it to leaders in that category in the NBA. To begin this analysis, I had to define what a frustration foul is.
The Frustration Foul Algorithm
A frustration foul is one committed by a player within 5 seconds of committing a turnover or missing a shot.
To do these calculations, I used Darryl Blackport’s pbpstats API. It allows getting details of what happens in each possession for all the games in an NBA season. We can identify if a foul happens on the possession and if the previous possession ends in a missed shot or a turnover. We can then filter for situations when the foul occurs within 5 seconds of the previous possession and if the same player commits the missed shot/turnover and the foul. A similar algorithm can also be done to calculate the number of Euro-fouls, and this analysis will be a part of a future article. Here is the code implemented in python to filter the necessary possessions.
if isinstance(possession_event, Foul) and (isinstance(possession_event.previous_event, Turnover) or not (possession_event.previous_event, FieldGoal)) and possession_event.seconds_since_previous_event <= 5:As I got all the nerdy stuff out of the way, let us now look at the results.
Frustration Foul Leaderboard for the 2020–21 Season
Here are your leaders for frustration fouls updated as of 29th January 2021.
So, where is Jokic? I started this endeavor because of him. He is tied for 10th place with 22 other players with two frustration fouls. Now let's get back to the leaderboard. One more name I was on the lookout for was Russell Westbrook, who always seems to commit an inordinate number of frustration fouls. Predictably he is tied for third place with 4 frustration fouls. The top players in this category are Donovan Mitchell and Chris Paul. I really didn’t expect Mitchell to be here. As for Chris Paul, we know all the complaining he does during the game, and we shouldn’t be surprised to find him here.
Frustration Foul Leaderboards for the 2017–20 Seasons
Now, let us look at the players committing the most frustration fouls over 3 seasons from 2017–20.
Finally, I found my guy Nikola Jokic who is tied for 2nd in frustration fouls at 10 fouls for the 2019–20 season. Devonte’ Graham beat him to the top spot with 11 fouls. In the 2018–19 season, James Harden lead the league in frustration fouls with 12 followed by Chris Paul with 11 who also currently leads the league in frustration fouls. Marc Gasol committed 15 frustration fouls in the 2017–18 season which lead the league by a large margin. One thing we can observe is that the number of frustration fouls committed by the league leaders is almost constant throughout the seasons. This is true for the 2019–20 season despite playing fewer games. Also, out of the 18 players shown in these leaderboards Only three Marc Gasol, Ian Mahinmi, and Nikola Jokic are big men. All the other players are guards. We can conclude that guards generally have more propensity to commit frustration fouls.
The number of frustration fouls seems to be way higher this season with Chris Paul already having 6 despite only a quarter of the season being played. The lack of preseason may contribute to this. To conclude, I have analyzed the possession data from 2017–21 and found the players who commit the most frustration fouls in those seasons. I am hoping to extend this analysis to Euro-fouls, and it would be my next blog post.
Thank you for reading and any feedback is welcome. You can reach me on Twitter at @SravanNBA.
