FanPost

A Breakdown of Dwight Howard's Impact on the Orlando Magic's Success, Part I - Aggression

I was bored the other day, and decided to compile some various stats from Dwight Howard's career and see how they impact the Orlando Magic's winning percentage.  I have broken it down into various categories (blocks, rebounds, fouls, points, field goal percentage, field goal attempts, free throw percentage, free throw attempts, and then various combinations of points, rebounds and blocks). I also have broken it down into different timeframes, being this season, the pre-SVG era (2004-2007), the SVG era (2007-present), and his overall career.  Part One looks at aggression statistics: Blocks, Rebounds, and Fouls.

You can view all statistics compiled by year here.

Below is a look at the above mentioned timeframes and how the team performed based on varying numbers of blocks in a game.

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Surprisingly, over Dwight's career, the stats say that there is actually a point of diminishing returns based on how many blocked shots he has in a game. As you can see, the team's winning percentage is actually worse when Dwight gets 6 or more blocks in a game than if he only gets 4 or 5 blocks. This same trend is also reflected in this year's statistics. Also, I find it impressive that Dwight has blocked 4 or more shots 94 times in his career out of 489 career games, nearly 20% of the time!  Next, we will look at how the number of rebounds Dwight grabs impact the team's success.

 

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This goes more in line with what we would expect. The team winning percentage steadily increases as Dwight rebounds more, with a slight variance in that the team trends at winning slightly more often when Dwight gets 10-14 rebounds versus 15-19 rebounds. That trend tracks throughout his career. Last, we will look at how Dwight's foul rate impacts team wins. Also, Dwight has rebounded the ball 15 or more times 159 times in his career, 32.5% of the time! Wow!!

 

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This is pretty straight forward. The team doesn't win that often when Dwight fouls out and they win more when Dwight fouls three times or less. Who knew?!? lol What is surprising is that as aggressive as Dwight is on the defensive end and how often he complains about bad fouls (as do many of us on this site), he has only fouled out of a game 19 times in his career, less than 4% of the time! In fact, he has nearly the same amount of games where he had zero fouls in a game as he has fouled out...

In part two, we will look at the impact of Dwight's offense on the team's success with Points, Field Goal Percentage and Attempts, as well as Free Throw Percentage and Attempts. Please feel free to let me know if these breakdowns are beneficial or not...

This FanPost was made by a member of the Orlando Pinstriped Post community, and is to be treated as the opinions and views of its author, not that of the blogger or blog community as a whole.

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