NBA teams
Bradford Doolittle, ESPN Staff Writer 9y

NBA's most clutch players

NBA

Last week, we took a look at how teams are performing in the clutch. We got a lesson in just how volatile this subset of data can be Tuesday, as runaway league clutch leader Golden State went down in overtime against the Chicago Bulls. The Warriors still rank as the best clutch team in the league by outscoring opponents by 36.8 points per 100 possessions. That's impressive, but last week they were at plus-63.2. Thus is the world of small sample sizes.

Today we're turning our attention to player performance in clutch situations. If the data is that unstable at the team level, you can imagine how it works at the player level. Measuring what players have done is no big trick -- the stats are straightforward once we've agreed to a definition of what constitutes a clutch situation. As we did with the teams, we're going with the most common definition: Any possession during the last five minutes of regulation (plus overtime, as with the Warriors and Bulls on Tuesday) when the score is within five points.

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