NBA

NBA fan meticulously breaks down James Harden’s strip club downfall

Analytics in sports has reached a whole new level.

One NBA fan has decided the amount of on-court numbers wasn’t enough and dug into the off-court antics, with his focus on one superstar player. Reddit user Ryan Sullivan shone a light on just how James Harden performs on the road and how his impact differs depending on which city he is in and the quality of that cities strip clubs.

The incredible detective work quickly blew up on social media with fans left in absolute amazement at the work put in.

So how does one decide to dig into the numbers and comparing them against cities strip clubs? For Sullivan it all came after the Rockets were beaten in Miami on Sunday, a city known for it’s establishments.

James Harden
James HardenGetty Images/NY Post composite

Here’s the method to his brilliance.

“Poor Performances were determined by variances in 6 stats: Points, FG%, 3PT%, FT%, Assists and Turnovers. For each of these stats I compared Harden’s overall season average to the city-specific season average. I identified 2 categories of poor performances,” he wrote.

“Sub-Par — Harden performed WORSE than season average, and

“Very Sub-Par — Harden performed 20%+ WORSE than season average.

“I analyzed his poor performances across each of the NBA’s 28 different cities (did not look at home games so no Houston, there are 2 teams in LA, and I distinguished between Brooklyn and NYC = 28 cities).

“City Strip Club Rating was determined by the average google review rating for the first 10 strip clubs in each city based on the google search “[CITY] Strip Clubs” (e.g., “Detroit Strip clubs”). Yes, this did involve me making like 30+ searches for strip clubs on my work cpu…

“Finally, I put the City Strip Club Rating into the pivoted game log data, performed a regression analysis and visualised it into charts.”

The work was incredibly thorough and the results speak for themselves.

“I have proven, to a statistically significant degree, that James Harden’s game performance declines in cities with higher rated strip clubs,” he wrote.

“Correlation Coefficient – r – (between avg strip club rating and total # of sub-par games) = .4575.

“Given the nature of the subject matter, this would be considered a moderate-to-strong correlation.

“Coefficient of Determination – r2 – (between avg strip club rating and total # of sub-par games) = .21.

“This means that James Harden’s box score is 20% predictable based on the quality of a city’s strip clubs.”

Bad news for the Rockets is that three of the top five cities with the highest rated strip clubs are located in the Western Conference and two teams reside in one city.

The top five are as follows: Miami, Chicago, Utah, Los Angeles and New Orleans.

So for teams looking to throw one of the game’s best players off his game, the answer is simple and won’t affect the team’s cap at all.

Invest in your cities strip club establishments and watch Harden deliver a below par game.