Russell Westbrook and the 10 Biggest Ball Hogs Since the Three Point Line

In basketball the worst thing that you can be called is a ball hog. It’s ugly. It means you put your own success ahead that of the team. It means you’re more concerned about your scoring totals than you are about your team winning.

It’s been used to smear players by mere accusation. Even Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant have been accused of this ugly, narcissistic tendency.

So I got to wondering. Who are the worst ball hogs since the three point line, and how do you define a ball hog? Some players have a system that goes through them and they are supposed to shoot. Does simply taking a lot of shots make you a ball hog?

Is it missing the shot that makes you a ball hog? Is it having a low field goal percentage that makes you a ball hog? I wanted to consider a way that merely being a focal point on offense could be differentiated from hurling up the ball willy-nilly without regard to the consequences.

What I ended up doing was determine that a “good shot” was a made shot, and a “bad shot” was missed shot. Now I acknowledge there’s some crudeness to this. Sometimes people make bad shots or miss good shots, but my thinking is that it works itself out over time.

I also figured that it matters how much you shoot to a point. You can’t compare a guy who shoots the ball five times a game to a guy who shoots 25 times a game.  

So I took the 100 players who averaged the most field goal attempts per game since the advent of the three point line, and I determined the ratio of missed field goals to made field goals. The following rankings are the result of that list.

If you’re looking for Kobe Bryant, he’s not here. He was 33. Derrick Rose isn’t on here either. He’s 57^th. Michael Jordan is only 85^th. LeBron James is 63^rd. Kevin Durant is 47^th. Lots of “ball hogs” there that are not proving to be ball hogs.

These 10 though, they are the ones who never saw a shot they didn’t fall in love with. 

10: Tim Hardaway 1.323

Tim Hardaway averaged 17.7 points per game over the course of his NBA career and it only took him 15.1 field goal attempts to get there!  His UTEP two step might have helped to popularize the crossover dribble but he still missed a lot more shots than he made.

If you’re looking for an excuse to cut him some slack you can look at his career assist numbers. Hardaway is 13^th in career assists. 

9: Latrell Sprewell, 1.343

I doubt there’s going to be a lot of shock here. Latrell Sprewell wasn’t exactly the citizen of the century while he was playing. When he wasn’t choking his coach he was jacking up bad shots. Then, when you figured he couldn’t get any more self-centered he decided that the was going to end his career early because the 21 million over three years was not enough to “feed his children.” 

8: Allen Iverson, 1.344

He’s the only one the list to ever get the MVP out of his hogging. To be fair he also managed to hog the 76ers to the NBA finals. Iverson missed 12.5 field goals per game, most of anyone since the inception of the three point line.

With Iverson it was really a case of the good with the bad. There’s no question that he took his share of ill-advised shots. On the other hand it’s become a little convenient to judge him differently than people looked on him then. He was a gutsy player. If there were a stat for most times knocked to the floor, Iverson would be the all-time leader in that too. 

7: Gilbert Arenas, 1.377

Another bastion of team leadership rivaling the likes of Latrell Sprewell, Gilbert Arenas' appearance here is not surprising.  At one time he was a superstar in the making. Now he’s just a bad, if not the worst, contract in the NBA. If there’s an NBA player who could benefit from the services of Dani Santino it’s Arenas.

He doesn’t just act like a self-serving-ego-maniac on the court though. He’ll take a bad shot just as easily off the court as his history more than proves. Well, maybe we should complement him on not literally taking a shot off the court.  

6: Stephen Jackson, 1.379

It’s amazing to me the large numbers of these guys that are involved with other character problems. Stephen Jackson attracted attention after the Malice in the Palace. Jackson has his own little history of criminal problems,  including a couple of cases of battery.

Jackson seems to be a mixed bag though as he also has a pretty good history of doing positive things.

It leaves one to wonder if his bad to good ratio in his personal life is also 1.379. 

5: Jamal Mashburn, 1.386

Remember when Jamal Mashburn was alongside Jim Jackson and Jason Kidd as the Mavericks team of the future?

Believe it or not, only 23 players since the advent of the three point line averaged more shots per game than Mashburn. All of them averaged at least 20 points for their career. Mashburn though, only scored 19.1 points per game in his injury-shortened career.

4: Russell Westbrook, 1.38

It surprises me that Westbrook is this high on the list. I knew he was prone to taking some extra shots, but not this prone. It’s even more surprising when you consider that he has the league’s two-time scoring champion on his team.

Put me on the list of people that are saying that teammate Kevin Durant needs to straighten out Westbrook. I don’t think he needs to confront him. They’re friends. They should stay friends. Durant should take him out to dinner and say, “Look, Russell, I appreciate your effort, but dude, I’m better.” 

3: Jerry Stackhouse, 1.424

Three numbers that don’t look good together are 14.3 field goal attempts per game, a .409 field goal percentage and only 6.2 free throw attempts per game. Toss in a 3.5 assist per game career average and what you have is a player who just shot it a lot and made it occasionally.

Stackhouse is the classic ball hog, elevating his scoring simply on the number of shots he makes. In his highest scoring season he took 24.1 shots per game and made only 40 percent of them. And that was his best season. 

2: Antoine Walker, 1.426

Starting to get what I mean about players with other personal issues and ball hoggery? Maybe he was hoping that if he missed enough shots the banks would open. The problem was that bank wasn’t cashing anything for him either.

Walker missed the exact same number of shots per game as Alex English. The only thing is that English averaged 3 fewer shots and scored 6.4 more points per game.

Walker was last seen missing shots in the Developmental League, where he was averaging a field goal percentage of .440. At 35 years old, I think developing isn’t going to happen. 

1: Baron Davis, 1.433

The number one ball hog since the inception of the three point line is none other than Baron Davis. Maybe we can call him the Baron of Ball Hog. There was a time when it looked like Davis could really emerge as a bona fide superstar, but he’s never lived up to expectations.

Davis is another one that has been associated with character issues. Essentially it seems like he’s lost interest in basketball. He’s gotten—we’ll delicately say heavier—and doesn’t seem interested in being coached either. Fat, uncoachable ball hogs tend to not be the best players to build around. That’s been my limited observation. Maybe he’ll turn it around in Cleveland though.