Portland Trail Blazers: Hassan Whiteside’s numbers aren’t “empty stats”

Numbers point to Whiteside’s major impact on Portland’s success

Thinking about what it means to be an “empty stats” player, one would imagine that these sorts of players produce on losing teams, which means they spend most of the game getting their numbers with the game already decided. Such a claim couldn’t be further from the truth with Whiteside.

Statistically, Whiteside has done the majority of his damage when the outcome still hung in the balance, something you absolutely want out of a featured option on your team. With the score margin ranging from 1-to-5 points, Whiteside averages over 40 percent of his points (376 of his 935 total).

And even when Whiteside isn’t a threat to score — something he’s done more than just six centers league wide — the former All-Defensive Teamer is impacting games when the game in question. Of Whiteside’s possible 1,803 minutes, here’s where the time stamps sit.

• Only 41 minutes where the team is either ahead-or-behind by 20+ points.
• Only 107 minutes where the team is either ahead-or-behind by 16-to-20 points. 

Instead, what we find is that the highest sample of playing time comes from these three scenarios:

• 388 minutes when the Blazers are ahead 1-to-5 points and need to put the game away.
• 375 minutes when the Blazers are behind 1-to-5 points and need a small run.
• 271 minutes when the Blazers are behind 6-to-10 points and need a large run.

In American football, players are stigmatized for a similar reason, especially quarterbacks who dink-and-dunk short passes in order to improve their percentages and rack in meaningless yards after a game has been decided. In basketball, these “empty calories” are harder to indulge in, particularly for focal points like Hassan Whiteside.

More from Portland Trail Blazers

• Damian Lillard needs just two words to dismantle a Blazers fan’s hot take
• NBA Rumors: Stalled trade talks may lead to Blazers, 76ers keeping stars
• The NBA’s strong message to Lillard clears path for a major trade
• NBA Trades: Is this the deal that finally sends Damian Lillard to Miami?
• 5 players who will challenge Victor Wembanyama for Rookie of the Year

Only four centers have been clocked in with more playing time than Whiteside but Portland Trail Blazers head coach Terry Stotts is too veteran a coach to toss him to the wolves by having him out there padding numbers when games are in the history books.

There could be something fundamentally with my viewing of the game, but the correlation between Whiteside, say, collecting a missed shot by a teammate, and putting it back in for two points, and that being an empty calorie play, feels philosophically wrong.

The parallel between Whiteside’s advanced numbers and his reputation as a “stat chaser” doesn’t quite seem to fit, either. This year, he ranks third in the NBA in offensive rebounds, and of the three players ahead of him, none of them are creating more contested rebounds than he does.

In every year since 2014-15, Whiteside has dropped to no more than the top-20, which includes a year when those, so-you-say “empty statistics” nearly helped push the Miami Heat to the Eastern Conference Finals.

The Blazers have had to make lemonade out of what they’ve had in their frontcourt this season. And just like a lemon, Whiteside’s numbers are honest no matter how you slice them. He’s been virtually the same player in both wins and losses. Empty calories or not, stats have ended up just like rebounds for Whiteside; he simply gobbles them up.