I discovered a pretty cool NBA stat the other day

Isaiah Thomas didn't commit a single turnover in the Celtics' 120-103 loss in Cleveland on Saturday.  It was the third straight game he'd played without a turnover.  When that came to my attention, I began to wonder how rare a streak that was for somebody who has such an enormous role in his team's offense.

There's no easy way to look that up, unless you have another stat to compare it to.  Thomas also scored at least 27 points in all three of his turnover-free games, so that gave me a good number to cross-reference with.

I did a search on Basketball-Reference.com for most consecutive games where a player scored 27 or more points with zero turnovers, and the results were quite surprising: The NBA didn't start recording turnovers as an official stat until the 1977-78 season and Basketball-Reference only keeps track of them as far back as 1983-84.  But in the past 32+ years, Michael Jordan is the only player to match Isaiah's feat, over a three-game span in February of 1991.

I posted about all of this on CelticsLife Monday.  I also sent the stat to a few other Celtics media people I thought might find in interesting.  Yesterday, the Celtics official website wrote about it:

Isaiah Thomas' recent stretch of ball has only been matched once in the last 33 seasons ... by Michael Jordan. Read: https://t.co/HHliHiePx1

— Boston Celtics (@celtics) March 8, 2016

The NBA.com article links to my original tweet as the source.

Celtics.com featured it again today as well:

Will Isaiah's streak end tonight? Which Grizzlies must the Celtics worry about? We dive into those questions here: https://t.co/dLeN6cqTUO

— Boston Celtics (@celtics) March 9, 2016

Toucher and Rich of 98.5 The Sports Hub also brought it up on their show this morning while talking to CSNNE Celtics play-by-play man Mike Gorman (at the 25-minute mark):





UPDATE:

Kyle Draper, Chris Mannix and Brian Scalabrine discussed it during the Celtics pregame show on CSNNE tonight.

UPDATE #2:

Towards the end of the second quarter, CSNNE announced the "Chevy Malibu Unexpected Stat" of the night:

I guess I should expect to see my new Chevy Malibu parked outside in the morning?


UPDATE #3:

Two days later:

Isaiah Thomas on his five turnovers: "I blame y'all. All I could think about is Michael Jordan."

— Brian Robb (@CelticsHub) March 12, 2016

Sorry Isaiah, my bad.


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