One of the best in the business at dribble penetration is Tony Parker of the San Antonio Spurs — and if there is one video you need to watch today, it is this one:

Parker, who probably has the best spin move in the game, also is incredibly agile, crafty, and an excellent finisher in the paint — in case you didn’t figure that out.  While the majority of the video is devoted to his scoring, the last two minutes or so, are devoted to his passing highlights (which are almost as good as his scoring highlights).  I emphasize this because Parker creates as much offense off his passing and the focus the opposing defense has to give him, as he does by finishing at the rim.

Without further ado, here are your six guards that averaged the greatest number of points in the paint during the regular season:

While most of these players are shooting guards (which is not surprising), they also averaged a decent amount of assists per game (Tyreke Evans was the only guard that had a bad assist average) — which backs up the intuition that dribble penetration creates offense.

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Mandatory Credit: David Richard-USA TODAY Sports

Yesterday, I looked at NBA refs and the rate that they call technical fouls.  Today, I’m looking at which refs tend to call more charges and which refs tend to call more blocks.  I only looked at refs that refereed at least 45 games to make sure there was a decent sample size of charges and blocks.  Basically the intuition of sample size is that in one game a ref might call seven charges and one block — and if all the data you have is that one game, then your data is skewed.  But if you have data from over the course of a season (or 45 games) your data does not end up being skewed.

(In case you’re curious…here’s the data source: http://vorped.com/bball/index.php/referee).

The charge-block ratio is basically the rate at which refs call charges relative to the rate at which refs call blocks.  For example, Scott Forster has a very high charge to block ratio of 10.25.  This means that this season he has called 10.25 times as many charges than blocks.  Dick Bavetta on the other hand has a charge to block ratio of 1.8.  This means that Bavetta has called 1.8 times as many charges than blocks.

What is astonishing is that only one NBA ref that has refereed at least 45 games calls more blocks than charges.  That ref would be Tony Brothers, who has a charge to block ratio of 0.889.  This suggests that experienced NBA refs tend to call more charges than blocks, in general — that’s why the average charge to block ratio is 2.41.