The 10 Best Single-Game Performances From the 2013-14 NBA Season

The dog days of summer in the NBA are a great time for reflection. Since the news cycle is so deathly slow these days (hey, the Heat are “considering” Ekpe Udoh!), why don’t we take a trip down (recent) memory lane and look at the 10 best single-game statistical performances from last season?

Constructing such a list by focusing on only one aspect of the game – such as scoring – doesn’t tell enough of the story for our purposes. Instead of succumbing to our own subjectivity by trying to decide how to weigh the importance of points, rebounds, steals, etc., we’ll use John Hollinger’s “Game Score” to do that work for us.

Game Score takes points, field goal percentage, free throw percentage, offensive rebounds, defensive rebounds, steals, assists, blocks, fouls, and turnovers (essentially everything in the standard box score but three-pointers) and gives them each a different value and combines them (the exact calculation can be found here). The resulting number is meant to give a rough measure of what a player accomplished in a single game, scaled similarly to points scored – 40 is an outstanding performance, 30 great, 20 good, 10 average, and so on.

There were 10 individual performances last season that had a Game Score of 40 or higher, so a top 10 seems like the way to go.

Let’s get down to it, starting with one of the most surprising performances of the whole 2013-14 season.