Sports fans have long looked to statistics to help them identify uniquely remarkable games. No-hitter, triple double, golden set, maximum break, nine dart finish, hat trick, perfect game. Of course, these are all completely arbitrary and a no-hitter where you walk 10 batters or a triple double where you miss 27 shots aren’t exactly Game of the Year candidates, but arbitrary or not, people give them significance, so achieving them matters.
Rarer are season-long statistical feats. These don’t happen every year, but when they do, it’s a legacy-definer for the player. In baseball, you have Triple Crowns and the 40-40 Club. In football, there’s the 2,000-Yard-Season Club. Basketball’s most popular equivalent is the 50-40-90 Club, which includes players who shot 50% from the field, 40% from three, and 90% from the free throw line. Very simply, it attempts to identify extraordinary shooting seasons from all over the court. Only nine players have ever achieved it in the NBA, with Kyrie Irving joining the Club this year.
The Problem
But part of the 50-40-90 Club has always chapped my hide. Shooting three pointers at a 40% clip is incredible, and yet, it detracts from the 50% field goal percentage goal. One is a subset of the other. That would be like if hockey tracked goals plus points or football did rushing yards plus scrimmage yards. Nonsense.
This didn’t used to be that big of an issue. In Dirk Nowitzki’s 50-40-90 season, he made just 72 three pointers, less than one per game. That wouldn’t even qualify for the end of year leaderboard at this point. Duncan Robinson this year shot 40.8% from three and 62.5% from two, an excellent shooting season. And yet his field goal percentage was a pedestrian 43.9%.
In the eight seasons since Steph Curry’s first All-Star selection in 2014, the subsequent explosion of high efficiency offense and the greatest generation of shooters the league has ever seen has resulted in just three 50-40-90 seasons. From 2006-2013, there were six. Something is wrong with the statistic.
Field goal percentage can’t be used as a catch-all for “regular shooting” anymore since it punishes players for taking higher value shots at a league-leading clip. To have the 50, 40, and 90 be mutually exclusive, the solution is simple: make the “50” two point percentage.
Would this open the floodgates for everyone?
No, definitely not. For starters, only a handful of players notch 90% free throw percentage each season, easily the rarest of the three. Even the best free throw shooters of all time in their prime can’t hit that mark every year (Steph Curry 2016-17, Steve Nash 2006-07, Mark Price 1993-94).
Furthermore, you’ve got to be really lucky to have your great seasons line up with each other. Damian Lillard shot 90% from the charity stripe in 2017-18, 2018-19, and 2020-21. You wanna guess which season he got 40% from downtown? 2019-20. I can’t tell you how many times in compiling this list that I saw a player who was capable of 50, 40, and 90 but just couldn’t put them together in a single year.
50-40-90 Club 2.0
Here’s the updated Club. Members to make it under the old criteria are italicized.
Player | Year | 2P% | 3P% | FT% | FG% |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
LarryBird | 86-87 | 54.7% | 40.0% | 91.0% | 52.5% |
LarryBird (2) | 87-88 | 54.6% | 41.4% | 91.6% | 52.7% |
MarkPrice | 88-89 | 54.8% | 44.1% | 90.1% | 52.6% |
MarkPrice (2) | 92-93 | 51.2% | 41.6% | 94.8% | 48.4% |
ReggieMiller | 93-94 | 53.5% | 42.1% | 90.8% | 50.3% |
ChrisMullin | 97-98 | 50.3% | 44.0% | 93.9% | 48.1% |
PejaStojaković | 03-04 | 51.1% | 43.3% | 92.7% | 48.0% |
SteveNash | 05-06 | 54.8% | 43.9% | 92.1% | 51.2% |
DirkNowitzki | 06-07 | 51.5% | 41.6% | 90.4% | 50.2% |
SteveNash (2) | 07-08 | 52.7% | 47.0% | 90.6% | 50.4% |
JoséCalderón | 08-09 | 53.8% | 40.6% | 98.1% | 49.7% |
RayAllen | 08-09 | 54.2% | 40.9% | 95.2% | 48.0% |
SteveNash (3) | 08-09 | 52.9% | 43.9% | 93.3% | 50.3% |
SteveNash (4) | 09-10 | 54.0% | 42.6% | 93.8% | 50.7% |
KevinDurant | 12-13 | 53.9% | 41.6% | 90.5% | 51.0% |
J.J.Redick | 14-15 | 51.5% | 43.7% | 90.1% | 47.7% |
StephenCurry | 14-15 | 52.8% | 44.3% | 91.4% | 48.7% |
StephenCurry (2) | 15-16 | 56.6% | 45.4% | 90.8% | 50.4% |
CJMcCollum | 16-17 | 50.6% | 42.1% | 91.2% | 48.0% |
KyrieIrving | 16-17 | 50.5% | 40.1% | 90.5% | 47.3% |
J.J.Redick (2) | 17-18 | 50.4% | 42.0% | 90.4% | 46.0% |
StephenCurry (3) | 17-18 | 59.5% | 42.3% | 92.1% | 49.5% |
MalcolmBrogdon | 18-19 | 54.4% | 42.6% | 92.8% | 50.5% |
StephenCurry (4) | 18-19 | 52.5% | 43.7% | 91.6% | 47.2% |
KhrisMiddleton | 19-20 | 54.6% | 41.5% | 91.6% | 49.7% |
Kyrie%Irving (2) | 20-21 | 56.1% | 40.2% | 92.2% | 50.6% |
StephenCurry (5) | 20-21 | 56.9% | 42.1% | 91.6% | 48.2% |
New members of the Club are Chris Mullin, Peja Stojaković, José Calderón, Ray Allen, J.J. Redick (twice), CJ McCollum, and Khris Middleton. Club members to pick up extra seasons are Mark Price, Kyrie Irving, and Steph Curry, whose total went from one season to five. Number of members goes from nine to sixteen and number of seasons goes from thirteen to twenty-seven.
Is the new Club better than the old one?
To get a sense of how this new and improved Club lines up with the eye test, this article lists the fifteen greatest shooters of all time. Of the fifteen, seven are in the original 50-40-90 Club (missing just the two newest members). Our new criteria adds four more members to the Club from this list. An overlap of eleven between a list of fifteen and a list of sixteen is very strong, but let’s look at the exceptions.
The players we added not from this list
José Calderón, who would have had an old criteria 50-40-90 season in 2007-08 if he had simply taken more free throws. Also, the list is focused on the greatest three pointers, while Calderón was a free throw specialist, setting the NBA single season free throw percentage record at an unfathomable 98.1%, so I think it’s fair to say the man could shoot.
CJ McCollum and Khris Middleton are both still under 30, so in the same way that Brogdon and Irving aren’t included in the list, I think them making the Club does not diminish it. They still have a lot of career left, and they had some dang good seasons.
The players from the list who we did not add
Klay Thompson and Dražen Petrović, who never completed a 90% free throw season.
Kyle Korver, who is perhaps the greatest tragedy of the Club. He had a 50-40 year, a 50-90 year, and three 40-90 years, but he just couldn’t get them to line up. Truly a pity.
Steve Kerr, who never made enough free throws to qualify for free throw percentage. He famously has an unofficial 50-50-90 season, just not getting enough volume to qualify. That year, he shot 50.6% from the field, 51.5% from three, and 92.9% from the free throw line, one of the greatest shooting seasons of all time. You may have noticed something odd with that line. His three point percentage is higher than his field goal percentage. That’s right. He made more of his threes than his twos. In fact, that year on twos he shot 49.8%. Per our supposedly more forgiving criteria, he actually would have had the fabled 50-50-90 season taken away from him. What an oddball.
Efficiency Stats
Effective Field Goal Percentage (eFG%) and True Shooting Percentage (TS%) are advanced statistics that take into account added value from threes and/or high percentage free throws to better capture shooting efficiency. If we compare players who made it under the old criteria with the players who made it under the new criteria, they’re practically indistinguishable.
| eFG% | TS% | |
|---|---|---|
| Old Members | 57.2% | 62.5% |
| New Members | 57.4% | 62.2% |
Four of the top seven seasons by both eFG% and TS% are new additions, so there’s even new greatness among the greatness. All four of these are from Curry, which says as much about him as it does about the limitations of the current criteria. Steve Nash bagged four 50-40-90s without making 200 threes in a season or averaging 20 points. Curry has done both eight times. And he has a higher career 3P%, 2P%, and FT%. For him to miss four additional 50-40-90 seasons because he took too many threes is malarkey.
Furthermore, the number of 50-40-90 seasons since 2014 has jumped from three to twelve, which better reflects how much better shooting is in this era than any previous one.
This Club does a better job than the old one of cataloguing great shooting seasons, and it’s not because it’s too lenient, it’s because it better reflects what we’re trying to capture: phenomenal shooting.
So Adam Silver, I call upon you to change the definition of an informal statistic to make it the way I want it to be. Thank you in advance.
Great piece. I also look at it from a slightly different angle: who from the CURRENT list would be excluded if they took as many 3s as Steph Curry does? Unless I’m overlooking someone, if you project all of the shooting percentages (3s and 2s) to a situation in which the player attempts more 3s than 2s, then ONLY Curry 2015-16 would remain a member.
Why this matters: generally, all of these players would’ve helped their teams if they could’ve attempted more 3s, all things being equal. E.g., if you shoot 40% from 3s and 52% from 2s, then your expected points per attempt is higher on the 3s. So for a player to be a member of the “club” while taking few 3s DIRECTLY rewards them with a distinction for hurting their team, i.e., for taking a small enough number of 3s to avoid hurting their overall FG%. That seems perverse.
One of the most perverse results is Curry not being in the club in 2020-21 while Irving is, because of Curry’s sub-50% FG%… even though Curry did better than Irving in BOTH 2s AND 3s. Irving is in it over Curry ONLY because Irving kept his 3pt attempts low enough not to harm his overall FG%, even though his 3pt attempts were more valuable than his 2pt attempts.
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