The Suns beat the Spurs yesterday on the road with a 121-107 comeback. In this campaign, Booker scored a season-high 48 points, 5 rebounds, 6 assists and 3 steals.
Booker is not the "strongest scorer of the new generation", and I would like to share some data and records with you in this issue.
This game is the 15th time in Booker's career to score 40+ points, equalizing the "little bully" Stoudemire and tied for the first place in the history of the Suns.
The Suns congratulated Booker on becoming the only player in Suns history to cut 45+5+5 multiple times.
There is another statistic that deserves our attention, which I would like to call "Booker's Law": Booker scored 20+ in the 10th half of the season (both in the first and second halves), during which the Suns won 10 wins and did not lose a single game. The last time Booker scored 20+ at halftime, it was the day before yesterday. In the past three games, Booker has averaged 37.7 points per game, 19 shots from mid-range, and hit 15 of them, shooting a whopping 79% from the field.
The Suns are the team with the highest shooting percentage (58.9 percent) shooting at key moments of the season (the last five minutes of the game, with a point difference of less than 5 points), and Booker is the most accurate player in key moments. According to statistics, Booker shot 63.6% in key moments, ranking first among all players who have made at least 20 shots.
It is worth mentioning that the 25-year-old Booker has scored 125 30+ times, trailing Jordan's 196 times in all the "shooting guards" of the same age group; Bryant (121) and Wade (86) are three or four.
Meanwhile, Booker is already the holder of multiple NBA records —
[1] The NBA's first playoff total scoring record holder. Booker made his first career playoff debut last season, scoring a total of 601 points throughout his playoff journey (not a single 7 in the series). In one fell swoop, the 521 points that had been sealed by Rick Barry (1967) for more than half a century were broken.
[2] The NBA's youngest Mr. 70 points. Bukda was only 20 years old and 145 days old. No ancients before, after... It's hard to have anyone! (Note: Booker is also the youngest Mr. 60))
[3] Youngest consecutive Mr. 50+ years, 22 years and 149 days. He is also the fifth player in NBA history to score at least 50 points in three single games before the age of 25, followed by Chamberlain, Rick Barry, Karim Abbadour Abdul-Jabbar and LeBron James. Only James was younger than Booker when he scored at least 50 points in three single games.
[4] The youngest Mr. "Billion Dollar". The Suns completed a contract extension with Booker in the 2018 offseason with a five-year contract totaling 158 million, the first billion yuan contract in the history of the Suns, and the under-22-year-old Booker also became the youngest Mr. Billion dollar in the league.
[5] The youngest 500 three-pointer winner.
[6] NBA Three-Point Contest Record Holder (28 points)
In addition, Booker is the 5th youngest Mr. 5000 in the NBA, the 7th youngest Mr. 10,000... Wait a minute. Booker is only 25 years old now, but he has already achieved so much.
Booker is the league's least valued and most underrated player — the All-Star can only be selected on injury. Various new scoring records have been slammed as "brushes"... That is, the team's dismal record in the past few years of his career has created the illusion that Booker is "not worthy of the name".
How many players in the league can match many NBA stars at the age of 25? Or even being an insurmountable mountain in itself?