In search of the worst shot-blockers

A rare sight: Here's former Cav Drew Gooden (now with the Bucks) blocking a shot. (Getty Images)

In scanning Bucksketball this morning, I noticed that author Jeremy Schmidt seemed inordinately pleased that Drew Gooden is averaging exactly one block per game in the preseason. That doesn’t seem like so much to ask for a 6-foot-10 guy who is a relatively good athlete, but it turns out Gooden has never averaged one block per game in any season despite playing significant minutes for most of his career.

That got me thinking: Who are some of the worst shot-blockers in the league? There are a ton of ways to go about answering this question, but here’s a simple one: Which players 6-10 or taller block the fewest shots? This, of course, is completely unscientific, since plenty of guys shorter than 6-10 are more likely to be good shot-blockers than some of these giants for various reasons, including athleticism and the role individual guys play on particular teams.

In any case, with Gooden’s numbers as our baseline, I ran a search on Basketball-Reference for every player 6-10 or taller who logged at least 1,000 minutes in any season since 2005 and had fewer than 0.7 blocks per game (Gooden’s career average). Here are the Drew Gooden All-Stars, based on the number of times they appeared on this list:

Hedo Turkoglu (5)
Troy Murphy (5)
Rashard Lewis (5)
Jeff Foster (4)
Jared Jeffries (4)
Zaza Pachulia (4)
Chris Wilcox (4)
Matt Bonner (3)
Jason Collins (3)
Drew Gooden (3)
Brad Miller (3)
Tim Thomas (3)
Vlad Radmanovic (3)

Again, this is quite simplistic and done in jest only. Determining the true winner of the Worst Shot-Blocker in Recent NBA History title would require much more work. It clearly isn’t Turkoglu, for instance, since he spent much of this time on the perimeter defending small forwards. And perhaps we can forgive Lewis’ lack of rejections, since he knows his job on defense is to keep his man in front of him and direct shot-blocking opportunities to Dwight Howard.

Some guys — such as Wilcox — barely cracked the 1,000-minute threshold, so they are at a natural disadvantage when we look at blocks per game.

We can take the first baby step to correcting this problem by upping our minutes requirement to 2,000 and changing our search criteria to any player who rejected one shot or fewer per 36 minutes (again, Gooden’s career average) over the same time frame. That search returns just 56 player seasons (as compared with the 102 in our initial search), with the following “leaders”:

Dirk Nowitzki (5)
Rashard Lewis (5)
Hedo Turkoglu (5)
Lamar Odom (4)
Mehmet Okur (4)
Troy Murphy (4)
Chris Bosh (3)
Drew Gooden (3)

So we’ve got some new names (Chris Bosh!) and some substantial overlap. Have we come close to finding the league’s worst shot-blocker? Are there any names that don’t appear on either list that belong in this discussion? Fill me in.