An NBA Superfan found James Harden performs worse in cities with great strip clubs
Free-throw opportunities seem to fall into James Harden’s lap on the court. But what falls into his lap in certain NBA cities might be even more important.
A Redditor recently found a direct connection between Harden’s play in away games and the city’s quality of strip clubs. The better the Canadian Ballet, the worse the seven-time All-Star plays. And what city was found to have the best strippers? The 305.
Ryan Sullivan, whose handle is u/AngryCentrist, first decided to research the correlation after the Rockets’ 129-100 loss to the Miami Heat. By analyzing Harden’s performances in each of the NBA’s 28 cities over the past four seasons (Los Angeles has two teams and New York City was separated from Brooklyn), Sullivan determined two categories of poor production. Sub-par was used to classify Harden performed worse than his season averages while “very sub-par” categorized performances of at least 20-percent worse than his season averages.
“Poor performances were determined by variances in 6 stats,” Sullivan wrote on Reddit, “points, FG%, 3PT%, FT%, assists and turnovers.”
From there, he googled the name of each city with the term “strip club” and found the average review rating for the first 10 results. Lastly, Sullivan executed a regression analysis with Harden’s stats and the strip club rating to create a chart.
The results were astounding. According to the British Medical Journal, any correlation coefficient between 0.40-0.59 is usually considered a moderate association. The correlation coefficient determined through this analysis was .4575 or, in the Sullivan’s words, a “moderate-to-strong correlation.”
In addition to finding that Harden’s worst performances come in Miami, Sulivan discovered the Arizona State product’s best games come against the Toronto Raptors, ironically the city with the worst strip clubs.
Despite the findings, Harden is a baller. He’s been helping pay bills and dropping at least 29 on the Heat for the last four years.
