Last year was a strange one for everybody, but Lou Williams took things to a whole new level when he was spotted violating COVID protocols at a strip club last July.
The LA Clippers guard was spotted in the strip club after being allowed to leave the NBA’s bio-secure bubble for a family funeral, and was subsequently handed a 10-day quarantine which forced him to miss two games.
Not only was he spotted breaking all the rules (he was at least wearing a mask distributed by the NBA inside the club) during a global pandemic, but he claimed on social media he was only there “to get hot wings”. Apparently, he is such a regular at Magic City in Atlanta that they really do have ‘Louwill Lemon Pepper BBQ’ wings named after Lou Williams on the menu. (We will refrain from comment on the notion of eating food at a strip club.) Despite his protestations, a dancer at the club confirmed she performed for Williams that night and said he tipped well.
In our quest to determine if there is a correlation between off the court activities and their effects on game performance, and if those correlations be used to make NBA picks, we decided Lou Williams would be a good candidate for this study.
Pickdawgz has analyzed the performances of Williams over a three-season period (2017-20) to see if off-court habits had any effect on his output for the Clippers or if his performances stayed the same, regardless of off-court distractions across the country.
To do this, we analyzed the top-rated clubs across various nightlife industries to calculate their effect on the performance of Williams.
By working out his average performance stats per game over the three-year period and the performances in each city he played in every year, every individual key statistic has been analyzed and compared to his overall averages for the period to consider whether he performed below or very below average in each city in each season.
A below average performance is anything below his overall average for each category (points per game, average field goal % and 3 point %) over the three year period, while a very below average performance is anything more than 20% below his average performance.
Williams is a point guard/shooting guard and in the past three years (2017-2020) with the Clippers, averages 20.06 points per game, has an average field goal % of 0.425 and an average 3 point % of 0.324, but how many times has he dipped below those averages, and is there a correlation with the quality of strip clubs in each city?
Our research tells us that his worst performances came in Dallas, Miami, Boston, Portland and Atlanta, where he recorded below average performances across the different categories on at least seven occasions in each city over the three-year spell.
Of these cities in which he performed worst in, Miami, Boston, Portland and Dallas are among the best cities in terms of average strip club rating, which suggests his on-court performance was inhibited by outside distractions.
Williams’ best performances came in Charlotte, Detroit and San Francisco where he exceeded his average performance numbers in every appearance across the three cities over the three-year period - and those three cities all rate among the lowest in the league for strip club ratings.
In Dallas, the city in which Williams performed the worst on average with five below par performances and four very below par performances, he did not manage to exceed his overall performance averages at any points.
His average points per game was 17.22 (compared to overall average of 20.06), field goal % was 0.357 (0.425) and 3 point % 0.274 (0.324) - showing that it really was his worst place in terms of performance.
In Atlanta, where he is a regular at Magic City, he also performs poorly at 18 PPG, a FG% of 0.350 and a 3P% of 0.166.
Were the patterns in form really related to partying too often and not focusing on his profession, or are they merely coincidence and he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time?
Only the man himself will know.
Methodology: The number of below average performances is worked out by assessing how many times Williams performed his cumulative average in each metric across every game. The very below-average performances came when Williams performed at least 20% worse in a performance metric in a game when compared to his season averages. The average nightclub rating has been calculated by using the review ratings of the top 10 Google results in each city.
