Was “all Blake Griffin does is dunk” a true statement?

Blake Griffin with no doubt was a dunking machine in his early NBA seasons. This became even more obvious with the Clippers acquisition of Chris Paul in late 2011.

Highly talented in ball handling, passing and scoring of the dribble, it was terms like “All Blake Griffin does is dunk” from opposition fans that irked the Clippers faithful.

Let’s test this notion by seeing what percentage of points were infact scored from dunks by Blake Griffin.

The data includes regular season and playoffs from 2010-11 through to 2016-17 conclusion.

Obtaining this data was done firstly player boxscores to get total points, FGM and FGA and then Play by Play data to turn the FGM and FGA into Dunks, Layup and Alley-Oops.

I included a layup aspect simply because in some instances a layup can appear as a dunk and/or it is a similar action which can help promote the saying “all he does is dunk”.

Tallies

Blake Griffin points dunk tallies
Points and dunk tallies

Blake Griffin points dunk tallies chart

The 2011-12 NBA season brought Griffin his highest tally of dunks. Averaging 2.83 dunks per game. Infamously as the first few seasons past and Griffin started to gain injuries his dunk counts dropped away.

Percentages

Blake Griffin percent dunks
Percentage from dunks

Blake Griffin percent dunks chart

27.6% was the greatest percentage of points being from dunks in a single season by Blake Griffin. This was done in both 2011-12 and 2012-13 season. 2011-12 had 38.3% of points being from dunks and layups.

In his first 3 NBA seasons, Blake Griffin roughly averaged a quarter of his points scored from dunks.

Without looking at other avenues for his scoring aside from dunks and layups, having 25% plus of scoring output from just dunking says a lot.

However clearly dunking was not all Griffin did, he scored the other 75% of his points shooting jumpers, tip-ins or free throws.

If I did dunks, putbacks and layups for Deandre Jordan from these same seasons it’d look a lot more predictable and at a higher percentage. The obvious truth was Deandre Jordan did not shoot jump shots. Blake Griffin did and he also dunked a lot, still two different play types.

Blake Griffins scoring in his early seasons included a lot of dunks however terms referring to him “only dunking” arent factual.