John Stockton is inarguably one of the great point guards in NBA history. He was a 10-time All-Star who made 11 All-NBA teams and was well-deserving of a Hall of Fame induction. He didn’t need the help of scorekeepers to create one of the best resumes of all time. He might have gotten it anyway.
Stockton’s 15,806 career assist total is considered one of the league’s unbreakable records. In his 19th season, Chris Paul moved into second place on the all-time assist list with his 12,092nd assist. Paul would have to average 10 assists and play in all 82 regular season games until he is 44 years old to pass Stockton.
That obviously isn’t happening, so Stockton’s record will be safe for at least the next 20 years. The bigger threat to Stockton’s record is the accusation that his assists were padded throughout his career.
“Ain’t nobody catching that,” Paul said about Stockton’s record in 2019. “I don’t know who the statisticians were, who used to do the stats in Utah, but ain’t nobody catching that.”
Paul walked back that statement a few days later, stating that “people misconstrued what I said last time about John Stockton. His record will never be broken because he was so durable.”
Paul is far from the only one to suggest that there may have been some generous accounting practices in Stockton’s era. Those accusations have been around for decades, and there is some truth to them. A former NBA scorekeeper during Stockton’s era once told Deadspin that “the Jazz guys were pretty open about their liberalities. … John Stockton averaged 10 assists. Is that legit? It’s legit because they entered it. If he’s another guy, would he get 10? Probably not.”
Alex Rucker, another former NBA scorekeeper from that era, told the Pablo Torre Finds Out show that he and his peers were trained to “support or reinforce stars, and excitement, and fun” and be generous with how they doled out subjective stats like assists.
“They’d show us a Stockton and Malone clip,” Rucker told Torre. “To me, there’s no causal connection between the pass and the basket. The majority opinion by a mile was, ‘Oh no, that’s definitely an assist. That’s John Stockton.'”
We know that Stockton did get some stat inflation. But how bad was it and would he still have the record over Paul if we adjust for it?
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John Stockton stat-padding controversy, explained
The biggest criticism of Stockton’s assist numbers is the massive split between his home and road assist averages. He averaged 10.9 assists per game in Utah compared to 10.1 on the road.
That looks like pretty damning evidence of home-scoring bias. And there is some merit to that argument.
There is room for interpretation in the league’s definition of an assist, “a pass which leads directly to a basket.” The Jazz’s long-time scorekeeper John Allen addressed those judgment calls in an interview with the Spokesman-Review in 1995.
“The NBA will allow a dribble and a fake or two, and then the shot has to go in,” said Allen. “The leeway is, ‘What is directly?’ I just try to be consistent with the Jazz and the opponent.”
While Stockton might have benefited from a friendly home scorekeeper, that phenomenon isn’t particularly unique to him.
The effect for Paul isn’t as large, but he averages 9.6 assists at home and 9.0 on the road over his career. Jason Kidd, in third place on the all-time list, benefited even more than Stockton did, averaging a full assist more at home versus on the road.
The home bias isn’t enough to come even close to taking Stockton’s record away from him. Even if we only used his lower road assist average of 10.1 per game, he’d still have over 3,000 more assists than anyone else in NBA history.
The home bias was real, but it wasn’t nearly severe enough to de-legitimize his record.
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How generous scorekeeping impacts Chris Paul’s hunt for assists record
The other claim made by Rucker and other scorekeepers of that era was that Stockton was awarded way-too-generous assists both at home and on the road to promote the stars of the league.
I went back and looked at several of Stockton’s top assist games that are still available on YouTube. There were some pretty egregious fake assists sprinkled in there.
This one, for instance, was counted as assist No. 18 during his career-high 28-assist performance:
Plays like that existed but were surprisingly few and far between. Of the hundred or so Stockton assists I watched, only a handful were controversial. Even fewer were flat-out incorrectly scored like the one above.
The number of fake assists was easily less than five percent of the plays I watched. If we took away five percent of Stockton’s career total, he’d still be 2,900 ahead of Paul. If we both used Stockton’s road assist average and took away five percent of that total, he’d still clear Paul by 1,400 assists.
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Stockton’s assist total is unassailable. He had a great coach in Jerry Sloan to get him those numbers. The Jazz made the playoffs every year of his career and were usually a top offense. Many of his assists came from playing within Sloan’s Flex offense, a movement and pass-heavy system that led to a ton of midrange jump shots or good post position for players like Karl Malone.
The assists that Stockton recorded weren’t usually flashy and didn’t generate particularly superb looks. He would often throw a basic post entry pass and let Malone go to work. You can certainly quibble if those are assists in spirit, but they’re still scored that way today.
The big reason Stockton has the assist record is because he was an ironman throughout his NBA career, as Paul noted. He only missed 22 games over 19 seasons, including zero during the last four years of his career between the ages of 37 and 40.
No matter how you cut it, Stockton’s assist record stands up to scrutiny. He had great court vision, played in a pass-heavy system with one of the best finishers of all time and most importantly, his toughness was remarkable.
Stockton may not have gotten 15,806 assists in his career. Even so, he’s still several thousand ahead of anyone else.
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