Like NBA father, like NBA son?
There's a theme to this week's mailbag, which answers questions about the league's legacy players. First, we take a look at how similar fathers who played in the NBA are to their sons who have reached the league, using sibling duos as a point of comparison.
Which father and son duos are most alike? Which are most different? And which traits tend to carry over the most from one generation to the next?
Then we take a look at how much more likely these kinds of relationships are in basketball, where having a parent who played professionally dramatically increases the child's chances of playing in the NBA.
Finally, I answer a question about whether point differential holds its predictive power when it comes to team records at the extremes given the outlier performances we've seen from two teams over the past two seasons.
Throughout the NBA season, I answer your questions about the latest, most interesting topics in basketball. You can tweet me directly at @kpelton, tweet your questions using the hashtag #peltonmailbag or email them to peltonmailbag@gmail.com.
"Do NBA fathers and sons often have similar strengths? thinking about Seth, Steph and Dell Curry all being great shooters or Gary Payton 1 and 2 being excellent defenders"
-- @dew89
Thanks to Basketball-Reference.com generously supplying the data it tracks on NBA relatives, I was able to answer this question by calculating the similarity scores between stats for all sets of fathers and sons who both played at least 500 NBA minutes since individual turnovers were first tracked in 1977-78.
