Last night, the AP reports, New Orleans Hornets star Chris Paul "narrowly missed a rare quadruple double."
No, he didn't. Chris Paul got nowhere even remotely close to a quadruple double.
These are the numbers: 33 points, 11 assists, 10 rebounds, and...7 steals.
Seven is not 10. Seven is only 70 percent of 10. Chris Paul narrowly missed a quadruple double in the same sense that I narrowly miss being eight and a half feet tall.
There are plenty of other ways to do the numbers. You could start with the fact that Chris Paul has never gotten 10 steals in a game in his whole career. Or the fact that 17 times this season, he has gotten less than 3 steals in an entire game (3 steals being the difference between 7 steals and a double-digit number of steals). And Chris Paul is good at stealing the ball!
Quadruple doubles are rare because, after points, rebounds, and assists, it's really hard to get 10 of anything else in basketball game. Ten blocks is a monster game--it's happened fewer than 100 times since the league started counting blocked shots. As for 10 steals, well, the all-time record for a game is only 11.
Triple doubles are tough enough to begin with, and just as susceptible to bullshit. Paul himself is something of a master of the "near triple double." (The king of the non-accomplishment would probably be LeBron James.)
Attention, sportswriters! Here's what counts as nearly getting a triple double: when a guy gets at least 10 in two categories, and 9 in another. Less than that, and what you have is a "nice game."
Oh, and please shut up about the "double double," especially for big men. You know what getting 10 points and 10 rebounds was called before somebody invented the "double double"? It was called doing your fucking job.
