If you ever wondered if James Harden's reported love for the strip clubs has impacted his play on the court, redditor AngryCentrist has revealed the findings of his investigation into exactly that.
To determine whether there was a direct correlation between Harden's performance and the quality of the strip clubs in each city the Rockets visit, AngryCentrist came up with a detailed formula using stats from the past four seasons such as Points, FG%, 3PT%, FT%, Assists and Turnovers. He then cross-referenced those stats with the quality of strip clubs in each city.
"City Strip Club Rating was determined by the average google review rating for the first 10 strip clubs in each city based on the google search “[CITY] Strip Clubs” (e.g., “Detroit Strip clubs”)."
"I put the City Strip Club Rating into the pivoted game log data, performed a regression analysis and visualized it into charts."
The findings of this important investigation determined that Harden’s best performance comes in city with the worst strip clubs - Toronto, while his worst performance comes in city with the best strip clubs - Miami. As a whole, AngryCentrist concludes that there is a "moderate-to-strong correlation" between the dip in Harden's performance and cities with higher-rated strip clubs.
If you want to do a deep dive on how the quality of strip clubs impact Harden's stats in each city - click here.