Yesterday Andrew Zimbalist (fellow sports economist), Russell Adams (sports writer for the Wall Street Journal) and I were guests on the Midmorning Show (hosted by Keri Miller) on Minnesota Public Radio. The topic of our conversation was “Coaches and Compensation” (if you follow the previous link you can listen). This was an unusual talk show, […]
The New York Knicks in 2005-06 were expensive failures. Given a very large budget, Isiah Thomas went into the market and purchased every scorer he could lay his hands upon. His team of expensive scorers, though, could not win [as previously noted HERE and HERE and HERE and HERE]. This past summer, Isiah appeared to […]
On Labor Day I posted a column entitled “Labor Day Thoughts”, which focused on how the NCAA exploits college athletes. On November 16th – at the Sports Economist – I posted a column entitled “The Purpose of College Athletics” which questioned the argument NCAA president Myles Brand offered that the NCAA’s primary purpose is the […]
Note: This is re-posted from The Sports Economist: For Martin Luther King Day, Gregory Mankiw has published an excerpt from his textbook at his blog. The excerpt details research on the extent of discrimination in the NBA. Unfortunately, the latest study Mankiw lists comes from 1990. Last year The Handbook of Sports Economics Research (edited […]
Growing up my favorite football players were the running backs. Earl Campbell, Tony Dorsett, and Walter Payton topped the list for me in the mid-1970s. And then – as a Lions fan — Billy Sims in the early 1980s and Barry Sanders in the latter part of that decade became my favorites. We all know […]
Last September I noted the following quote from Richard Peddie [President and CEO of Maple Leafs Sports & Entertainment Ltd., which owns both the Toronto Maple Leafs and the Toronto Raptors]: “I’m a great believer in continuous learning. I do it mostly through reading. I devote at least an hour a day to reading, although […]
Thus far this season the best team in the Eastern Conference is the Cleveland Cavaliers. With a record of 22-13, this team looks like it is on pace to win around 51 or 52 games. Last year this team won 50 games and it was not the best in the East. So it’s clear the […]
If I were doing what I said I would do, the next team to be analyzed would be the Toronto Raptors. Yesterday, though, an immense number of requests (okay, four) came in for a comment on the Boston Celtics. So last night I looked at the 2006-07 edition of the franchise that still leads the […]
The day after Christmas I posted a column on the Best Teams in the NBA. At the end of this column I indicated that I was willing to comment on any NBA team people wished to hear about. Surprisingly people took me up on this offer and made requests. With yesterday’s post on the Washington […]
Production is defined as the transformation of inputs into output(s) [That’s a really bad lead sentence. I assure you this column gets better]. In basketball, the output we frequently focus on is wins. Inputs can be defined in terms of position — point guard, shooting guard, small forward, power forward, and center. It can also […]
Wages of Wins Journal 
January 18, 2007 by dberri
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