Yesterday I noted on our homepage (Wages of Wins) that two more reviews of The Wages of Wins have appeared. Since I am not sure if people are consistently looking at our home page, I thought I would note these reviews in this forum.
Allen R. Sanderson of the University of Chicago has reviewed our book for Choice. Sanderson’s short review has been added to the Reviews section, located on our homepage and at in the Review page posted above.
In December, John Bundell reviewed our book for Economic Affairs. We can’t reproduce the entire review, but here are the last three paragraphs:
“So are payrolls and wins highly correlated? Do strikes/lockouts impact on future attendance? Do current structures give competitive balance? Are tall people in ‘short’ supply? Do fans care about competitive balance? Does ‘star power’ bring in fans? Do ‘better’ players make their team-mates ‘better’? Do great players lift their games to higher levels when the games matter more? Buy the book and find out the answer to these and many other great questions. It’s 100% American but suggest various UK research questions. And in buying the book you will also be sending a signal to the market that we want good, interesting, accessible economics that explains the world around us and makes us see it in a different, better way.” – John Bundell, Director General, Institute of Economic Affairs
[John Blundell (2006). Review Special: THE WAGES OF WINS: TAKING MEASURE OF THE MANY MYTHS IN MODERN SPORT – by David J. Berri, Martin B. Schmidt and Stacey L. Brook. Economic Affairs 26 (4), 94–94. doi:10.1111/j.1468-0270.2006.682_5.x]
Analyzing the NBA in 2006-07
In addition to these reviews, the page entitled NBA Analysis: 2006-07 has been updated. All of the mid-season analysis has been listed. Additionally, the list of teams that have been examined has been updated.
At this point, these six teams have not been analyzed: Atlanta, Denver, Miami, Milwaukee, New Orleans/Oklahoma City, and Philadelphia.
As noted yesterday, I am going to examine the ability of the Heat to Repeat next. After my discussion of the Heat, I plan on discussing the Hornets, Hawks, and Bucks (in that order). Finally, I will review the two teams involved in the biggest trade of the year (thus far), the Nuggets and 76ers.
When the Nuggets and 76ers are reviewed, a comment on every team will have been posted. After that, I guess I could go back and look at any specific team. Again, I am open to requests. So please let me know which teams you wish me to look at again.
– DJ
Wages of Wins Journal 
anon
February 13, 2007
Bulls. There have considerable shifts in minutes for some players since you last analyzed them.
Will
February 13, 2007
Is there a website that provides updated WP48 statistics for each NBA player over the course of the NBA season? Preferably updated daily, but beggars can’t be choosers.
dberri
February 13, 2007
anon,
I agree. The Bulls would be a good team to look at again.
Will,
I would love to see something like this. Any volunteers?
Ben Guest
February 13, 2007
How about the Celtics, now that the kids are playing more?
dberri
February 13, 2007
Ben,
I can look at the Celtics after the Bulls. Hopefully by the time I get to the Celtics they will have won again.
Rashad
February 14, 2007
As long as you’re taking article requests, I would love an individual look at the winscores of a few of your overrated and underrated picks, picking out just where the mainstream view differs from winscore. i.e. Kobe Bryant is good, but his turnovers hurt him, or Gilbert Arenas doesn’t rebound enough and shoots too low a percentage. Things like that.
Rashad
Jon
February 15, 2007
The Raptors seem a good choice to redo since they’ve turned their season around dramatically since December. You wrote back then that you could not see any improvement of their record of last year (27-55). The Raptors are now 29-24 and going strong – what happened? I would argue that your formulas are good at measuring past performance but not useful when predicting future performance or things like team chemistry and player (especially rookie) potential.
dberri
February 15, 2007
Rashad,
I will try and do more on this at the end when I talk about overrated and underrated again. A few more details on why would probably help.
Jon,
I disagree that the statistics are not useful at projecting the future. In basketball, statistics have more predictive power than what we see in baseball and football. That being said, you cannot expect any forecast to be perfect. If that were the case, why bother playing the games? We could just look at the numbers, then “know” the outcomes, and simply go home.
Jon
February 16, 2007
David,
Thanks for answering my comment (allow me to add I’m a big fan of both you and the website).
I think you’re being a bit facetious when you say the system isn’t perfect. I don’t expect the system to be perfect (no system is). I do think that there are serious limitations on the system’s predictive power since past performance does not always correlate well with future performance, especially early in a player’s career (and in some cases not at all). The “right situation” has a huge impact on player performance, whether that situation is a coach, system, or the players around him. That’s why I feel that although your formulas are great at evaluating performance, they tend to fall short when it comes to predicting performance, which is a far more subjective expertise.
I would love to be proven wrong – please explain what has happened since you wrote this in December: “Given these moves [by the Raptors in the offseason], it is hard to see how this team improves dramatically next season over what it did last year. If Bargnani is the real deal, though, the team would have two building blocks in place for the future. ”
You’ve already argued that Bargnani is a bad rookie in past posts – why are the Raptors now 29-24 (2 more wins than all of last year)? What happened that the numbers couldn’t predict?
dberri
February 16, 2007
Hi Jon,
Okay, you got me curious.
NBA.com has not updated the data for the last game, so I am looking at data after 52 games (when the team was 28-24). If you look at points scored and points surrendered you see that after 52 games this team had outscored their opponents by 10 points for the season. In other words, they had scored about as much as they gave up, which means the Raptors are the equivalent of a .500 team.
If you look at the roster, where did these 26 wins come from? The key players are Chris Bosh (6.7 WP), Anthony Parker (5.1 WP), Jose Calderon (5.0 WP), T.J. Ford (3.9 WP), and Morris Peterson (3.3 WP). Of these five, Bosh, Ford, and Peterson are all improved, although the difference is not that great.
The key appears to be Calderon and Parker. Calderon has produced three more wins this year than we would expect given what he did his rookie season. Parker would have been impossible to forecast, since he has not been in the NBA for years (and didn’t play much when he was).
If you take away these improvements the Raptors would be about 12 games below 0.500. But with Calderon improving (and it is not unusual to see a player improve from his first to second year), and the addition of Parker, this team is now a playoff team (albeit in the East).
Hope that helps. Again, I hope we do not get to a point where we can predict outcomes in the NBA perfectly. Still, I think we can have a pretty good idea where a team will be given the past performance of the players. And when the forecast is off, we can also go through the numbers and see which players specifically improved (or got worse).
Jon
February 16, 2007
Great answer and much appreciated. So Calderon and Parker are the keys to their improved performance. This makes sense from a viewer’s perspective and is backed up by the stats available on 82games.com which gives the lineup of Calderon, Parker, Bosh, Garbajosa and Nesterovich as their most productive (+42 in +/-). Thanks again for taking the time – let’s hope Bargnani improves as much from year one to year two as Calderon did.
Charles Follymacher
February 17, 2007
Calderon is definitely the difference (I was a fool to let him go in a trade a month or so ago). He’s definitely a much different player, grown so much and it seems to have come from nowhere. Last year he was so shaky and kind of wild, this year he looks like the poor man’s Nash (at least assist-wise). Crazy, but that’s why they play the games.