In the April 23rd issue of Sports Illustrated is the following brief story (it appears on page 24):
Title: The Wages of Win
Subtitle: Breaking Story – Money Doesn’t Buy Happiness, NBA Titles
Story: The last six NBA champions have had two things in common. They’ve played outstanding basketball, and they’ve been relatively frugal. Since the 2000-01 season, the team that won the title had a total payroll right around the league average. Big spenders haven’t fared nearly as well. No team with the league’s highest total salary has won a playoff series since Portland in 2000. (In three of the past five years the team with the highest payroll has missed the playoffs — that’d be New York each time.) There’s a solid chance that that trend will be bucked this year: The Suns, the No. 2 seed in the West, had basketball’s priciest roster.
That’s the entire story. There is no author listed, although my wife thinks I wrote this and forgot. Pretty sure that’s not true.
The story, though, does sound like something straight out of The Wages of Wins (except we say “Wins” and this story said “Win”). But there is no mention of our book in the short story. Was this story inspired by our book? One suspects this is true, but it’s hard to know for sure.
By the way, I know I said I wasn’t going to post for 12 days. The one exception to my hiatus is a major publication writing something that appears to be inspired by The Wages of Wins. Assuming this doesn’t happen again, I will be back to regular posting in May.
– DJ
Wages of Wins Journal 
Kevin Pelton
April 23, 2007
I hate to take this slightly off-topic, but did SI really say the Suns had the NBA’s highest payroll? I don’t know of any evidence that indicates this to be the case. New York pretty clearly again has the league’s highest payroll, and Phoenix seems to be around six or seven.
Now Dallas, that’s a slightly different story.
dberri
April 23, 2007
Kevin,
USA Today, looking just at who was on the final roster, has Phoenix with a higher payroll then New York. That is where I presume SI got the data. They didn’t cite USA Today either.
I am curious about your take on this story. It says Wages of Win. Offers analysis similar to what we do. But it doesn’t mention us at all.
I am not at all sure how to take that and I am wondering what other people think.
Owen
April 23, 2007
It’s ridiculous they used the wages of wins in the title of the item and didnt credit you guys. I can only think some overzealous editor cut the item down at the last minute…
dberri
April 23, 2007
Owen,
See, I am not sure what happened. We have an article that both imitates our title and the essence of our story, without exactly copying.
A few months ago a New York paper ran a story on estimating the economic value of actors. In the story the author said “we are going to take The Wages of Wins approach.” Now we never talk about actors or movies. But apparently, as my editor at Stanford noted, the author of the article thought “The Wages of Wins” was so much a part of common knowledge that people would know what that meant. Perhaps the SI article is on a similar foundation. There is no need to site because people know what “Wages of Wins” means.
Of course, I think this is only true in New York. Few people in Bakersfield have a clue what “The Wages of Wins” means.
All in all, I am a bit confused. Did SI just steal our basic idea? That seems hard to believe since they have mentioned the book more than once. Or is this just imitation? Its a puzzle.
Again, if anyone has any ideas, pass them along.
JCB
April 24, 2007
When you move from Coase (1960) to The Coase Theorem, you’ve made it. :-)
John
April 24, 2007
Dear WoW,
I spend a good part of my day (particularly while sitting in my office at a bank) debating the members of my various fantasy sports leagues on WoW. Now, most of them don’t like it. One of them suggested the reason you were so accurate (100% accurate) on the Sixers record post-Iverson is because their schedule got easier. Yeah… I suppose the final 58 games were easier, and you guys noticed. So I guess he’s got you there.
I suspect that most WoW’s critics simply do not understand statistics. They look at statistics the same way global warming skeptics look at scientists. Just some whacko left-wingers trying to ruin America. They equate an opinion based on science and math to their opinion which is heavenly influenced by what they want to believe. They can’t refute the stats because they don’t understand them, and they don’t want to understand them. They use the “laugh test” because it’s all they have.
Anyway… I did think of a scenario where WoW would not be very accurate. Say a star WoW player like Shawn Marion had a typical Marion-esque game with excellent WoW stats, however, he also made 10 field goals in the opposing teams basket. I would guess those aren’t TO’s as his team would get the ball back. Marion’s WoW stats would suggest he had an excellent game, when in fact he would have scored twenty-something points for the opposing team! How does WoW account for that?!!? HA
Imagine if he did that every game of the season! WoW wouldn’t be so accurate would it?
Kevin Pelton
April 24, 2007
Ah, I see that USA Today is counting all of Jalen Rose’s salary to Phoenix, when in fact the Knicks are paying the vast majority of it. That’s not the way I would do it.
I don’t think I want to comment on the article without having seen the context in the magazine itself. I’ll have to dig up a copy.
Jason
April 24, 2007
I’d write a letter, noting instances when SI had previously mentioned. It looks very much like plagiarism to me.
As for salaries: The fact that USAToday reports Phoenix as the highest salaried team is, in any real sense, false. However it does expose some of the strangeness that is the NBA player salary market.
The USAToday is adding up the total compensation of players on a roster. This doesn’t include players who have been released but are still being paid by the team *AND* still count against the team’s salary cap and lux tax threshold. For instance, Philly was still on the books for about $20 million for Webber and will be next year as well. They will not have cap room accordingly and will pay some lux tax on his salary as well. He does not show up in the USAToday’s figures associated with Philly. Meanwhile, Jalen Rose shows up as getting $18million in their salary summary. He is getting that much money, but not from Phoenix. He costs Phoenix about $1.5million. The rest is still being paid by New York and counts against their bottom line, their lux tax, their salary cap.
So the numbers from USAToday don’t mean much at all if you’re trying to compare what teams spend vs. what they get in return. I wouldn’t use the USAToday’s salaries for any research about sports economics. It’s quite clearly error-ific to the point of being worthless.
On a related topic, rather than just look at what is spent vs. what a team gets, I think it’s very interesting *how* team salaries get to be what they are. With the cap, a team cannot simply go out and decide to outspend the Knicks immediately, even if the owner wanted to. Rather, because of the cap rules, to get salaries up, teams must give big raises to players on their roster and trade short term contracts for long term contracts that increase in value. Of course, once a team has started to spend money, it cannot simply decide to stop either until the contracts expire or they can find a trading partner willing to assume the contracts.
While it’s interesting to note that expenditures don’t correlate well with wins, *why* this is the case is somewhat different and simply noting that high salaries aren’t correlated with wins well doesn’t necessarily mean that in the future spending more won’t help. It may be that once the wasted money is written off, the *change* in expenditures from year to year may correlate with a change in victory totals. That seems to be one of two realistic choices for a team that has in the past made bad salary decisions (the other being to wait out and try to move the bad contracts and start fresh, usually without any talent to show for it) . But I don’t have the data to support or reject this at all, and USAToday’s grossly errant data won’t help here.
Owen
April 24, 2007
I nominate Jason for MVP, most valuable poster…
dberri
April 24, 2007
Jason is very skilled. Maybe he should be a guest poster.
Jason
April 24, 2007
Thanks much for the kind words.
Hmmm. If I can come up with something interesting, I’ll give it a go. I too should spend more time at my day job, but at least for the next couple weeks, I should, with all good fortune be internet-less as I’ll be on vacation far, far away.
dberri
April 24, 2007
Jason,
I take it your semester is ending. We still have a few weeks left of our spring quarter. Quarters are great in September, but now they are less fun. Enjoy your vacation.