As one can see via the above link, part of this week’s conversation is the following sentence and picture:
Cut to the final scene of Braveheart, with Dave Berri as William Wallace, shouting “Scoring is vastly overrated!” as he fades away to blackness.
To find out what that means (if anything), spend a bit of your Sunday reading Beckley Mason (previously linked to here) and Ethan Sherwood (previously linked to here).
– DJ
Posted in: Basketball Stories
Wages of Wins Journal 
philos
October 10, 2010
Interestingly, fantasy basketball is one avenue where scoring tends to overrated as well, at least by the less experienced fantasy baller. In fact, the way I see it, WP would probably be a good metric for fantasy ball. The only difference I see is minutes. Minutes is a lot more important in fantasy than in WP. Any of you guys have a ranking of players using WP that disregards per minute numbers? I wonder how that would look.
evanz
October 10, 2010
@philos
It’s WP48. Check out Andres Alvarez’s site:
http://www.permanent-sketch.com/WinsProduced/Main.html
arturogalletti
October 10, 2010
Philos,
You’re looking for Wins Produced (not WP48). Go to the Wins Produced Numbers from Andres Alvarez page and sort by wins produced.
philos
October 10, 2010
Thanks Evanz and Arturo… Any of you play fantasy ball? Would u use WP to form your team? I’m thinking of trying it out this year.
Joe
October 10, 2010
Philos,
basketballmonster.com may help you out. It will help you create your rankings based on past performance and your league settings.
Darrin Thompson
October 11, 2010
Since I don’t see a regular old forum anywhere I’ll ask my question on this post since it seems kind of general.
I wrote myself a little program to scrape an nba.com box score and calculate win score and win score per minute. I ran it on two Pacer’s preseason games. I could see that looking at WS for two preason games Hansbrough and McRoberts look really good and Granger looks lousy, far worse than I expected.
So now what? I have a bunch of new questions now.
Are McRoberts and TH having average games or good games? I assume WS only ranks players for a particular game. Right?
Assuming TH and McBobs continue to get minutes in the regular season, can I expect them to continue to play well?
If I’m at a game and I yell at JOB to “Put McBobs in!” can I be smug in the assumption that I’m right about it or should I have dark inner doubts? How do other fans handle this?
If I am right, because I’ve done a basic statistical analysis, how do I distill that into a soundbite for screaming at JOB, possibly to help him make a better call? I think other fans have tried profanity and I think we can agree without any analysis that this isn’t working at all.
It’s clear from my analysis that Danny Granger needs to work on his shooting efficiency. If I do get to a game, how can I make sure Danny gets the message? As stated earlier, the yelling of profanity hasn’t helped much historically speaking. Creepy stalking is out too.
Seriously, has anyone posted a boiled down wins produced formula or something that can weight win scores between games and/or teams?
What do I do with my new knowledge? Gripe about management on a blog? Some people totally beat me to that…
nerdnumbers
October 11, 2010
Darrin,
Awesome work! Mosi of the Miami Heat Index has done some stuff like this for Olympic games and playoff games. If you hit up his site you can ping him direct for a lot of questions.
The games question is a really good one. The automated site (www.permanent-sketch.com) evaluates players using the Wins Produced methodology which compares a player against the entire population of similar players for the season. Once enough of the season has been played, you can use that. Or you can use the general averages for each position. (I forget the exact ones for Win Score)
Preseason games for existing talent is less reliable than previous season data. So looking back at how players played last year is a good idea.
In terms of getting your message heard, the blog route is actually pretty good. DJ has been mentioned many times by GMs that seem to not use his message, and Arturo was mentioned direct by the Wizards owner. At this point there are tons of sports blogs but stats heavy ones are still in the minority and the Wins Produces /Wins Score ones are in the minority of those. . . .
Bill Gish
October 12, 2010
Philos, I have a fantasy league at PASPN.net where I am currently adding WP48 to a database I have that already has that site’s scoring scheme.
It’s a keeper league so I am using last year’s data and will be able to directly relate WP48 to fantasy wins
I plan to write a blog entry about it on my blog N’Awlins Hoops:
http://nawlinshoops.blogspot.com/
Check it in a week or two.
I thought I was the only one crazy enough to relate WP48 to fantasy wins!
Great minds…