Editor’s Note: About a week ago I posted a story detailing how the Houston Rockets were defying the Pareto Principle. Teams tend to get between 70% to 80% of their wins from their top three players (i.e. about 80% of wins tend to come from 20% of the team’s roster). The Rockets, though, have been getting much more than 20% of their wins from the “rest of their roster” (i.e. players not in the top three on the team in Wins Produced). This discussion might have led someone to wonder, “how do other teams look with respect to the Pareto Principle?” As one can see below, Arturo Galletti – from Arturo’s Amazing Stats – has provided a quick answer (which originally appeared at Arturo’s Amazing Stats).
Andres Alvarez changed my life.
Let me explain. Back in April of last year, Prof. Berri had a contest. Pick the best Win Producer for a day and get a prize. I participated and built what I thought was a nifty tool in excel to aid me. Dre went out and gave us the power of Automated Wins Produced.
It’s more addictive to me than meth and posting batman images.
Oh God. They're making it more powerful.
He’s the one who kickstarted this blog by reducing the complexity of analysis by a few order of magnitudes. So you can all blame him for anything I do in the future or have done in the past in this space :-)
So, since he get’s a kick out of them, I decided to put up a visualization of the Automated Wins Produced for this season (as of an hour ago). The charts are:
- Done by conference
- Projected over an 82 Game season (for ease of reference)
- Show the Top three players for each team and the rest of the team.
The results are interesting:
Dre, I hope you enjoy this one and it inspires some more cool tools for us to play with. Which might inspire some more posts. Which might inspire some more tools ….
A delicious cycle (Image courtesy of xkcd.com)
Wages of Wins Journal 
Justin Wehr
February 12, 2011
Good to see some visualizations. I hope to see more on this blog.
One formatting note: I might suggest changing the color of the bars corresponding to “Rest of team” so we can more quickly see where the top three compare to the rest of team. Another way you could have presented it is by doing a stacked bar for the top 3 players next to a stacked bar (or single bar) for the rest of the team.
arturogalletti
February 12, 2011
Justin,
Both are good ideas. I’ll write some scripts to help me with this. I’ve done more involved ones before. This was a quick and dirty visualization to get a feel for the league (and I think it did the job well).
Greyberger
February 12, 2011
Did Kevin Love just break WP?
Philip
February 15, 2011
Nice stuff Arturro, both quick and dirty. It’s fascinating to see the Spurs, who have been a prime example of the Pareto Principle, in terms of both WP and general perception, bucking the trend.
Any chance we could get a scatter plot showing how strongly teams adhere to the Pareto Principle? I always find the visuals evocative.
arturogalletti
February 15, 2011
Philip,
I’ll take a stab over at my blog I think.
Greyberger,
Love has been putting up a ridiculous number.