Archive for the 'Win Shares' Category

On the subject of "Least Likely NBA Championships," there are a lot of different ways to frame the discussion. You could look at the teams with the toughest paths (i.e. strength of schedule) en route to the title; you could look at the teams whose regular-season record would have predicted them to win the least often; you could even look at the teams with the closest margins of victory in the playoffs. I've actually done a few of those studies, but today I want to look at the group of players with the least collective talent to win a championship -- or at least the smallest amount of collective accomplishments heading into the title season -- which is another way to look at the "most surprising champs" question.

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Here at Basketball-Reference, we recently gathered a new database of player positions that goes further than merely listing guards, forwards, and centers. It isn't live on the player pages yet (that's coming soon), but I've worked with it in several posts over the past few weeks, and today I'm going to use it to see which position has traditionally been the strongest for teams that are successful in the postseason.

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With a 2-0 lead in their conference semifinal series, this year's Suns team is currently looking like a good bet to defeat their hated archrivals, the San Antonio Spurs, and make the Western Conference Finals. The Suns have never advanced past the Conference Finals in the Nash era, and this year's likely WCF opponents have been a tough nut for Phoenix to crack, but it looks like the 2010 season is shaping up to be as good an opportunity as any in recent memory for Phoenix to make the Finals.

If you had told me a few years ago that we'd be saying this in May of 2010, after Mike D'Antoni departed and Steve Kerr shifted the franchise's direction with the acquisition of Shaquille O'Neal for Shawn Marion, I would have said you were crazy. Even now, this Suns team doesn't "feel" as great as the team that went deep in the 2005/06/07 playoffs, but here they are, with a chance to do something that the earlier incarnations of the Nash Suns never did. So how do these Suns stack up to Phoenix's past playoff teams?

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After I posted a list of the Top 100 elimination-game performances by Win Shares since 1991 on Monday, several readers mentioned that they wanted to see the flip side of that, the biggest "chokes" in elimination games by Win Shares since '91. Well, here you go: the list of the 100 worst elimination-game performances by WS in the era for which we have box scores...

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Talking about arguably the 4 biggest stars of the NBA's 25-and-under set today, LeBron James, Carmelo Anthony, Chris Paul, and Dwight Howard, had me thinking about this crop of young stars and how they relate to their counterparts in the past... Is this current group the best ever? And if not, who is? Well, here's a simple way to measure how much contribution the NBA is getting from it's age <= 25 players -- divide the youngsters' Win Shares by the NBA's total WS and see what proportion of the league's wins are being added by the kids:

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Last week, I attempted to replicate an old Bill James study on high-peak (since people apparently don't like the word "peaky") vs. consistent pitching aces, adapting it to basketball. The goal was to see whether a team would expect to win more championships over a 20-year span with a guy whose peak was fast and meteoric -- but whose decline was just as abrupt and total -- or a guy whose career slowly built to become a solid star, never contending for MVP but performing at a high level for a long time. To accomplish this, I took real-world data and built a composite player for each type of All-Star, each with the same number of career Win Shares, and then ran a Monte Carlo simulation of 10,000 careers, tallying how many times each player won a title when surrounded by average teammates. The results were that the consistent player won a ring slightly more often in his career, which contradicted James' findings in baseball, but the # of rings/season for each type was so negligibly different that there was an advantage of just 0.011 championships per 20-year career for Mr. Consistency, not enough to make any difference for real players.

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Recently I was reading Bill James' 1994 book The Politics of Glory, about the baseball hall of fame, and he devoted a chapter to the debate of Don Drysdale vs. Milt Pappas. If you're unfamiliar with the players, all you need to know is that Pappas and Drysdale had virtually identical won-loss records (209-166 for Drysdale, 209-164 for Pappas), Drysdale had an ERA+ of 121 vs. Pappas' 110, and Drysdale was inducted into the Hall of Fame with 78.4% of the vote in 1984 after 10 years on the ballot (never receiving less than 21% of the vote), while Pappas received 1.2% of the vote in 1979 and dropped off the ballot forever.

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Whenever Hall of Fame arguments come up, especially in baseball, I have a tendency to tune out from the sheer tediousness of the typical debate. On one side, there's always an arrogant guy who saw many of Player X's games and "knows" he's a Hall of Famer, so he cites other, lesser players who are already in the Hall (as though that were somehow evidence Player X should be in), brings up a couple of memorable career moments, and generally fudges on borderline issues to make the player seem better than he actually was. On the opposing side, another equally narcissistic guy splits hairs about the "magic numbers" Player X failed to reach, denigrates his career because A) if he won titles, he didn't have enough individual honors; or B) if he had a lot of individual honors, he didn't win enough titles. Throw in a few unsubstantiated jabs at Player X's character and/or manhood, and then start the whole process over again -- how fun.

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Following up on the work we did here about a month ago, here are the final versions of our projected Win Shares per minute, broken down into offensive and defensive WS/mp. The biggest change here is that I used the new Win Shares formula for past seasons, the new Simple Projection System to create the rates, and hopefully I also included every player who could possibly play in the NBA this season (708 in all!). So enjoy, and stay tuned for the big preview rollout on Monday and Tuesday, when we'll combine these rates with a playing-time projection and our Monte Carlo simulator to give you our official predictions for the season.

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Thanks to the alert eyes of one of our readers ("Deepak"), I have corrected a minor flaw in the Win Shares system. For those who don't care, feel free to move on. All others, please continue reading after the jump.

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