Archive for the 'Win Shares' Category

Chicago Bulls

62-20, 1st in NBA Central Division (Schedule and Results)
Coach: Tom Thibodeau (62-20)

SRS: 6.53 (2nd of 30) ▪ Pace: 90.4 (23rd of 30)
Off Rtg: 108.3 (11th of 30) ▪ Def Rtg: 100.3 (1st of 30)
Expected W-L: 61-21 (1st of 30)

Arena: United Center ▪ Attendance: 893,462 (1st of 30)

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Frequent BBR commenter "Panic" has a good topic for a data dump today:

"I have a modest proposal for a data dump, if you haven't already looked at this: Kevin Love has 10.9 win shares and his team has an expected 20 wins, for a Love-contributed 54.5% of wins, by far the league's highest percentage of his team's wins by one player. Where does this measure up historically? I'm guessing below maybe Bellamy's rookie year and the Warriors when Arizin was in Korea, maybe a Wilt season or two. Any in the modern era?"

Let's take a look -- here are the players with the highest ratio of individual Win Shares to team wins in a single season (numbers thru Sunday's games):

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Hanging out with Hoopism's Bailey brothers (Jason & Matt) and Harold Shanafield of Haystack Scouting on Friday night, we had a great conversation about the "ultimate teams" of a given coach. The idea is this: if you had a certain coach, and you had to play a pickup game in his signature style with players from NBA history, who do you pick to play?

Specifically, we were joking around and picking Don Nelson all-stars, thinking of freakish lineups with a SF at the 1, a PG at the 2, a SG at the 3, a SF at the 4, and a PF at the 5. Jason had a few too many beers and picked Travis Outlaw as his PG, I called on Antoine Walker's services at point forward, Matt built a team around Anthony Mason, and I also think Wang Zhizhi was somehow involved. This was all for fun, but what if we actually picked the players who put up the most Win Shares while playing for Nelson?

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I've been thinking about this concept for a while, but I want to throw it out there for the readers and see what they think...

Everyone knows we already have a Basketball Hall of Fame. But from an NBA perspective, a lot of people think it's broken -- as the argument goes, too many non-NBA people get inducted while great NBA players are left out in the cold. So there's a growing push to create an NBA-only Hall of Fame. How do you stock such a Hall, though? It seems like the other major sports have a pretty clear focus in their induction processes: baseball's hall is largely about longevity and statistical milestones, while football's hall is heavily focused on guys who won championships and/or changed the game.

So what should the NBA's angle be? I want to propose that this hypothetical Hall be about "relevance". As in, who were the relevant players in a given season or span of seasons? Who were the essential names? When you tell the Story Of The NBA, which players would it be inexcusable not to mention? If the Hall of Fame is about celebrating the history of the league, then including the guys that fundamentally shaped the narrative is a pretty good mandate. And if we can tell the NBA's story without mentioning a certain player, it's hard to argue that he belongs in the Hall.

The good news is that you can generate the majority of this list by setting up a basic checklist of requirements. But I want to know what you think those requirements are.

Off the top of my head, here's a basic list of requirements that capture the "relevant" players each season:

• Top 3 in each season's MVP voting
• Every Sporting News MVP
• Every season's 1st-team All-NBAers
• Every Finals MVP
• Top 3 players on each NBA champion
• Best player on Finals runner-up
• Best player on team with NBA's best record
• PER leader for seasons 2000-present
• Win Shares leader for seasons 2004-present

This is the list of players generated by those criteria:

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Well, it's (quasi) official now: Carmelo Anthony is a member of the New York Knicks.

Finally, we can put aside the trade speculation and ask the really important questions about the deal. No, I'm not talking about how this shifts the balance of power in the East, or if 'Melo and Amare Stoudemire can coexist in the Big Apple... I'm talking about where Carmelo ranks among all-time players who were traded in the middle of the season.

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Reading yesterday about Dave Duerson's tragic passing made me think about the player similarity system he inspired at PFR, and that in turn caused me to remember a similar system I concocted for basketball players.

Using the methodology I outlined, who are the most comparable players to this year's All-Stars in terms of career quality and shape (through their current age)?

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Just as we did last season, let's take a look at which players would have made the All-Star teams if various advanced stats were the only criteria in the voting. To pick teams, I used the official positional designations from the 2011 ballot; each team must have 4 guards, 4 forwards, and 2 centers, with room for 2 wild cards from any position to fill out the roster. Players in bold are starters; "*" designates the player as a member of the real-life All-Star team.

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As a follow-up to their post about minute-weighted team age, Hoopism took the advice of our commenters and re-ran team ages, this time weighted by Win Shares:

Mapping Average Age to Success in the NBA

Comparing side-by-side with the raw roster averages, this has the effect of allowing you to see which teams' most productive players skew especially young (Miami, Orlando, LA Clippers) or old (Phoenix, Boston, Houston).

Inspired by yesterday's quiz about the 1990s All-NBA Teams, here are the Win Shares leaders for each decade (made possible by the handy BBR Player Season Finder):

The Fifties (1952-59):

All-Decade WS team: G Bill Sharman (67.6) - G Bob Cousy (60.5) - F Dolph Schayes (95.2) - F Paul Arizin (69.8) - C Neil Johnston (92.0)

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Here's a quick mailbag from "Imadogg", who writes:

"I was wondering who the best 'one-sided' players of all time are. For example, when thinking of the best offensive players ever, a name like Jordan or Wilt might come to mind, but no one would dare call them one-sided or only offense. On the other hand, when I think of Steve Nash, I think of perfection on one side of the ball and nothing at all on the other. On defense, guys like Dennis Rodman, Ben Wallace, or Dikembe Mutombo come to mind as amazing defenders who you would prefer never to give the ball to."

Imadogg went on to suggest looking at the percentage of a player's Win Shares devoted to offense vs. defense, so I'm going to take that approach when determining the most "one-dimensional" players in post-1952 NBA history.

I should note, one issue with using Win Shares is that they can sometimes be negative, which totally wreaks havoc on an exercise like this. But as a kludge, I just zeroed out the negative OWS/DWS, and took the percentage of those totals devoted to each side of the ball.

Among players with 10,000 career minutes, here are the players most extremely biased toward offense:

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