Who is the least productive player in the NBA today?  If you guessed Darko Milicic, you were close.  According the automated Wins Produced numbers from Andres Alvarez, Milicic is currently the second least productive player.  Milicic’s current Wins Produced of -0.6, and if he keeps on that pace he will produce -10.0 wins across an entire season.

Although this is not very good, it is a clearly better than the pace Amare Stoudemire is on.  After four games, Stoudemire – the prized acquisition of the Knicks this past summer – has posted a -0.272 WP48. Because he is playing many more minutes than Milicic, this level of production puts Stoudemire on pace to produced -16.7 wins.

And that production led to the following two comments today.  The first is from Italian Stallion.

Sorry to take this a million miles off topic, but I have to vent.

Amare Stoudemire can’t play basketball to save his life. He’s athletic as hell and can score when he gets a clear path to the basket or decent mid range shot, but he can’t handle, pass, or make plays at all, is mediocre as rebounder at best, and is a turnover machine.

Thanks. I feel better now.

And that to the following response from Andres Alvarez (or Dre or nerdnumbers):

First off it won’t stay that way. You guys beat a top team in the East with Amare playing like crap. Right now Conley, Rudy Gay and Melo are playing super well. It won’t last. If Randolph and Amare at least return to average (for big men) and Fields keeps playing well then you guys look in good shape. Right now your roster is actually above average on the whole! 40 wins baby. Still it does amaze me that Amare is dead last in Wins Produced right now.

Of course, the sample is quite small.  And given Amare’s career, we can fully expect he will play much better.  But for today, Amare is the least productive player in the game. 

- DJ

The Detroit Pistons are the last winless team in the Eastern Conference.  After losing to the Boston Celtics, the Pistons began looking for answers.  The head coach – John Kuester – argued that the Pistons “…have to collectively someway or somehow find another voice besides my own that is going to lead us.”
Tayshaun Prince answered his coach with the following observation: “… He’s right, but at the same time it goes both ways,” Prince said. “We can sit here and continue to get on each other and be vocal, but like I said, the right thing has got to come from him as well as us. It goes both ways. He says we got to be more vocal, he has to do some things better, too. Obviously, we’re 0-4 so it ain’t just the team.”

Just to summarize… Kuester claims the team needs more leadership.  Prince agrees, but thinks the coach has to be better also.  And apparently, both Prince and Kuester think that if team improves with respect to coaching and leadership that somehow the Pistons would be vastly improved. 

But does the team just need better coaching?  For an answer we turn to today’s Wall Street Journal, where David Biderman asks, “Do NBA Coaches Actually Make an Impact?”  Biderman’s story should be familiar to readers of Stumbling on Wins (the book I co-authored with Martin Schmidt). 

To quickly summarize… Michael Leeds, Eva Marikova Leeds, Michael Mondello, and I examined 30 years of player performance data.  Our study indicated that of the 62 NBA coaches we examined, more than 75% had no statistically significant impact on player performance.  In other words, most NBA coaches fail to systematically alter the productivity of the players they are given to lead.

And that suggests the problems the Pistons are having this year are not about coaching or leadership.  The Pistons won only 27 games last year.  Despite this performance, Joe Dumars chose to bring back most of the players employed in 2009-10.  Somehow he thought that the same players could produce very different results.  But as I noted last October, the current edition of the Pistons isn’t very good.  In essence, if everything goes right for this team it might reach 40 wins in 2010-11.

Obviously everything isn’t going right.  But it isn’t clear that the team really needs a new coach or better leadership.  What the team needs are more productive players.  If we look at the current Wins Produced numbers (and in case you didn’t notice, the automated numbers from Andres Alvarez are currently being updated daily), the following Pistons are posting above average WP48 marks [average Wins Produced per 48 minutes is 0.100]:

Ben Wallace: 0.335

Tracy McGrady: 0.217

Ben Gordon: 0.123

Rodney Stuckey: 0.121

The rest of the roster is currently below average.  Yes, it is possible for some of the below average players to play somewhat better.  And it is also possible – given what we have seen from their respective careers – for Gordon and Stuckey to offer less.  When we look at everything these players have done across their respective careers, though, it seems unlikely that the current Pistons are suddenly going to morph into the team Stuckey saw a few weeks.  In case you missed this, here is what Stuckey said in September:

We all just have to stay healthy and the sky is the limit for us. On paper, we are the best team in the League. We are deep and athletic. All we have to do is play to our abilities.

The past performance of these players suggests that they do not have the ability to be the best team in the league.  They don’t even have the ability to be a serious playoff contender. 

Unfortunately, I suspect Dumars doesn’t think so.  And when playoff contention doesn’t happen this year, John Kuester will probably get fired.  Firing Kuester, though, probably won’t help.  What the Pistons need to do is fire some of these players, and of course, bring in more productive talent.

- DJ

In case you haven’t looked at the WP numbers for 2010-11, after three games, Carmelo Anthony is a “star”.  Yesterday, Andres Alvarez offered an explanation for Melo’s improvement.  As the following story explains (and this is what Andres said at Nerd Numbers in its entirety), maybe Melo is better because he is trying not to be good.  Yes, it is great story.

Table 1: 2011 Denver Nuggets after 3 games.

Arturo made a brief mention of this in a podcast discussing the preseason. Last night I called the Nuggets a contender and said it’s because

1) Afflalo is playing out of his mind.

2) Shelden Williams is a heck of a pick up.

3) Al Harrington is playing good. . . for Al Harrington

and. . . and. . .

4)  Melo is playing like a borderline superstar.

During prediction and preseason time I was having a grand time insulting Dirk Nowitzki and Carmelo Anthony. As of right now they are both playing like top 10 Forwards in the league. I don’t expect it to stay this way but I had to look at Carmelo and what the heck was going on. With that I hopped over to Basketball-Reference, pulled down Melo’s per minute stats for 2010 and 2011 and looked at what was up.

Improvement 1) Carmelo has improved his scoring efficiency.

Table 1: Carmelo Anthony’s per 48 minute scoring stats from 2010 and 2011.

Carmelo is shooting almost five fewer shots per 48 minutes than he was last season. In terms of two point shooting this is great because as you may recall shooting 50% from two point range is the required threshold to be helping your team. While Melo still isn’t there, by decreasing this type of play, he’s helped his performance (addition by subtraction). Based on last year’s numbers, I suggested Melo stop taking threes. He took this to heart but rather than stop he has increased his three point shooting to be much more productive. Finally his decrease in shooting has decreased his trips to the line by two, but he has picked up shooting there as well. Essentially Melo has thus far increased every facet of his scoring game.

Improvement 2) Carmelo is pulling down more boards

Table 2: Carmelo’s Rebounding per 48 minutes stats from 2010 and 2011

Carmelo is pulling down almost one less offensive board per game. This is more than offset by the fact that he is now pulling down almost two more defensive rebounds a game. (Remember the Wins Produced metric says an offensive rebound and defensive rebound have the same result, your team gets the ball).

Melo has improved his play by shooting more efficiently and pulling down more rebounds. Perhaps he has been reading the Wages of Wins Network in the off season. What is more likely is that he may be pulling a tiny whining session. He is going for fewer offensive boards and taking fewer shots. In essence he is playing less “offense”. His assumption may be that by doing this he convinces the team to trade him. However, the net effect of this is that the team improved. Plug in the fact that Afflalo is playing absolutely insane right now and the Nuggets actually look like contenders. As I said, if Melo keeps playing like this or we get good trade return then perhaps this story has a happy ending for the Nuggets. However, as a Nuggets fan I just can’t be too optimistic about Carmelo Anthony.

-Dre

After three games the New York Knicks have a record of 1-2, which is consistent with a 27 win team across an 82 game season.  Such a record would be a little bit off the 29 win mark of the 2009-10 season; and if it stands (as if we could actually extrapolate from a sample of three), this record would leave more than a few fans of the Knicks disappointed.

When we look at efficiency differential – or offensive efficiency minus defensive efficiency – we see a somewhat different story.  Currently the Knicks have scored 99.6 points per 100 possessions while only allowing 100.9.  These two efficiency marks are consistent with a team that wins about 37 games in an 82 game season.  In other words, the Knicks have clearly improved (assuming we can rely on a sample of three… which we probably can’t).

And when we look at Wins Produced…. oops, where can we get these numbers?  Sure, one could hand-craft the WP numbers.  But that takes time (more specifically, it takes my time).  Thankfully, this is no longer necessary.  The automated Wins Produced numbers from Andres Alvarez are now available for the 2010-11 regular season!!!  And I can’t tell you how cool it is to see these numbers on-line (thanks again to Andres!).

With number in hand, we can now look at how the Knicks have improved.

The WP leaders for the Knicks – after just three games – are as follows:

• Landry Fields: 0.8 Wins Produced, 0.422 WP48
• Wilson Chandler: 0.6 Wins Produced, 0.286 WP48
• Ronny Turiaf: 0.4 Wins Produced, 0.256 WP48

The team’s Wins Produced is only 1.5.  And that means the rest of the Knicks are combining to produce wins in the negative range.  In sum, the Knicks “success” is almost entirely tied to two players (Chandler and Turiaf) who don’t start and a third player who wasn’t supposed to be in the NBA.  

Okay, the Knicks have only played three games.  So these numbers probably don’t mean much.  But these numbers do give me a reason to talk about that player that wasn’t supposed to be in the NBA.

A few days ago I noted that the numbers from college and a preseason do tell us something about what a rookie will do his first season in the NBA.  And these numbers indicated that Landry Fields is projected to be the second most productive rookie in the NBA in 2010-11.

Chad Ford – of ESPN.com – had an interesting comment, though, on how many NBA teams missed on Landry Fields.  Here is what Ford said on Monday:

On draft night, the Knicks caught me by surprise when they took Stanford forward Landry Fields with the 39th pick in the draft. Fields was in our database ranked as the 116th-best player in the draft. He’s the first American player ever to be drafted that wasn’t in our Top 100 since we started doing this in 2003.

Clearly, I blew it. Fields has earned a starting position for the Knicks and through three games is posting a very impressive 19.30 PER — better than both Blake Griffin and Cousins. How did I (and a number of NBA teams) miss so badly? Our Top 100 is based on the consensus of a number NBA scouts and executives. Fields wasn’t mentioned by any of them. He was so off the radar that he wasn’t one of the top 60 players invited by the NBA to participate in the Chicago predraft camp. The NBA selects participants based off of rankings by all 30 NBA teams.

But that’s not an excuse. One NBA scout, along with a source close to the Stanford team, called me and told me I was sleeping on Fields. I pulled down some tape from Synergy and frankly, just didn’t see it. Had I thought about him specifically for Mike D’Antoni’s wide-open system — maybe. But the truth is I thought he was a good European prospect, not an NBA one.

He’s proven me and the rest of the league very wrong in the early going. From all accounts he’s a very nice kid who’s working really hard. Here’s hoping he keeps it up over the course of his career.

The data on Fields – from college, preseason, and the first three games of this season – all indicate that he will be an above average NBA player.  Yes, this data is not perfect.  But given all these numbers, one wonders why Fields wasn’t mentioned by any of the scouts and executives Ford surveyed. 

Okay, I think we have some idea.  Numbers don’t play quite as big a role in player evaluation as some might think (even in the midst of the so-called “stats revolution”).  Players appear to be more often evaluated in terms of how athletic they appear.  Certainly this approach works for players like LeBron James and Dwight Howard.  But for the role players – and let’s face it, Fields may be a WoW star but he is probably not going to score enough to be considered an NBA star – the “staring” approach (i.e. we look at the player until we form an opinion) may not always work.

Given how often it appears that how a player “looks” trumps his numbers, one wonders how many more players like Landry Fields are out there.  How many teams are currently giving minutes to players who look athletic, but can’t produce? And how easily would it be for teams to find cheap and productive replacements?

I am not sure about the answers to these questions. But I have to think that Landry Fields is not the only Landry Fields teams could be employing.

- DJ

Today I want to post my Wins Produced numbers for the 2009-10 season (yes I know, I should have done this some time ago).  But before I get to these, let me just re-post the WP story (as posted last week in an interview I gave to Raptors HQ).

RaptorsHQ – So let’s kick things off with a biggie – how on earth did you get interested in not only the field of sports economics, but in developing the metric you’re most well-known for, “wins-produced?”

David Berri:  My interest in the economics of sports began as a graduate student at Colorado State.   And it began somewhat by accident.  In the process of looking for a research topic I came across a reference to a paper measuring the economic value of a baseball player.  Prior to seeing this reference I did not know someone could use economics to study sports.  Once I found this paper – and others in the same area – I decided to write a paper on the economics of the labor market in baseball.  From there, I began my own research program in the economics of sports.

Because most economists had focused on baseball, I decided to start examining the economics of professional basketball.  That research, though, had a significant road block.  In baseball, productivity can easily be measured with OPS, Runs Created, etc…  These measures have already been established, generally capture accurately a hitter’s contribution to wins, and are fairly easy to explain in an academic article.  When I started research in the NBA – around 1994 or 1995 - the only measures that were generally available were something akin to NBA Efficiency.  The NBA Efficiency measure (which is similar to Dave Heeran’s  TENDEX measure and Robert Bellotti’s Points Created model) is quite easy to calculate and explain.  But it is not highly correlated with team wins.  So it is not a particularly good measure of player performance.

A better approach is to determine how the statistics tabulated for NBA players statistically relate to wins.  But this is easier said and done.  As I recall, Stacey Brook (my co-author on The Wages of Wins) came up with somewhat convoluted four equation system back in 1996 (for a paper we presented at the University of Colorado).  Upon seeing the model a person in the audience said, “I take it this is not your first guess.”  And I think I replied, “And it won’t be our last.”

These four equations were eventually reduced to two equations for a paper Stacey and I published in 1999.  And these two equations were further refined for a paper I also published in 1999.

Dean Oliver and I had many discussions concerning this two equation system.  Dean had also developed a measure of player performance, a measure that I questioned on theoretical and practical grounds (the issues raised were briefly discussed in The Wages of Wins).  But although I was not willing to fully accept Win Shares (by the way…. Win Shares is a model that I prefer – as a forthcoming paper I have written argues – to the Player Efficiency Rating and Adjusted Plus-Minus), that doesn’t mean that what I had done so far couldn’t be improved upon.  And with Dean’s urging me along, the model I had published was made better.

In 2006, Tony Krautmann and I published a paper (a paper originally presented in 2004) that offered a simple one equation model that connected much of what a player did on the court to team wins.  This approach was improved upon – and labeled Wins Produced — for The Wages of Wins.

So the Wins Produced model began back in the mid-1990s.  After much discussion (with various academics — including Dean Oliver), it was gradually transformed into what people can see today (in Stumbling on Wins and other publications). 

Let me close by noting the basic lessons the Wins Produced model teaches. 

Wins in the NBA are determined by the ability of a team to gain and keep possession of the ball (so rebounds and turnovers are important) and the ability to turn possession of the ball into points (so shooting efficiency is also important).  Players who are not particularly efficient scorers and/or have problems gaining and maintaining possession of the ball, tend not to be very productive.  And that is true, even if the player takes a large number of shots.  In sum, scorers who are not outstanding with respect to shooting efficiency (and/or the possession factors) really don’t help their respective teams win many games

So that is the story.  And here are the numbers from last year.

Table One: Ranking All Players in 2009-10 by Wins Produced

Table Two: All Players in 2009-10 listed in Alphabetical Order

One should note that these numbers are slightly different from the numbers Andres Alvarez posts.  The numbers from Andres are referred to as “automated Wins Produced”.  This is partially because the position adjustment Andres employs is derived from an algorithm that considers such factors as the position designations listed on-line, a player’s height and weight, and the height, weight, and position designations of his teammates.  In general, this algorithm is good enough to tell us if a player was a center, power forward, small forward, shooting guard, or point guard.  But sometimes it might place a player at a position “incorrectly.”

The approach I have taken could be called “hands-crafted” Wins Produced.  Essentially, I go through each roster, and assign positions by considering height, weight, position designations (i.e. same factors as Andres) and also my understanding of what position the player is probably playing.  This process is fairly tedious (hence the inability to provide updated numbers throughout a season).  In general, Andres and I reach the same conclusion for most players (so the automated approach – since it is easier – is preferred). Sometimes, though, there are differences.

It is also possible that a person looking at the lists Andres and I offer would disagree.  If that is the case, I have presented the ADJ P48 numbers (you can look here for what the means) and the position averages.  This will allow one to calculate their own WP48 numbers for each player.

One last note…Andres Alvarez will soon be posting automated Wins Produced numbers for the 2009-10 (for an early glimpse — and remember, it is very early — Arturo Galletti offered WP estimates yesterday).

- DJ