This weekend several of the fine analysts at the Wages of Wins Network had a fun Ultimate Fantasy Draft (Editor’s note: Which, of course, Arturo won :-) ).

Rather than keep things simple, we broke things into three different drafts. In draft one — which we reviewed on Saturday — each player had to pick their ideal draft busts. In our next two drafts we got serious. Draft two consisted of two rounds to pick the best underrated draft picks of all time. Here the criteria was to find players not selected in the lottery that went on to be great. Draft three consisted of four rounds (extended from two by Arturo so we could all have a complete starting line up with a sixth man) picking the best players of all time. It was a ton of fun and here’s a brief run down.

The Podcast

You can find us in several convenient internet locations

• Direct Download – Wages of Wins Fantasy Draft
• The iTunes Store – Wages of Wins Podcast
• Our RSS Feed – Wages of Wins Podcast Feed

The Participants

• Arturo Galletti of Arturo’s Silly Little Stats and new Nightly Editor of the Wages of Wins Journal
• Ben Gulker of Pistons by the Numbers
• Devin Dignam of NBeh?
• Dre Alvarez of Nerd Numbers

Draft 2: The Underrated Draft

In this draft each player had to select the best player available that wasn’t originally drafted in the lottery. Devin won the “coin toss” and picked 1st and 8th, Ben selected 2nd and 7th, Arturo selected 3rd and 6th and Dre selected 4th and 5th.

 Table 1: Underrated Draft Round picks.

A great crop of players picked lower than their careers would deem fit. Dre lucked into Ben Wallace.   As it turns out he was forgotten on several other lists due to the fact he went undrafted! Arturo drafted Sabonis, and explained that in the modern age he’d get even more years of greatness from him. Devin decided to pick up two Bad Boy Pistons and Ben picked a duo that can be described as “They’re much better than Kobe”.

 Draft 3: The Main Event

The final round let each player select any player not picked in the underrated round. It is important to remember that the Wins Produced numbers only go back to 1977-78, so some of us didn’t venture too far into players before that era. Ben won the coin toss and picked a surprising top pick. (Editor’s note: Dre is being sarcastic of course.) The rest of the results are below.

Table 2: All Time Fantasy Draft Picks

About midway through all of us ended up deciding to select a starting five, which had Devin in a bind as he had not constructed a backcourt and Ben had snatched up the top guards. On a fun note Arturo and Ben both decided to select championship tandems (E.J.  the resident Spurs fan will no doubt approve). Also the top three centers that played their greatest years out of the turnover era were all picked. Of course with only 16 picks, a few names are certain to have been missed.

Arturo’s Team

*Bill Russell played his career before 1978 and as such we do not have Wins Produced numbers for him.  We imagine, though, that they are amazing!!

Ben’s Team

 Devin’s Team

* Wilt played before 1978 and unfortunately we don’t have his Wins Produced numbers. Again, though, they had to be amazing!!

** Kareem was drafted and played before 1978 as such we don’t have his Wins Produced rookie numbers and his “career” totals are all actually from after he was 30. Notice he was still pretty amazing.

Dre’s Team

Summing Up

This was a ton of fun and we’d be more than happy to do the same kind of event with “new contestants”. I’d love to hear follow up comments, and of course, disagreements are welcome.

-Dre

Kevin Clark and Jared Diamond – of the Wall Street Journal – wrote the following story for the Friday edition: Not to Second Guess, But…  One Measure Says the Knicks Would Be Better With Their Original Draft Picks

The “one measure” in this story is Wins Produced.  And I thought I would provide a bit more information on this story.

First the back-story: Jared called me earlier in the week with the following question:  If the Knicks kept everyone they drafted recently, how good would that team be?

To answer this question, we looked at each player’s Wins Produced.  For the most part we looked at performance in 2010-11.  But for David Lee I took his numbers from 2009-10 (he was hurt by Wilson Chandler of the Knicks this year while playing for Golden State).  And I also took the 2009-10 numbers for Mardy Collins (last time he played) and the 2008-09 numbers from Renaldo Balkman (last time he played more than 100 minutes in a season).

After collecting the production numbers for each player, I then had to allocate each player on the roster by position.  And then allocate minutes played.  In sum – as the following table indicates — there was some guess-work involved in this project (some is an understatement).

The above table indicates that this team would win 54.2 games.  But as I explained to Kevin and Jared, this exercise reminded me of what we see when we look at each team’s projected playoff performance.  In the playoffs, teams only play about 10 players, and consequently, we tend to see forecasts that are five to ten wins better than what we see in the regular season.  Since I only had ten players on this hypothetical Knick team, I reasoned that this team’s expected performance would probably be between 45 and 50 wins.

Such a mark is actually better than what the Knicks achieved this year; both with and without Carmelo Anthony.  And that suggests that had the Knicks simply stayed with their draft choices, the Knicks wouldn’t be worse off.  And I suspect, this team would be quite a bit cheaper.

But that is not what they have done.  Many of these draft choices have departed in New York’s persistent desire to add expensive scorers.  For example…

• Wilson Chandler and Danilo Gallinaro departed in the trade that brought the Knicks Carmelo Anthony
• David Lee departed after the team acquired Amare Stoudemire (as I recall, Stoudemire was considered a replacement for Lee)
• Jordan Hill departed in the trade for Tracy McGrady
• Channing Frye left as part of the trade that brought the Knicks Zach Randolph
• Trevor Ariza departed in the trade for Steve Francis

Notice the pattern?  The Knicks – both under Isiah Thomas and Donnie Walsh – seemed to send players New York has drafted to other teams in exchange for established scorers.  And these established scorers generally failed to win much.

As I noted in my conversation with Jared and Kevin, the Knicks have had success in the past.  But these brief periods of success coincided with teams built around defense.  When they have focused their attention on scorers, the team has generally struggled.

Unfortunately for fans of the Knicks, this lesson has yet to be learned in New York.  The Knicks in 2011-12 will be built around Stoudemire and Anthony.  That combination was not very successful in 2010-11.  And given the past performance of both scorers, it seems unlikely the Knicks will be very successful with this duo in the future (it is possible the team will be successful, it just doesn’t seem likely that this team will be as successful as fans of this team hopes).

Someday, though, maybe someone with the Knicks will simply take the time to learn the history of this franchise.  And when that happens, maybe this team will start focusing less on accumulating scorers and more on acquiring the productive players necessary to compete for titles.

- DJ

The following is from our resident Raptor blogger Devin Dignam of NBeh?. I’ll turn the floor over to him.

I’ll offer more in-depth coverage shortly, but here are my quick thoughts on the 2011 NBA draft.

Importantly, my evaluations rely on Position Adjusted Win Score (PAWS). PAWS takes Win Score per 40 and adjusts it by position, because each position has different average values.

To calculate this, take the WS/40 of a player, subtract the average positional value, and then add the average value for all players. The average values that I’m using are the same ones used by David Berri, who is one of the brains behind Win Score and Wins Produced. With players who are listed as playing two positions, I use a simple average of the two positional values in question. For those who are curious, the values are as follows:

• PG: 7.4
• SG: 8.4
• SF: 9.95
• PF: 12.59
• C: 12.32
• All players: 10.17

Ranking all players by PAWS gives us a good idea of how well a player performed in their various leagues. A word of warning, though: NCAA PAWS/40 does not correlate perfectly to NBA success, and Euroleague PAWS/40 is even worse. There are players with historically good NCAA PAWS (like Michael Beasley) who don’t turn out to be good players, just as there are players with poor or mediocre NCAA PAWS who turn out to be pretty decent players (John Wall and Derrick Rose come to mind). For the most part, though, players with a PAWS of 12 or higher usually end up being good NBA players, and players with a PAWS of under 7 end up being below average players. Euroleague PAWS are far less reliable due to the way basketball is played overseas, and to my knowledge, no one has examined how well Euroleague PAWS correlate with NBA productivity. Keep this information in mind while using this data.

1. Who won the draft?

Without question, the Denver Nuggets made the best choices on draft night. With the #22 pick, the Nuggets managed to get the NCAA player who posted the highest PAWS/40 (17.28) in the draft, Kenneth Faried. Then they picked up Jordan Hamilton at #26, who posted the 21st best PAWS/40 (at 10.72) in the draft. Of course, the cost of acquiring the #26 was swapping Raymond Felton for Andre Miller, but (ignoring age) that was largely a lateral move, as Felton and Miller produce at about the same rate and are a very close match salary-wise. With a lineup of Ty Lawson, Arron Afflalo, Jordan Hamilton, Faried, Nene, and Andre Miller, Wilson Chandler, Danilo Gallinari, and Chris Andersen coming off the bench (or in some such combination), Denver looks really scary.

I bet they miss us now

2. Who lost the draft?

With the #6, #18, and #34 picks, the Wizards had a chance at a huge draft haul. Instead, they walked away with Jan Vesely, Chris Singleton, and Shelvin Mack. Vesely posted a PAWS/40 of 6.76 overseas, which was only good enough for 66th place among all the players who were drafted. Singleton (8.50, 47th) and Mack (8.67, 43rd) weren’t much better, but at least they were somewhat close to average (PAWS/40 of 10) and not below the cutoff line (PAWS/40 of 7).

3. Who made the biggest steal?

There were a lot of second round steals this year, but to me, the team that had no business getting what it got was the San Antonio Spurs. In exchange for George Hill – an average guard still on his rookie contract – the Spurs got Kawhi Leonard, who posted a PAWS/40 of 13.02, which was good enough for 4th amongst all drafted players. The really amazing part about the trade is that they still have a strong guard rotation (Parker, Ginobili), it shores up the Spurs’ weakest position (small forward), and takes minutes away from the unproductive Richard Jefferson. Now the Spurs can trot out a starting lineup of Parker, Ginobili, Leonard, DeJuan Blair, and Tim Duncan, and try for one last ring before Duncan retires.

4. Who made the biggest reach?

Canadian Tristan Thompson had a PAWS/40 of 8.18, which put him 51st out of all the players who were drafted, and yet the Cavs selected him at #4. While I’m glad they did – it certainly removed any chance that my favorite team, the Raptors, would draft the hometown boy one pick later – it was not a good pick. They made the right choice by picking Kyrie Irving with the #1, but man…there were much better options available at #4. Honorable mentions go out to Washington (Jan Vesely, ranked 66th) and Detroit (Brandon Knight, ranked 65th).

- Devin

With the real draft finished — and with a few fans potentially unsatisfied with their team’s draft choices — the Wages of Wins Network decided to hold a  series of fantasy drafts podcasts based on historical players.

It was a lot of fun.

A little like this actually (Image courtesy of xkcd.com)

The result was a massive podcast that we’ll cut into several pieces for your enjoyment.

Fantasy Draft Round 1: All Time Busts

You can enjoy this podcast in several ways

• Direct Download – Wages of Wins Draft Busts
• Our RSS Feed – Wages of Wins Podcast Feed
• In the iTunes Store – Wages of Wins iTunes Page

Inspired by some great pieces as Hoopism and Shut Up and Jam about top draft busts, we held our own Busted draft (no one picked Iverson). Over two rounds Wages of Wins Network Analysts picked players they considered to massively underperform expectations.

• Arturo Galletti – Nightly Editor of the Wages of Wins Network had the 1^st and 8^th picks
• Devin Dignam – Stats Ambassador to Canada and head writer at NBeh? had the 2^nd and 7^th picks
• Ben Gulker – Head Writer of Pistons by the Numbers had the 3^rd and 6^th picks
• Dre Alvarez – Assistant Editor of the Wages of Wins Network had the 4^th and 5^th picks

Here’s a breakdown of how things went with a little follow up on our thinking

Table 1: Wages of Wins Network Bust Picks first four years numbers.

With the #1 Pick Arturo Selects: Andrea Bargnani

He lost over 14 games in his first four years. Somehow Toronto still managed to have a few decent seasons in spite of playing without a Center. Toronto fans may want to blame him for Bosh leaving.

With the #2 Pick Devin Selects: Darko Milicic

He was very unproductive, and also drafted in front of Chris Bosh, Dwyane Wade, Kirk Heinrich and Chris Kaman. Putting a positive spin on it, Ben points out Darko not playing minutes may have helped make sure the Pistons played their best players.

With the #3 Pick Ben Selects: Joe Barry Carroll

Compared to the rest of this list Joe Barry Carroll is actually a start with positive wins produced. That said he was not a productive players. Ben points out that in this trade, Golden State gave Boston Robert Parish and Kevin McHale. In contrast to Joe Barry Carroll these two players were stars that helped win titles. Carroll would go on to score lots of points, but oddly that didn’t translate into wins.

With the #4 Pick Dre Selects: Nikoloz Tskitishvili

I’ve discussed my thoughts on this pick more in depth here. It was not terrible enough that Skiti barely played, and when he did he played poorly. It’s the fact that he was picked in front of much better players. Stoudemire and Boozer Bosh [Editor's Note: Thanks Mosi for catching that!] were all also in this draft. While Skiti would play on some of the worst Nuggets teams of all time, Boozer and Stoudemire both made it far into the playoffs.

With the #5 Pick Dre Selects: Jeff Turner

What makes Turner truly amazing is how many minutes over the course of his career he was able to pick up despite his terrible play. The only player on this list that played worse per minute in their rookie contract is Dre’s 4^th pick. Devin argues he was drafted too low at 17 to be a true bust. Still, we can all agree he was terrible.

With the #6 Pick Ben Selects: James Edwards

A terrible player that got progressively worse. Despite having the bar set super low on expectations, he somehow managed to underperform. Detroit actually traded for him, and all he really succeeded in doing was taking minutes from better players. He was picked 46^th, so again, a hard sell as a draft bust. Ben, a long time Pistons fan, disagrees.

With the #7 Pick Devin Selects:  Rafael Araujo

Picked right in front of Iguodala, he didn’t even play 2,000 minutes in his NBA career. In his limited time, though, he managed to lose 3 wins for his teams. He may earn even more stars as a trade bust. Utah gave up Kris Humphries – who just cracked 14 Wins Produced this year – for this stiff.

With the #8 Pick Arturo Selects: Michael Olowokandi

In a surprising turn, Michael Olowokandi — who many thought would go in the top three –  falls to the second round! Picked in front of future Finals MVPs in Dirk Nowitzki and Paul Pierce, and several productive players including Antawn Jamison and Vince Carter, this was a clear miss for the Clippers.

Honorable Mentions – Adam Morrison, Marvin Williams, etc…

A few names had to miss the cut. Actually more than a few I’m sure. That said we did mention a few others while making our picks (listen to the podcast for these other names).

Summing Up

This was clearly a ton of fun and we’d love to have more people on to do similar drafts. Just drop us a line and we’ll set it up. If you agree or disagree with any of these names, please tell us! After all, what’s the fun in making lists if you can’t discuss them?

Dre

The following comes from our resident WOW Heat blogger Mosi Platt of the Miami Heat Index. A fun fact about the Wages of Wins network is that we disagree about a lot of things (just follow Mosi and myself on twitter or go here if you don’t believe me).

Those disagreements make for very fun e-mails and posts. Our hope is to start capturing some of those here for the readers.

Here then is Mosi’s spirited defense of the Allen Iverson Pick (from 1996).

The 2011 NBA Draft is Thursday and the typical articles on draft busts have been popping up on the blog circuit. An article at Hoopism was very good but an article at the new Wages of Wins Network blog, Shut Up and Jam, could use some work.

Allen Iverson has been a popular target for criticism on the Wages of Wins Network because the statistical models published in the Wages of Wins illustrated that he didn’t have the winning impact the media claimed. There’s no denying that Iverson’s poor shooting percentage and turnovers created as many problems as his scoring and steals created highlights, but James Brocato made a mistake when he used Wins Produced to label Iverson a mistake as the first pick in the 1996 draft.

Yes, it’s a little silly to defend an 11-time All-Star and future hall-of-famer labeled a “bust” by a blogger, but it just takes a little context and the same statistical models to illustrate why Iverson was the right choice for the Philadelphia 76ers in the summer of 1996.

This article will use Win Score, a statistical model created by Professor David Berri from the Wages of Wins Journal, to measure how much a player’s box score statistics contributed to their team’s efficiency differential and wins. More information on these stats can be found at the following links:

Simple Models of Player Performance
Introducing PAWSmin — and a Defense of Box Score Statistics

The Philadelphia 76ers in 1996

The Philadelphia 76ers had the second-worst record in the NBA in 1996 at 18-64 (the Vancouver Grizzlies were worse at 15-67).  Obviously the 76ers were bad and needed a lot of talent, but where did they need it the most? This spreadsheet lists the Win Score per 48 minutes (WS48) for the 76ers guards, forwards and centers in 1996.

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The average WS48 for an NBA guard from 1994 to 2005 was 6.2. The average WS48 for a 76ers guard in 1996 was 3.7. That’s 40 percent less than average. Jerry Stackhouse (3.8 WS48), Vernon Maxwell (3.7 WS48) and Trevor Ruffin (4.2 WS48) played 85 percent of the minutes in the 76ers backcourt and they were terrible. Stackhouse was a rookie and Ruffin was in his second season, so they could improve, but Maxwell was 31 and declining.

The average WS48 for an NBA forward from 1994 to 2005 was 8.8. The average WS48 for a 76ers forward in 1996 was 10.0. Clarence Weatherspoon was an above average forward with a 12.2 WS48 that played 78 percent of the available minutes. The 76ers expected to be set in the frontcourt the next season with Derrick Coleman returning from injury. Coleman produced an average of 13.9 WS48 from 1991 to 1995 so the 76ers would have two above average forwards if he stayed healthy (see this spreadsheet for stats from Coleman’s first five seasons).

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The average WS48 for an NBA center from 1994 to 2005 was 10.8. The average WS48 for a 76ers center in 1996 was 9.0. That’s 17 percent less than average, but the “true” centers on the roster only played 32 percent of the available minutes. Coach John Lucas used power forwards like Sharone Wright (9.2 WS48), Tony Massenburg (9.1 WS48) and Ed Pinckney (13.8 WS48) at center for 66 percent of the available minutes.

As illustrated by the numbers above, the glaring weakness in the 76ers’ lineup was the backcourt. Since Stackhouse was the team’s star rookie at shooting guard (and young enough to improve), the focus was going to be improving the point guard position since an aging Vernon Maxwell was not going to be the solution.

The Best College Point Guard in 1996

Who was the best point guard in the 1996 draft? This spreadsheet lists the position-adjusted Win Score per 40 minutes (PAWS40) for the first and second-team All-Americans in 1996.

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Allen Iverson was the 4th-most productive All-American entering the NBA draft in 1996 (Tim Duncan did not enter the draft until 1997). He was the most productive point guard with a 12.5 PAWS40. At 6’1”, Tony Delk was going to have to play point guard in the NBA and he was more productive than Iverson in college with a 13.4 PAWS40, but he played shooting guard for the national champion Kentucky Wildcats and only averaged 2.7 assists per 40 minutes. Not exactly the solution for a team looking for a point guard to pair with Stackhouse. Iverson, on the other hand, averaged 5.7 assists per 40 minutes.

There were only two All-American point guards in 1996: Iverson (12.5 PAWS40) and Jacque Vaughn (8.6 PAWS40). It was an easy decision for the 76ers to make.

For those that would suggest the 76ers should have gone with size and chosen Player of the Year Marcus Cambyto improve their below average production at center, there are two counter-arguments:

• First, the production at point guard was much worse than the production at center; and
• Second, Camby was less productive than Iverson in college with a 9.4 PAWS40.

By the numbers, Iverson was indeed The Answer for the 76ers in the 1996 draft.

Go to Bleacher Report and vote on who you think the 76ers should’ve taken with the No. 1 pick in 1996: Iverson, Camby or Nash.