Daily Archives: December 29, 2011

The 2011-2012 NBA Wins Produced Cheat Sheet

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I was born not knowing and have had only a little time to change that here and there.

Richard Feynman, Letter to Armando Garcia J, December 11, 1985

The New Kings

At the end of last season, I was arrogant. I was at the top of my game. I felt I had an answer or a model for every possible scenario the NBA could throw at me.

Then everything changed.

First, we didn’t know if we would have a season.Then we didn’t know where Chris Paul and Dwight Howard would end up. We still don’t know who’s going to be playing where exactly. Never mind the fact that the schedule for the season is so strange that Vegas refused to post over/unders for wins for the season.

But I wasn’t worried, All I had to do was adapt all my existing models slightly to account for the variation right?

Yeah, about that…

One of the projects that we had been working on is on improving the Wins Produced model . The Lockout gave us a great opportunity to do so and we did. This is a very good thing.

Except that it means that the world changed. Up is not quite down but it’s not exactly up anymore. The value and contribution of each player has changed and it’s going to take a while to adjust to the new reality.

It’s easy for anyone to be confused.

Luckily, I’m here to help you with that and I’ve been in the lab working on the problem. To start, I decided to come up with a nice little cheat sheet for the New Wins Produced model. It features every veteran currently on an active roster and it’s sorted by team and by the players Wins Produced for the 2010-2011 season. It has basic information for each player, totals for the last five years, each players average year and the numbers for the 2010-11 season.

Hopefully, that will help everyone involved.

-Arturo

Checking in on a Prediction

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Economists aren’t known for getting predictions right.  Nevertheless, we keep trying. 

My latest prediction – which was revealed in an article by Ron Dicker at Huffington Post – was that television ratings for NBA games this Christmas would exceed the ratings seen for games played on Christmas last year.  This prediction — made a few weeks ago — was motivated by the research I published with Martin Schmidt on the impact labor disputes have on attendance.  As we noted in The Wages of Wins, fans may say during a labor dispute that they will hold a grudge, but the data makes it clear that this is an empty threat.  Although this research was about attendance, I predicted we would see a similar story with respect to TV ratings.  And as I revealed today in my latest at Freakonomics…. well, go read the post. 

I will add this bit of information.  In the 33 days since the NBA lockout ended, we have had more than 90,000 page views at the Wages of Wins Journal (according to WordPress).  From November 26 to December 28 of 2010 (or last year at this time), this blog only had about 53,000 page views.  This is somewhat surprising, since NBA games were actually being played for this entire time period in 2010.  But one suspects that fans became very interested in the NBA once the lockout ended. 

Then again… last year the primary writer in this forum was me.  And this year, other people are doing almost all the writing. So maybe this all simply reflects a change in the talent level in this forum :)

- DJ