Darko W48 = -.104
Hollins W48 = -.167

That, my esteemed friends, is addition through subtraction.

Win Shares uses a current teams number of Win’s as the base, while Win’s produced is calculated separately…it just so happens that it almost always comes within 0-3 wins of a Teams actual total. I wasn’t sure if it was Win Shares or Wins Produced that you disliked.

I read Berri’s book 4 years ago. I remember thinking the reasoning behind the stat was sound at the time. And it confirmed my opinion that Iverson and players like him were overrated.

At the most basic I have always thought that anyone who had a high PPG but low FG% was inefficient and inefficient on a large number of possessions, therefore not as valuable as most people think. It would be like looking at hits per game in baseball and not batting average, yet that is what most fans do with basketball.

But, as with adjusted +/-, I don’t make player evaluations in a vacuum and only look at one stat or stats alone. I would never, ever want Iverson on a team I was running not because he is untalented, but because his salary vs. his contributions would not be equal.

But I bet if I looked at the 74 players listed above him on wins produced that year I would find many that I think he is more talented than and if I’m choosing sides for a pick-up game I’d choose him above the 75th place…but I doubt I’d take him in the top 10.

What I’m really interested in, in the game of life, is how we fool ourselves. In basketball that means overvaluing PPG or Kobe’s miraculous game-winning shots (and not all of his misses), streak shooting (which doesn’t appear to be real), etc. So books like Berri’s or Freakanomics or any of Gladwell’s stuff are fascinating to me. I don’t think they’re always right, but they often point in new directions of inquiry.

Wyn said it better than me below: this is one stat, a useful one to put into the mix along with other stats and personal observation.

p.s. I also would not want Barry Sanders on my team. Spectacular to watch, but I don’t think what he did helps a football team win games at a high rate.

We would see a team take tons of chances on players that do well in “Win’s Produced” but aren’t commonly thought of as Great (or even average). I’m going to come up with a potential off-season the Wolves could have if only focusing on Win’s Produced…

would you say that stats like Wins Produced and adj. +/- are useful cues for identifying players worth investigating more closely?

But Berri constantly uses it to compare players across different teams, and comes up with some pretty absurd conclusions.

For example, in his post about All Star snubs, he stated he felt tat the WC starters should have been Kidd, Ginobili, Odom, Love and Camby, because their combined WP was more than the actual starters. Am I missing the point of his stat or something? Because if you were to field that team on a regular basis, it’s got no chance of winning more games than a team built around Kobe, Melo and Duncan, basically regardless of who you put at point guard or center with them.

That’s where the stat falls apart for me. Berri and fans use it like it’s a comparative metric of all players across the league, but the rank it puts them in is illogical to begin with.

And would explain why it is such a good predictor of team wins, in spite of the obvious paucity of defensive statistics. I suppose if this was the case, good rebounders will be overvalued at the expense of good defenders on their team.

I don’t want to overstate how much i think WP 48 under-appreciates man defense either. The predictive power of the stat leads me to believe that while there is no box-score stat that obviously captures defense, steals blocks rebounds or maybe even some other stat must correlate with man-defensive skill in a way that it is captured in the regression.

Lowered expectations – check.

Flynn, Brewer, Gomes, Ellington not meaningful players on a playoff team – check.

Love is our “superstar” – um, no.

But maybe, just maybe, he’s that #2 player.

We’ve got Love, maybe Rubio, and we still need that #1 superstar. That’s why I’ll be rooting for the second worst record in the league until we get him.