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Wins Produced - Wages of Wins (Berri, Schmidt, and Brook)
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Analyze This



Joined: 17 May 2005
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PostPosted: Wed Nov 29, 2006 2:04 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I agree with you that Berri created his metric as a tool to do economic research. But his book gets a lot of attention in the mainstream media. And that is not because he talked about the competitive balance in the nba. It is because of the nba metric. Dean Oliver his book has sold more than a few copies. So perhaps a bigger part of the population than you think has interest in this kind of work. Perhaps an academic journal is not the best way to get a lot of attention. But it's a start. And why not publish your work in a book? I would buy a copy Smile
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Dan Rosenbaum



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PostPosted: Wed Nov 29, 2006 2:14 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Analyze This wrote:
I agree with you that Berri created his metric as a tool to do economic research. But his book gets a lot of attention in the mainstream media. And that is not because he talked about the competitive balance in the nba. It is because of the nba metric. Dean Oliver his book has sold more than a few copies. So perhaps a bigger part of the population than you think has interest in this kind of work. Perhaps an academic journal is not the best way to get a lot of attention. But it's a start. And why not publish your work in a book? I would buy a copy Smile

Oh, I agree there is interest in this. But that does not mean there is interest in this in academic journals. And it might be quite expensive in time and effort to find out. And since I like actually helping make things happen rather than just analyzing what happens, a book is tough.
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Analyze This



Joined: 17 May 2005
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PostPosted: Wed Nov 29, 2006 2:23 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Yeah but a board is -how do you say that in English- " it passes faster". It's not as permanent as a book. And your ideas are spread over heaps of topics, there is not so much structure. You will also reach less people. And you can twist and turn as much as you want but for a lot of people not publishing but only writing on the net, will give you less authority/ make you less important and so your impact will be smaller. Not with the happy few, but outside the apbrmetrcis community this will be the case. You can replace a book by a academic journal and make the same remarks (exept the reaching more people part) . If you really want to start a big debate, or give more than "the happy few" a better understanding of basketball you need to publish in my opinion. If you just want to sell your stuff to an nba team and work behind the scenes for an nba team, than of course you don't need to publish. That's my opinion.
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ziller



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PostPosted: Thu Nov 30, 2006 4:34 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Another guy with an audience addresses the subject: King Kaufman at Salon.

Kaufman did pan the book previously. He bases his arguments not on math necessarily, but the fact Dennis Rodman was never more valuable than Michael Jordan.

EDIT: I should note this very thread is linked in the piece, thus completing the cycle.
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kjb



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PostPosted: Fri Dec 01, 2006 10:22 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

FFSBasketball wrote:
Gladwell continues the discourse.


Can you cut & paste and email what Gladwell wrote? My job's firewall keeps me off Gladwell's blog.
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Neil Paine



Joined: 13 Oct 2005
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PostPosted: Fri Dec 01, 2006 10:33 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Quote:
The Perfect and the Good

I wrote a piece for the The New Yorker a few weeks ago about a group of people who have created a neural network that predicts (or tries to predict) the box office of movies from their scripts. (It's not up on my site yet, but will be soon).

The piece drew all kinds of interesting responses, a handful of which pointed out obvious imperfections in the system. Those criticisms were entirely accurate. But they were also, I think, in some way beside the point, because no decision rule or algorithm or prediction system is ever perfect. The test of these kinds of decision aids is simply whether--in most cases for most people--they improve the quality of decision-making. They can't be perfect. But they can be good.

In "Blink," for instance, I wrote about the use of a decision tree at Cook County Hospital in Chicago to help diagnose chest pain. Lee Goldman, the physican who devised the chest pain decision rule, says very clearly that he thinks that there are individual doctors here and there who can make better decisions without it. But nonetheless Goldman's work has saved lots and lot of lives and millions and miillions of dollars because it improves the quality of the average decision.

Is the average movie executive better off with a neural network for analyzing scripts than without it? My guess is yes. That's why I wrote the piece. I think that one of the most important changes we're going to see in lots of professions over the next few years is the emergence of tools that close the gap between the middle and the top--that allow the decision-making who is merely competent to avoid his errors to be reach the level of good.

I think the same perspective should be applied to the basketball algorithms I've been writing about. It is easy to point out the ways in which either Hollinger's system or Berri's system fail to completely reflect the reality of what happens on the basketball court. But of course they are imperfect: neither Berri or Hollinger would ever claim that they are not. The issue is--are we better off using them to assist decision-making that we are making entirely judgements about basketball players using conventional metrics? Here I think the answer is a resounding yes. (Keep in mind that I live in New York City and have had to watch Mr. Thomas bungled his way toward disaster. I would think that.)

And the reason that lots of smart people, like Berri and Hollinger and others, spend so much time arguing back and forth about different variations on these algorithms, is that every little tweak raises the quality of decision-making in the middle part of the curve just a little bit higher. That's a pretty noble goal.

That said, here are the latest updates on the Hollinger-Berri back and forth. And remember. I don't think this is a question of one of them being wrong and the other right. They are both right. It's just that one of them may be a little more right than the other.

Here we go. First Hollinger's response, courtesy of truehoop.com, (an excellent site by the way.)

November 26, 2006
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Dan Rosenbaum



Joined: 03 Jan 2005
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PostPosted: Fri Dec 01, 2006 11:55 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

At Wages of Wins,

Quote:
kjb // Dec 1st 2006 at 8:21 am

How undramatic is the team adjustment? I’ve read Dan’s critique, in which he inserted some absurdly radical values for blocked shots (for example), and once the team adjustment was added, it had no effect on the overall ratings.

I am not sure what you mean by "overall ratings," so this might not be what I have argued. Radical values for blocked shots (or personal fouls or assists) will change the player ratings, but they will not affect how well Wins Produced explains team wins.
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kjb



Joined: 03 Jan 2005
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PostPosted: Fri Dec 01, 2006 1:17 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Dan Rosenbaum wrote:
At Wages of Wins,

Quote:
kjb // Dec 1st 2006 at 8:21 am

How undramatic is the team adjustment? I’ve read Dan’s critique, in which he inserted some absurdly radical values for blocked shots (for example), and once the team adjustment was added, it had no effect on the overall ratings.

I am not sure what you mean by "overall ratings," so this might not be what I have argued. Radical values for blocked shots (or personal fouls or assists) will change the player ratings, but they will not affect how well Wins Produced explains team wins.


That's exactly what I meant. I guess I wasn't as clear as I'd hoped to be. Smile
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tpryan



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PostPosted: Mon Dec 04, 2006 4:44 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Dan Rosenbaum wrote:
Analyze This wrote:
I agree with you that Berri created his metric as a tool to do economic research. But his book gets a lot of attention in the mainstream media. And that is not because he talked about the competitive balance in the nba. It is because of the nba metric. Dean Oliver his book has sold more than a few copies. So perhaps a bigger part of the population than you think has interest in this kind of work. Perhaps an academic journal is not the best way to get a lot of attention. But it's a start. And why not publish your work in a book? I would buy a copy Smile

Oh, I agree there is interest in this. But that does not mean there is interest in this in academic journals. And it might be quite expensive in time and effort to find out. And since I like actually helping make things happen rather than just analyzing what happens, a book is tough.

Dan,

As you may know, there is a Statistics in Sports Section of the American Statistical Association (ASA) and there is considerable interest in sports among members of ASA. The Section's leading members (Scott Berry, Jim Albert, Jay Bennett, Carl Morris, etc.) have acquired some stature in various ways (e.g., Albert has written a couple of baseball books, Morris, a star academic statistician at Harvard, has served as a consultant to the Boston Red Sox, etc.). The Journal of the American Statistical Association (JASA), a prestigious journal, occasionally publishes sports applications papers, as does Chance, which is published by ASA. (JASA is at a considerable higher level of mathematical sophistication than Chance.)

Tom
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Ben F.



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PostPosted: Thu Dec 07, 2006 5:01 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

More on the whole subject, this from TrueHoop which links to I think a very soundly reasoned post.
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Ben F.



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PostPosted: Thu Dec 07, 2006 7:35 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Matthew Yglesias weighs in as well. I found this quote particularly interesting in light of the usage vs. efficiency debate, and it seems to espouse the conventional wisdom in a simple and articulate way:

Matthew Yglesias wrote:
Looking at WoW I think something almost all basketball fans have trouble with is the seeming implication that if you put five high-efficiency, low-volume shooters who were good at rebounding and avoiding turnovers on the floor simultaneously that you'd have a really effective team. This seems wrong to most of us; it seems as if in that situation the team would either see turnovers skyrocket (shot clock violations) or else shooting efficiency decline. And it would be good to have a formula that took that sort of thing into account. To construct a formula like that, though, you'd either need to just guess what would happen, or else you'd need much more data out of which to try and build an empirically grounded non-linear analysis. But since as best I can tell no coaches actually field lineups like that (they, like most people, are just assuming it wouldn't work) there isn't much to be done.
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bchaikin



Joined: 27 Jan 2005
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PostPosted: Thu Dec 07, 2006 9:25 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I found this quote particularly interesting in light of the usage vs. efficiency debate, and it seems to espouse the conventional wisdom in a simple and articulate way:

Matthew Yglesias wrote:
Looking at WoW I think something almost all basketball fans have trouble with is the seeming implication that if you put five high-efficiency, low-volume shooters who were good at rebounding and avoiding turnovers on the floor simultaneously that you'd have a really effective team.


why wouldn't you have a really effective team? as long as one was a PG, another an SG, and one a SF, a PF, and a C, why wouldn't the team be really effective?...

This seems wrong to most of us; it seems as if in that situation the team would either see turnovers skyrocket (shot clock violations) or else shooting efficiency decline.

not sure why one would think this - perhaps if this individual listed some of these players he had in mind it might help. i mean, if right now in 06-07 you fielded a team of antonio daniels, josh childress, quinton ross, shane battier, and ben wallace, would you seriously expect this team to have their turnovers skyrocket or their shooting efficiency dramatically decline from their current turnover rates and shooting efficiencies?...

And it would be good to have a formula that took that sort of thing into account. To construct a formula like that, though, you'd either need to just guess what would happen, or else you'd need much more data out of which to try and build an empirically grounded non-linear analysis.

turnovers have been kept since 1977-78. that's 29 years of data, 758 team seasons (i.e. the celtics have had 29 team seasons during this time), close to 14,800,000 total minutes of player regular season data in all. how much more data do you need?...

But since as best I can tell no coaches actually field lineups like that (they, like most people, are just assuming it wouldn't work) there isn't much to be done.

does this statement make any sense? any team a coach puts out for a full season is going to have similar team possessions as their opponents (within 4 for every game), and somewhat similar total touches or scoring opportunities over the span of a season. you field a team that previously had players/starters from different teams at each position that had say 20% less scoring attempts per minute than the average player at their positions in the league, then put them all together on the same team they are obviously going to increase their overall scoring attempts, with the certain amount of each increase being dependent on each player's touches/min and what they did per touch....

as for whether one thinks their turnovers would increase instead, there is plenty of data to show how players have performed with an increase (or decrease) in scoring attempts per minute over their careers, on the same team and also on different teams...
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deepak



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PostPosted: Thu Dec 07, 2006 11:41 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

bchaikin wrote:
why wouldn't you have a really effective team? as long as one was a PG, another an SG, and one a SF, a PF, and a C, why wouldn't the team be really effective?...


You might have an effective team, but probably not. The reason is if all the players are low usage players, then there's a good chance they don't have the requisite skills for creating shots for themselves or teammates effectively (ball handling, general offensive versatility, etc.). If you don't have such players on the court, they will have a tough time getting good shots against a decent NBA defense. I think that's the intuition most people have.
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bchaikin



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PostPosted: Thu Dec 07, 2006 11:54 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

You might have an effective team, but probably not. The reason is if all the players are low usage players, then there's a good chance they don't have the requisite skills for creating shots for themselves or teammates effectively (ball handling, general offensive versatility, etc.). If you don't have such players on the court, they will have a tough time getting good shots against a decent NBA defense. I think that's the intuition most people have.

what about the five i mentioned - daniels, childress, ross, battier, and wallace? is this a good example or a bad example of a team that would not be effective? let's forget the generalizations here - can anyone list a couple of examples of 5 players, one at each position, that are high efficiency, low volume players, maybe good rebounders or if not then good defenders, but also good at avoiding turnovers, that if playing together would have their turnovers skyrocket and/or their shooting efficiency drop?...
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Analyze This



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PostPosted: Fri Dec 08, 2006 2:54 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

bchaikin wrote:


This seems wrong to most of us; it seems as if in that situation the team would either see turnovers skyrocket (shot clock violations) or else shooting efficiency decline.

not sure why one would think this - perhaps if this individual listed some of these players he had in mind it might help. i mean, if right now in 06-07 you fielded a team of antonio daniels, josh childress, quinton ross, shane battier, and ben wallace, would you seriously expect this team to have their turnovers skyrocket or their shooting efficiency dramatically decline from their current turnover rates and shooting efficiencies?...

I think that. The team that you mention has only scoring role players. That team can't score enough to win games if each player did what he did today (the same role). Some of those players should need to take very different roles. If some of them try to score much more, they probably would try something they can't do (namely stay effective when using a much bigger part of the scoring possessions), they would force it (higher to ratio), and their ef fg% would go down (because when they use a big part of the scoring possessions they are not able to stay as effective as when they used a small part of the scoring possessions)
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