FanPost

Wins Produced updated, devalues rebounds

For the stat lovers among the DBB faithful, I share the following from the Wages of Wins Journal.

In response to criticism that Wins Produced overvalues rebounds, Dave Berri spent some time during the lockout re-calculating Wins Produced. In a nutshell, Wins Produced now shares the credit for a defensive rebound between the team and the individual who snags the board.

The results? A .98 correlation between the old and new Wins Produced - which implies Wins Produced got it pretty much right the first time - but hopefully a metric that's better equipped to preemptively address certain criticisms.

In his own words,

Both books argued that inefficient scorers in the NBA are overvalued and players that help in ways other than scoring are under-valued. In other words, many players people think are great (or not great) are really not helping (or really are helping quite a bit).

Such an attack on "conventional wisdom" – a term introduced by the late John Kenneth Galbraith – didn’t make everyone happy.* As Galbraith once noted, "Faced with the choice between changing one’s mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof."

The "proof" some people constructed focused on the value of rebounds. Because Wins Produced argues that non-scorers who grab many rebounds are quite valuable – and conventional wisdom argues that non-scorers are simply not that valuable – it must be the case that Wins Produced overvalues rebounds.

As the lockout dragged on and on, though, I began to think that maybe it might be better to just incorporate this effect into the measure we post at the WoW Journal. After all, the effect has been measured and it can be included. So why not just make the adjustment and therefore remove the argument "Wins Produced overvalues rebounds" from the discussion.

So that is what I have done.

You can read the full post here and the full Wins Produced numbers here.

*** SPOILER ALERT ***

The Pistons still don't look very good.

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