Non Celts:Interesting Story

["Michael J.King Sr." <kingpin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

This article is from Sundays N.Y.Times 27 April 03. I usually don't post 
articles in their entirety but the Times require readers to sign up and in 
to read online. In the past people have expressed reluctance in forced 
registrations. Just FYI I signed up many years ago with an E-Mail addy used 
only for said registration and have never gotten any spam or any mail other 
than NYT or Times related so here is the story in full:


April 27, 2003

New York Times Online



Mavericks Depend on Decimal Points

By DAVID LEONHARDT

2ef92f.jpgn their run to the playoffs, the Dallas Mavericks have relied on 
a seven-foot veteran of the German Army with a deft 3-point shot. Their 
bench includes the second Mexican-born player in N.B.A. history and a 
rebounding specialist from the basketball backwater known as France. Their 
owner rushed the court and pretended to fight with a referee on April 
Fool's Day.

But the most unusual part of the team will not be in the arena tonight when 
the Mavericks play the Portland Trail Blazers in Game 4 of their Western 
Conference quarterfinal. He is Wayne L. Winston, a professor of decision 
sciences at Indiana University, who will be watching the game from his 
family room in Bloomington, Ind., and yelling at the television if the 
Mavericks fall behind.

For the last three seasons, Winston and his friend Jeff Sagarin, a 
professional sports statistician, have been advising the team about which 
lineups to use during games and which free agents to sign.

Ignoring every traditional statistic for players, Sagarin and Winston have 
designed a ranking that is modeled on hockey's plus-minus system, in which 
players receive credit for being in the game when their team does well. 
Whether they actually score points or grab rebounds does not matter.

"Did you make the pass before the assist? Did you tip a ball to someone who 
made a shot? Did you set a pick? Did you take a charge?" said Winston, a 
fast-talking former "Jeopardy" champion who, like Sagarin, grew up outside 
of New York City rooting for the Knicks of the late 1960's and early 70's.

"Nobody's got a stat for these," Winston said. "Ninety percent of 
basketball is made up of things there aren't stats for."

The rating system has certainly not caused the Mavericks' turnaround by 
itself, but Mark Cuban, the Internet billionaire who owns the team, said it 
helped. Since 2000, when the Mavericks began using it, their winning 
percentage in the regular season has been .691, third-highest in the 
league. During the 10 previous years, it was a sickly .303, better than 
only that of the expansion Grizzlies.

Cuban said the ratings had influenced every player signing he had made over 
the past few years. Before each game, he also receives a report from 
Sagarin and Winston that lists the hot players and most effective lineups 
for the Mavericks and their opponents, as well as the kind of fouls that 
the referees for that game call most often. Cuban gives the report to the 
team's assistant coaches.

Traditional statistics "don't reflect the overall impact a player has on 
the game and the score, particularly when the outcome of the game is in 
doubt," Cuban said in an email interview. "I would love to have a player 
who never scores a point or gets a rebound if he impacts the game enough to 
help us win every game."

In the past, the rating system which goes by the Microsoft-like name Winval 
might have simply served as fodder for debate within the small world of 
mathematicians who are sports fans. But the Mavericks' use of it, at a cost 
of more than $100,000 a year, is part of sports franchises' emerging 
interest in hard-core quantitative analysis.

In baseball, the Boston Red Sox have hired Bill James, the author of many 
statistics-laden books, as a consultant. The Oakland Athletics have 
succeeded in recent seasons partly by relying on a different set of 
statistics than most teams do. The Toronto Blue Jays have begun mimicking 
that system.

The Mavericks use Winval to look for similar competitive edges.

The players widely considered to be the league's biggest stars, like Allen 
Iverson, Tracy McGrady and Shaquille O'Neal, are typically the ones who 
score the most points. But they are not always the ones who give their 
teams the biggest boost when they step onto the court, partly because many 
high scorers are only average defenders.

This is not always apparent from traditional statistics. O'Neal blocks a 
lot of shots and Iverson makes a lot of steals, for instance. All in all, 
though, opposing teams do not struggle to score when they are on the court.

Instead, the players who made the biggest difference this season included 
some second-tier stars, like the veteran Scottie Pippen of Portland (the 
fourth-best player in the National Basketball Association this season, 
according to Winval) and Richard Hamilton of Detroit (who was fifth). Kevin 
Garnett of Minnesota, Tim Duncan of San Antonio and Dirk Nowitzki of Dallas 
the German Army veteran ranked one, two and three.
The system's real value comes in identifying players like Eduardo Najera, a 
forward who makes the Mavericks a better team when he plays even though his 
contribution is often invisible in a box score.

"He'll do the dirty work," Winston said of Najera. "He has no stats, but we 
have him as great."

Winval has its roots in a serendipitous weekend trip to Dallas that Winston 
and his 10-year-old son took three years ago to watch the Indiana Pacers 
play the Mavericks. While Winston was walking around the lower level of the 
arena, one of his former students, having also seen him on "Jeopardy," 
recognized him and said hello.

It was Cuban. Almost 20 years earlier he had talked his way into Winston's 
graduate-level statistics class as a freshman at Indiana. Cuban wanted to 
take as many hard classes as he could before he was old enough to get into 
Bloomington's bars, he said.

Remembering that Winston had liked to use sports examples in his class, 
Cuban said he wanted to hear any ideas about improving the Mavericks, who 
were then on their way to a 10th straight losing season. The next day, 
while swimming in the pool of his Dallas hotel, Winston conceived of the 
basic idea for the rating system.

Back in Indiana, he and Sagarin began working on Winval soon after. They 
had met in the late 1960's while majoring in math at the Massachusetts 
Institute of Technology, and Sagarin, who is best known for his college 
football ranking, moved to Bloomington in 1977 after visiting Winston 
there. They have been talking about sports, and interrupting each other to 
offer a criticism or new idea, ever since.

"A lot of people know math," Winston said. "A lot of people know computers. 
A lot of people know sports. But not many people know all three."

The database on Sagarin's personal computer contains every substitution in 
every N.B.A. game since 1999-2000, allowing Winval to rate a player while 
controlling for who else is on the court. Players on good teams do not rank 
highly simply because their team wins.

Adrian Griffin, a swingman on the Mavericks, rates poorly, even though the 
team outscored its opponents when he was on the court. But it did so by 
less than when he was on the bench. Unlike Najera, Griffin has played less 
in the playoffs than he did during the regular season.

Sagarin and Winston have tried to sell their system to other teams besides 
the Mavericks. But only the Seattle SuperSonics have bought it, and they 
did so for just one month last season.

"It's a real nice system, it's just real expensive," Rich Cho, the Sonics' 
assistant general manager, said. "And it's only as good as what you make of 
it. In general, coaches don't have a lot of time to look at the analysis. 
They're not going to sit there during a game and look at a spreadsheet. 
They coach by feel a lot."

Sagarin and Winston argue that coaches rely on their instinct too much. 
Winston points to his once-beloved Knicks, who did their best this season 
when Allan Houston, Latrell Sprewell, Kurt Thomas, Charlie Ward and 
Clarence Weatherspoon were on the court together. But that lineup seldom 
played.

Cuban does not consider the system perfect. The biggest drawback, he said, 
is that a player's performance over the long N.B.A. season can make him 
look better or worse than he is playing at any given time. Some players may 
also take it easy during the regular season, waiting for the playoffs to 
give a full effort.

Winval, Cuban said, "is just one piece of information."

But it is valuable enough that he is quite happy that other teams are not 
willing to pay for it.




<http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/copyright.html>Copyright 2003 
<http://www.nytco.com/>The New York Times Company
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