Who is ‘most valuable’? Measuring the player's production of wins in the National Basketball Association

Abstract

How does one measure the productivity of an individual participating in a team sport? The purpose of this inquiry is to answer this question via an econometric model that links the player's statistics in the National Basketball Association (NBA) to team wins. This model will then be employed in the measurement of each player's marginal product. Such a measurement is useful in answering the question offered in the title, or a broader list of questions posed by both industry insiders and other interested observers. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Mixing the princes and the paupers: Pay and performance in the National Basketball Association

“…The conventional measure of productivity used by the National Basketball Association is NBA EFFICIENCY and this is the sum of player positive statistics, comprised as points, rebounds, steals, assists and blocked shots, minus the sum of performance metrics that reduce wins (turnovers and missed shots). Berri (1999Berri ( , 2008 points out that this measure imposes equal weights on each performance statistic and overvalues the positive impact of inefficient scoring.…”

Factors determining production (FDP) in basketball

“…The "Wins Produced" and its simplification "Win Score" are the two most accepted ways to rate players by the academic community. The works of Berri (1999;2008;2012), Berri, Brook and Schmidt (2006) or Berri and Bradbury (2010) explain the rationale of this method, the important limitations of other famous metrics such as "Efficiency", "PER", "PlusMinus" and "Adjusted Plus-Minus", and why Wins Produced overcomes such metrics. Berri (1999;2008) links box-score statistics with team wins through regression analysis.…”

“…The works of Berri (1999;2008;2012), Berri, Brook and Schmidt (2006) or Berri and Bradbury (2010) explain the rationale of this method, the important limitations of other famous metrics such as "Efficiency", "PER", "PlusMinus" and "Adjusted Plus-Minus", and why Wins Produced overcomes such metrics. Berri (1999;2008) links box-score statistics with team wins through regression analysis. Therefore wins are determined by both offensive efficiency and defensive efficiency, where offensive efficiency is defined as points scored divided by possessions employed and defensive efficiency is defined as points surrendered divided by possessions acquired.…”

“…Win Score's correlation with WinProduced is 0.99, when both variables are normalized per minute (Berri & Schmidt, 2010). Therefore, the major contribution of Berri (1999;2008) is to propose an easily understandable metric, which may be manually computed for any person, and which exceptionally correlates with team wins 1 . However, and acknowledging the merit of this metric, it has some important concerns.…”

Individual Team Productivity - A Conceptual Approach

“…The measurement of the productivity of an individual player participating in a team for the specific example of a basketball team of the NBA was done by Berri (1999). He proposed an econometric model tailored for basketball.…”