Winston has thoughts on everything NBA -- and stats to match

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Winston has thoughts on everything NBA -- and stats to match
Oct. 22, 2009
By Ken Berger
CBSSports.com Senior Writer

WASHINGTON -- Wayne Winston has a lot to say about basketball.

"I think LeBron is way better than Kobe," he says. "And I think Dwyane Wade and LeBron are the two best players in the NBA."

And this: "I actually think Lamar Odom is at least as much of a contributor to the Lakers as Kobe Bryant."

And: "Kevin Durant is an overrated player." The best player of the decade, according to Winston? Kevin Garnett. The 10th best? It's a tie between Rasheed Wallace and Manu Ginobili. Most underrated? Brad Miller.

"And it pains me to say that," Winston said, "because he went to Purdue."

Who is Wayne Winston? Maybe we should begin by telling you who he is not. He is not some barstool fan or uninformed sportswriter who fuels his opinions with information gleaned from SportsCenter highlights or newspaper box scores. He is a professor of decision sciences at Indiana University's Kelley School of Business, and until this year was the statistical guru for the Dallas Mavericks. He is author of the book Mathletics, which explains what statistics really tell us about sports.

He knows what he's doing and has data to back up his opinions. And he has more opinions than me and another Indiana alum, Mark Cuban, put together.

A few blocks from the White House, where matters of national and international security were being decided, Winston was the guest lecturer Tuesday for a newsmaker event at the National Press Club. The discussion, hosted by the IU-based National Sports Journalism Center, focused on explaining why traditional box-score statistics are meaningless and inferior to Winston's methods for quantifying how players contribute to winning.

Winston uses a complicated regression model to evaluate NBA players based on an adjusted plus-minus rating. Instead of looking at field-goal and 3-point percentages, assists, steals or rebounds, Winston isolates the most important factor in an NBA game: When a player is on the floor, how much does the score move relative to average when adjusted for the other players on the floor for both teams?

This is how Winston determined that LeBron James' team performs 20 points better than average when he's on the floor. It's also how he determined that the Thunder perform worse when Durant -- who is certainly their most talented player -- is on the floor.

Winston looked at why the Cavaliers lost to the Magic in the Eastern Conference finals and concluded the following: During the 57 minutes Ben Wallace was on the floor, the Cavs lost by 58 points. Case closed: Mike Brown should've played Joe Smith instead.

"Did they know that?" Winston said. "If they did, why did they let it happen the whole series? They should've known that."

A prediction: The Lakers, Celtics, or Cavs will challenge the 1995-96 Bulls' record of 72 wins this season, Winston said. Why?

"The good teams have gotten so much better and some of the bad teams are going to be really bad," Winston said. "I predict there will be some teams that win 15 games this year."

As for individual rankings, Kobe contributes about nine points better than average when he's on the floor, which Winston says is really, really good. But it's only half as good as LeBron and Wade, who are equally effective in Winston's estimation. Gilbert Arenas? About the same as Kobe.

"When he plays to his level, he is not quite as good as LeBron and Dwyane Wade," Winston said, "but he's not that far behind. ... If Gilbert Arenas can play to his former level, the Wizards will make the playoffs. If he can't, God help them."

Hey, I think God has his hands full with the Redskins. Speaking of which, Winston also has data that prove the Redskins are even worse than their 2-4 record suggests and that coach Jim Zorn deserved to have his play-calling duties revoked. Alas, Sherm Lewis won't do any better unless he takes a look at Winston's data showing which calls have produced the most points-per-100 plays and which have produced the fewest. (Hint: Don't call any plays for Ladell Betts.)

But the NBA tidbits are the most interesting to Winston, who developed the Mavericks' player evaluation system and oversaw their statistical team for nine years. Vince Carter replacing Hedo Turkoglu in Orlando, he says, probably will be a wash. The Lakers did well last season when Kobe was on the court, but they did even better when Odom was on the court with him.

How about this one: Anthony Parker will make a greater impact for the Cavs than Shaquille O'Neal. Year after year, Parker performs much better than average in Winston's evaluation, even though he has never averaged more than 12.5 points per game. The best Winston can say for Shaq at this stage of his career is that he won't hurt.

"Anything," Winston said, "is better than Ben Wallace."

You can find Winston's musings in his blog (waynewinston.com), including his belief that Andre Iguodala should've made the All-Star team last season because the Sixers were 11.46 points better than average when he was on the floor. And get this: Iguodala's defense accounted for 7.82 of those points.

Sixers fans who have long been frustrated with Iguodala just hit the floor all over Philly and South Jersey. And while it's true Winston's data don't always illustrate what you think your eyes have seen, that's part of the fun with quantitative analysis. It's also part of the dilemma.

Number crunching like this has exploded in the NBA in recent years, with a Moneyball approach factoring into most teams' personnel and lineup decisions. There are problems with all of the models, including Winston's, which he admits is fraught with "noisy data."

But adjusted plus-minus is probably the most intuitive tool for isolating a player's overall value because it takes into account two critical aspects that can't be gleaned from box scores: 1) Defensive impact; and 2) Making teammates better. All aspects of a player's contributions are captured by how his presence or absence affects the score of a game, and you can easily see how a player's teammates are affected when he checks in and out at the scorer's table. Anyone can say Jason Kidd makes his teammates better; Winston can actually prove it.

There's some debate about whether adjusted plus-minus or John Hollinger's PER (player efficiency rating, the best amalgamation of box-score statistics) is the proper way to rate players. The best answer is probably a little bit of both, with some lineup analysis from 82games.com thrown in. Winston said David Berri's "wins produced" model at the Wages of Wins Journal does a good job of combining both schools of thought. Alas, Winston's former boss, Cuban, assailed wins produced as a "dumb statistic" when he spoke at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference in March.

So it would be a good idea to ask Cuban why the Mavs traded for Shawn Marion, and then find out in a few months whether he came up with the right answer. Sometimes it's just as simple as the fact that Marion -- who is an average player, according to Winston -- was better than the players Dallas traded. But it also has to do with lineups. Winston said Dallas' most effective lineup last season was Dirk Nowitzki, Brandon Bass, Jason Kidd, Josh Howard, and either Jason Terry or J.J. Barea. So the Mavs play better with a smaller lineup.

"The key question will be, if you put Marion, Nowitzki and Howard as the frontcourt with Terry and Kidd as the backcourt, will that be a fantastic lineup?" Winston asked. "I happen to think it would be."

He also happens to think that the best coach in the NBA is Rick Carlisle. It's not that he's biased; he devised a system for evaluating every NBA coach, and when it showed that Carlisle graded the best, Cuban hired him. The study involved measuring changes in players' adjusted plus-minus in their first year playing for a new coach. By far, Carlisle improved new players the most.

There's another reason Winston believes Dallas will be among the six best teams in the NBA this season, along with (in no particular order) the Celtics, Lakers, Cavs, Magic, Spurs and Nuggets: They added Tim Thomas, who has historically been underrated according to Winston's data, and they also acquired Quinton Ross. Why Quinton Ross?

"Because he always plays well against Carmelo Anthony," Winston said, recalling how the Nuggets beat the Mavs 4-1 in the conference semifinals last season.

Garnett has been the best player of the decade so far, with an adjusted plus-minus of 11.7, followed by Tim Duncan (11.2), LeBron (10.9) and Nowitzki (10.4). Rasheed Wallace and Ginobili round out the top 10 (tied at 7.5). Will Garnett continue to play on that level coming off a knee injury?

"I'll know in two months," Winston said. "I'll be able to see if he's helping the team the same as he was before. ... If Garnett is what he was before -- and with the addition of Rasheed Wallace -- that team and Cleveland should never lose to the Knicks or the stiffs of the league, home or away."

Finally, a statistic we can all agree on.