A. Measuring Wins Produced in the NBA

Throughout the book, we mention Wins Produced for NBA players, a metric introduced in The Wages of Wins and Berri (2008). Much of the following discussion is offered for those who are interested in how this is calculated.

A Very Brief Introduction to Regression Analysis

The Wins Produced calculations are based on various regressions. For economists, regressions are often the laboratory in which we work. For many non-economists, though, the basics of regression may be unfamiliar. Fortunately, to understand our arguments one only needs to understand a few simple concepts.

Let’s start with the following simple model:

In words, this model says that wins are a function of how many points a team and the team’s ...

Get Stumbling On Wins: Two Economists Expose the Pitfalls on the Road to Victory in Professional Sports now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.