Kobe: Finals MVP or Finals Most Famous Scorer?

This is a few days late, but I wanted to chip in with a few thoughts on the Lakers winning their second consecutive championship, more specifically on Kobe winning his second consecutive Finals MVP. First of all congratulations to the Lakers. They earned their win, no doubts about it. It was an incredibly compelling series to watch and I enjoyed it as much as any recent playoff series. (more…)

Recently, Dave Berri, at the Wages of Wins Journal, put out a call looking for bloggers to use his statistical model, Wins Produced, to cover each NBA team. I volunteered to cover the Indiana Pacers for Berri’s “Wages of Wins Network.” My first post went up last week, and I thought it might require more explanation than was appropriate for that forum.

I have been reading Berri’s blog for over a year now. I am in the process of re-reading his book, The Wages of Wins, and look forward to immersing myself in his second book, Stumbling on Wins. His work is controversial and has caused a great deal of discussion across the internet. This FreeDarko post, and the accompanying commentary, is one of the most comprehensive discussions of his work I could find on the internet (although it falls mostly on the negative side). Like many basketball fans, many of his conclusions don’t fit with other pieces of my basketball knowledge. Some of what he writes makes complete sense to me, and other ideas challenge my conceptions. Over the past year I have come to a comfortable accord with his work: I see it as a valid statistical tool, one of many that I would like to keep in my analytical tool box. Like any other statistic, Wins Produced has strengths and flaws, answers some questions and raises others. It is one lens with which to examine the nature of basketball in an attempt to understand it better. In part, I volunteered to write with his blog as a chance to work with his statistical model, and hopefully understand it better. (more…)