Stumbling on Wins: Two Economists Expose the Pitfalls on the Road to Victory in Professional Sports

Summary: Most of this book looks at Pro Basketball and Football. They make the point that many GM/Manager decisions on who to draft and play are poor choices since you can use advanced stats to identify better players who get you more wins for less money. - - - - - In 1981 Bill James made a profound impact on sports with his first mass market publication of Baseball Abstract. He identified and created stats that could be used to measure baseball players objectively and much more precisely than before. Discovering the precise relationship between the runs allowed/scored and a teams winning percentage was a big deal. But his Runs Created stat that identified how many runs each PLAYER was responsible for was an amazing breakthrough. Berry and Schmidt did the same thing for basketball* a few years back in an earlier book. Now they've built on that and examine how GM/Manager decisions could be improved by advanced sports stats. For example, their Wins Produced (or the even simpler and almost as accurate Win Score) stat uses easily available stats like minutes played, rebounds, points, shots attempted (and more) to estimate how many wins each player is responsible for. Using this stat reveals that the popular perception of the best players are often wrong. And many GMs/Managers are building bad teams because they look at the wrong stats to identify the best players. I could go on at great length to justify that last paragraph but the book does that so I don't have to! If you're a fan of a pro basketball or football team that ISN'T a consistent winner you should read this book so you know what your GM/Manager is doing wrong. If you're the GM/Manager of one of those teams you should read this, apply what you've learned and start winning. The best teams you compete against understand these stats (even if they don't have them calculated - they do it intuitively) and they exploit the player selection mistakes you make to beat you like a drum! *There is a good amount of excellent football analysis in this book but the best work applies to basketball.

While I must admit at the outset that I am a sports fan and a finance professional, my love for sports statistics and data in general is enhanced by reading this book. The authors do a great job of taking a few elements of statistics - predominantly in NBA basketball and NFL football, and show that common perceptions on efficiency, pay for performance, effectiveness and player and coaching contributions aren't always supported by the underlying data. The book is replete with pages of footnotes for the hardcore researcher or statistician, but any fan with a high school level of math will be able to both understand end enjoy the book. It is eye opening, and demonstrates the power of data and the fallacies of pure "tradition" on decisionmaking - using a backdrop that most people can understand and appreciate.

Stumbling on Wins is an important book. If almost demands the question, "Why wouldn't someone want the team they have invested 1/4 billion dollars in...to win?" The authors have done a fantastic job of teasing out just what it is that determines what causes professional sports teams to win or to lose. For example: Everyone knows that coaching matters in professional sports, but how important is that coaches skill to the team? If you took that NBA coach and moved him to another franchise, does the next franchise perform better or worse? Does the incoming coach do better or worse? It turns out that there is a statistically sound model to determine just how much value a professional coach adds to a team. My read on their analysis is that most coaches are important (without one the team would be in disarray) but most professional coaches are pretty similar in their contribution to a team winning. So go ahead and spend tens of millions but it's not going to cause you to win any more games. Are there exceptions? Yes there is one truly notable, exceptional...exception. There is a clear "greatest coach ever," and after that the reported results show that most of the rest do their job...and no one is all that much better or worse than anyone else. Again, my read on their analysis. I'll let you get the book to find out which coach. What's even more fascinating is the authors discussion of how valuable certain all time all star players were to a teams winning. It turns out that a lot of current Hall of Famers were not as important to their teams that were big winners as many players were to teams that were losers. When Kareem Abdul Jabbar played basketball he was amazing. But there was another player who was able to help HIS team produce more wins than KAJ and yet he is not in the Hall. Moving to football the analysis is more difficult because there are only 16 games played in a season, not 82 or 162. Basketball, hockey and baseball all lend themselves to more valuable statistical analysis. But analyzing the football stats has plenty to teach us about who the most important quarterbacks are...even who the most important kickers are. It turns out that field goals do matter...and it turns out when the kicker goes to get his paycheck his kickoffs should matter more than his field goal kicking ability when it comes to his paycheck...and it doesn't. Just how good is Ben Roethlisberger? You'll find out in the book. In baseball, Bill James discovered years ago that "batting average" isn't anywhere near as important as On Base Percentage or Slugging Percentage. You never see those numbers reported in the paper or on ESPN. Why? OBP and OSP are a great deal more important in valuing a player. Taking a walk, is not exciting. But when Ricky Henderson walked 100 times it turns out that was a *lot* more impressive and important to his team than his other accomplishment of 100 stolen bases. My first inclination is that to watch your team score runs because of b

Reading the previous offering from these two authors, The Wages of Wins, had a profound impact on me. As a Knicks fans and a lifelong lover of basketball, I was perhaps uniquely primed for their message, but it was nevertheless a real revelation to see the empirical case made that scoring is overvalued in the NBA and that decision makers make systematic errors rather than incorporating all the information available to them. Watching Isiah Thomas operate after reading the book was as fascinating as it was painful and sparked me to take a serious and very rewarding interest in the use of advanced statistics in basketball and other sports as well. Needless to say, I have been excited for a long time about the arrival of their second book. Stumbling on Wins definitely didn't disappoint. I picked it up and didn't put it down before finishing it. It is immensely readable and very entertaining, full of the kind of sports stories that make it very clear there is ample room for improvement at the top or your favorite franchise and plenty of insight into human behavior to be garnered from a study of sports. It really builds and improves on their first book by focusing on the core insight about irrationality in human decisionmaking and by drawing on many different sports to illustrate the point. For both casual and serious sports fans, I think this will be a very enjoyable read which should deepen your understanding and enjoyment of sports for the long term. I guarantee you won't look at any of the decisions made by your local sports franchises in quite the same way again. Highly recommended.