As noted in these earlier posts, the statistical analysis of baseball that Bill James invented over 20 years ago has changed the way baseball players are evaluated. Now, the success of Mr. James’ statistical analysis is being applied to improve the evaluation of basketball players.
This Washington Times article by Patrick Hruby reports on the work of Wayne Winston, an Indiana University professor, in applying sabermetric statistical analysis to National Basketball Association players. As with sabermetric evaluation of baseball players, Professor Winston’s evaluation of NBA players is often contrary to conventional (and usually wrong) viewpoints. About LeBron James, the 19 year old rookie who is the consensus choice for NBA Rookie of the Year, Professor Winston points out:

“Nobody should be talking about LeBron James and Carmelo Anthony,” he says. “They should be talking about Dwyane Wade. It’s a crime.”
“James rates as an average NBA player,” says Winston, a professor of decision sciences at Indiana University. “That’s good since very few rookies rate that high. But Wade’s a real impact player for Miami. He ranks 21st best in the league in terms of changing the chances of your team winning a game.”

Professor Winston’s evaluation program is called Winval, which rates and ranks the value of every NBA player. The system ignores traditional measures such as assists and rebounds to answer a more basic question: That is, does a team play better or worse when a particular player is on the floor? Winval’s ratings are weighted to take into account every player on the floor. For every time segment a player is in a game, the system tracks the other nine players on the floor, the length of the segment of play, and the score at the start and end of the segment.

“We don’t care if you never score a point,” Winston says. “If you make plays and help your team win, you don’t have to score.”

The result of all that math? Rankings that sometimes refute conventional NBA wisdom. High-scoring players like Vince Carter, Dirk Nowitzki and likely MVP winner Kevin Garnett are among Winval’s top 10. But so is San Antonio’s Bruce Bowen, an unsung defensive specialist who averages just 6.8 points a game.
On offense, Bowen makes the defending league champs less than a point a game better than an average NBA player. On defense, however, the Spurs are 10 points a game stingier with Bowen on the floor.
Sacramento’s Brad Miller and Denver’s Nene fare well for similar reasons, while the Nuggets’ Anthony, the Kings’ Mike Bibby and New York’s Stephon Marbury rate lower than you might expect.
“Marbury’s one of the top 10 players on offense,” Winston says. “Everybody thinks this guy is a great player. But when he’s on defense, he gives it all back.”

Winval even gives its users insight into the off-court lives of some of the players:

A few years back, Winston couldn’t figure out why Jason Kidd’s normally stellar rating had taken an abrupt nosedive. It later came out the All-Star guard had been involved in a domestic altercation with his wife.
“DeShawn Stevenson, on Utah last year, his rating was really bad for two weeks,” Winston says. “The next week, I found out he was suspended from the team. So we can spot these guys having problems. We don’t know if they’re marital, psychological, injuries. But if a guy starts playing [bad], we know it.

This is the type of research that might get me interested in the NBA again. However, the league continues to do well financially, so they could care less about my lack of interest.
Hat tip to the DA for the link to this interesting story.