How Productive Was Andrew Gaze?

Win Score is a metric developed by economist Dave Berri (and co-authors) to evaluate how productive NBA basketball players are. Essentially, players are rated highly if they make good use of their team’s possessions by scoring efficiently, and/or gain a lot of possessions through rebounds and steals, and are rated lowly if they waste their team’s possessions by scoring inefficiently and/or lose possessions through turnovers. Hence, players that score a lot do not necessarily rate highly on this metric if they take a lot of shots to score their points. The formula is as follows:

Points + Rebounds + Steals + ½Assists + ½Blocked Shots – Field Goal Attempts – Turnovers – ½Free Throw Attempts – ½Personal Fouls

Despite my previous reservations, I think it is probably the best metric (apart from Berri’s own Wins Produced) available for assessing basketball players. For example, using Win Score Mr Berri predicted that, because Kevin Garnett is even more valuable than commonly thought, Boston had a very good chance of winning the championship when they acquired him (which they did). More regrettably, Berri predicted that my (and his) beloved Detroit Pistons were set to take a tumble when they traded the very productive Chauncey Billups for the high-scoring but relatively unproductive Allen Iverson (which they did). Iverson is a good example of a player who does not rate highly on this metric because he misses a lot of shots and commits a lot of turnovers.

Australian basketball fans will be well acquainted with Andrew Gaze, and the fact that he scored a truckload of points (over 30 points per game in fact). But in over 20 years of basketball Gaze won only two championships. Could Gaze then be similar to Iverson in that he scored a lot of points, but that he didn’t really help his team to win (although, to be fair, Iverson hasn’t won any championships)? To answer this, I plugged his career statistics into the Win Score Formula:

18938 + 3102 + 1078 + ½*3533 + ½*222 – 12549 – 2536 – ½*4796 – ½*2046 = 6489.5

Win Score Per Game = 10.57

How good is that? Let’s compare that with Iverson, who according to Win Score is fairly average:

24368 + 3394 + 1983 + ½*5624 + ½*164 – 19906 – 3262 – ½*8168 – ½*1777 = 4498.5

Win Score Per Game = 4.92

Gaze therefore was about twice as productive as Iverson, which is primarily due to his far better shooting efficiency and higher rebounding rate. Now let’s compare Gaze’s results with Michael Jordan’s, who was a very productive player:

32292 + 6672 + 2514 + ½*5633 + ½*893 – 24537 – 2924 – ½*8772 – ½*2783 = 11502.5

Win Score Per Game = 10.73

Those results look pretty similar to Gaze’s. Gaze was better in terms of shooting efficiency and assists, while Jordan was better at rebounds, steals and blocks, and not committing turnovers. I suspect Gaze played more minutes per game than Jordan, but overall, you’d have to say he was a productive player.

Of course, Jordan dominated the NBA while Gaze hardly played there, but these results suggest that to say Gaze was the Jordan of the Australian league is not that far-fetched. This suggests that the reason why Gaze didn’t win as often as Jordan has something to do with his teammates not being as productive as Jordan’s. While I haven’t crunched the numbers, from a quick glance at the Melbourne Tigers career stats I’d say that Lanard Copeland was a main offender. A story for another time perhaps (but probably not here)…