Dave Berri finally likes the Thunder

Dave Berri, author of “The Wages of Wins” and the winner of the 2009 Truehoop Stat Geek Smackdown has some encouraging words for and about the Thunder today on his W. of W. blog.  His “wins produced” metric and “win score” have been debated over and over and have proven to be as good as anything out there for measuring players and teams. Over the last couple of years Berri and his metric have been a little tough on Kevin Durant, especially in his rookie season. He did admit to big improvement for KD in year two.

Today on the blog he tells us what the final season win totals might look like for the Thunder according to wins produced.

…This quartet are on pace to produce 39.0 wins.  As a team, Oklahoma City has an efficiency differential (offensive efficiency minus defensive efficiency) of 2.4, a mark that projects to about 47 wins across an 82 game season.  So the four players listed above are responsible for about 83% of the team’s wins.

Missing from this list is any player at power forward or center.  Jeff Green remains a below average player.  And Nick Collison and Etan Thomas have yet to produce much in 2009-10.  D.J. White, though, has posted a 0.423 WP48.  Before Thunder fans get too excited, White has only played 44 minutes and has yet to play more than 15 minutes in a game (or more than two games in a row). Read the whole article. Discuss away.