Warriors SCORE Board, 2.08.10

A new month brings new tweaks to our patented SCORE system. The February formula:

WARP per 3000 minutes + Wins Produced per 3000 minutes + Win Shares per 3000 minutes + PER + Simple Rating

Three win-based ratings of of a player's effectiveness, topped with the efficiency stat du jour, and flavored with 82games's shorthand metric to taste. The latter provides the noisiest and least reliable information of the five measurements, but as most NBA players rate within a couple points of par, we're not going to worry much about its potential to distort things. (While we have interest in the adjusted plus-minus data listed at Basketball Value, they seem to be having some trouble with their calculations today; we'll give them a gander next time. Also, it's worth noting that we're using Bradford Doolittle's formulation of Wins Produced here, not Dave Berri's.)

How do our Warriors fare by this new accounting? And how does the system itself fare?

Corey Maggette's hot streak has ended, but his dominance in these metrics has not: he's still the Warriors' MVP by just about any way you measure. Azubuike and Randolph's starts still rate highly... 'Buike's poor showing in WP3K is largely due to the Warriors' poor performance when he was on the floor, which has more to do with sample size issues and Jack-related miseries than any mistakes he was making. Monta rates a good bit behind those guys, but a good bit above everyone else. Intuitively, that sounds about right.

Below those four, Curry, Biedrins, Morrow, CJ and Ronny are all clustered in a pretty tight group of fair-to-middlin' performers. The system prefers Curry's (relative) volume scoring over CJ's ball-handling, and Biedrins's production over Ronny's good plus-minus totals...both of these preferences seem sound. The various metrics disagree strongly about some of these guys -- Biedrins is more than four times more valuable than CJ by WARP, but less than half as valuable by Wins Produced -- but they all rate Curry just about the same, as a slightly below-average performer.

Finally, SCORE thinks that the four guys who stink, stink... most other players who've passed through (Mikki, Cartier, Coby) would also rate down here. Ineffective scrubs have not been the story of the Warriors' season, as some apologists would like to pretend, but they certainly haven't helped. To be fair, some better shooting could get Anthony Tolliver out of this cellar relatively quickly.

Overall, this new-look SCORE accounting checks out pretty good... if you subjectively wanted to rank the Warriors from most effective to least effective, your order would probably look a lot like this one. The rankings hew very closely to PER, but that doesn't necessarily mean we're overweighting it; adjusting the formula by halving PER inches Ronny ahead of CJ, but otherwise doesn't affect the ratings at all. We Worriers are satisfied. This newer, simpler formula will be our standard going forward, and we will update the SCOREBoard every Monday(-ish) forthwith.