Well, I'm heading on vacation starting tomorrow and won't be back until Tuesday, so we'll see how well my automated updates work this weekend. My guess is not well, since they are depending on an outside free service. We shall see how it goes. As for me, I'll be in the Bahamas for a few days, so the jealousy can begin now. This isn't a usual thing for me, in fact I haven't been outside of Utah in 5 years except for a trip to Vegas, which is only 6 hours away. So I'm not gonna feel bad about it, I'm just going to enjoy it. If, by chance, the updates don't work right and there are missing stats, please be patient and I'll try to get to it some time on Tuesday.
Couple more things...now might be a good time to mention my idea for a Fantasy Win Score game. My first thought was to let people create a team by picking 15-20 players. The winner would be the one who's team amassed the highest total win score throughout the playoffs. So you'd have to choose between good performers for average teams and average performers for good teams, you'd have to try to figure out which players will play consistently well in the playoffs, and which players will get sufficient minutes to rack up Win Score. Anyway, any thoughts on this idea would be greatly appreciated. If you have ideas of how to set it up better, let me know. Try to keep it simple however, the playoffs are only a few weeks away.
Also, David Berri and I are trying to work together to get a better way of deciding what position a player is. I know a few of you have noticed the disparities between the WP48 on my site and the one calculated by Mr. Berri and company. One of the issues is that I am using the shortcut calculation from Win Score and not adding in any team adjustment. This should have very little effect on the final number, the bigger issue is that we have been calculating the position adjustment differently. Hopefully we can come upon a good solution and you should see the WP48 numbers here coming closer and closer to the official numbers from the Wages of Wins team.
Again, thanks for all the support. Have a good weekend....I know I will.
Wednesday, March 21, 2007
Monday, March 19, 2007
Some new ways to look at the data....
Well, I didn't have as much free time as I'd hoped, but there are a couple new ways to look at the Win Score data this morning. They're just not as polished as I was hoping.
First, you can look at every day of the season and see the games played on that particular day, then drill down to see the list of players in that game. This feature is accessible from the front page, or you can click below:
Win Score Stats by Day
The second thing is just a huge list of every game by every player (over 20,000 individual games so far). This is a good way to find the best and worst individual games in any category. This link is available on the front page as well, or here is the link:
Win Score stats for every game, every player
I also was playing with new ways to look at the position adjustment. Over at 82games.com, the player pages give a percentage of time each position is played, so I tried using that to calculate position adjustments, hoping to see if it approximates any better. I've used the new position adjustments on the Miami Heat, so you can take a look and see if you think it works better or not.
Also, by request I've put a donation link. This is through PayPal and the link is only on the front page. You'll see a small graphic that says "Donate" on the right of the page. Thanks again to those who have already helped out by making a purchase at Amazon or clicking on a Google Ad.
I will try to keep rolling out new features as time permits, so keep checking back, I'll think you'll like the things I've got planned for the future.
P.S. Don't know if anyone noticed, but my bracket sucks. Again. I mean, Davidson? What was I thinking?
First, you can look at every day of the season and see the games played on that particular day, then drill down to see the list of players in that game. This feature is accessible from the front page, or you can click below:
Win Score Stats by Day
The second thing is just a huge list of every game by every player (over 20,000 individual games so far). This is a good way to find the best and worst individual games in any category. This link is available on the front page as well, or here is the link:
Win Score stats for every game, every player
I also was playing with new ways to look at the position adjustment. Over at 82games.com, the player pages give a percentage of time each position is played, so I tried using that to calculate position adjustments, hoping to see if it approximates any better. I've used the new position adjustments on the Miami Heat, so you can take a look and see if you think it works better or not.
Also, by request I've put a donation link. This is through PayPal and the link is only on the front page. You'll see a small graphic that says "Donate" on the right of the page. Thanks again to those who have already helped out by making a purchase at Amazon or clicking on a Google Ad.
I will try to keep rolling out new features as time permits, so keep checking back, I'll think you'll like the things I've got planned for the future.
P.S. Don't know if anyone noticed, but my bracket sucks. Again. I mean, Davidson? What was I thinking?
Thursday, March 15, 2007
Win Score Discussion and Commenting
I've been watching the comments closely the last couple days, and wanted to thank those who submitted new ideas and polite comments, both positive and negative.
There's nothing wrong with debate, I encourage those who are interested in basketball to debate. You are welcome to use this forum, or the Wins of Wages blog. But what I don't want to see is any personal attacks on here. We don't need anyone calling other people "hacks" and other such nonsense.
My favorite comment from the previous post came from "Anonymous" (of course) and said this:
"the point is now people can evaluate the predictive power of "pseudo"-wins produced. So even you, anonymous hater, can examine how well win-score does over the course of a season and determine whether it's something you're willing to embrace or not."
The point is exactly that. Now you've got the data available to you. And I'll be building more options into the site and more ways for you to access the information that you can use to form your own opinion. I'm not affiliated with David Berri or his colleagues in any way. I just read the book and enjoyed it enough to use some of my personal time to work on this project.
Now you can choose to use your personal time to formulate an opinion on this. And if you have something polite and intelligent to say, please share it here. If you prefer petty bickering, there are other places on the internet that thrive on that sort of thing.
Thanks again to all those who are showing interest and contributing by clicking Google ads or purchasing Amazon products. If the average for the last few days keeps up, I may have revenue enough to switch the site over in a few months. Have a great day and enjoy the NCAA tournament everyone. In case anyone is interested, here is my bracket:
Sweet Sixteen: North Carolina over Marquette, Texas over Arkansas, Vanderbilt over Oral Roberts, Georgetown over Boston College, Ohio State over BYU, Tennessee over Albany, Texas A&M over Louisville, Nevada over Memphis, Florida over Arizona, Davidson over Butler, Notre Dame over Oregon, UNLV over Wisconsin, Kansas over Villanova, Virginia Tech over Southern Illinois, VCU over Pittsburgh and UCLA over Gonzaga.
Final Four: Georgetown over Texas, Texas A&M over Ohio State, Florida over Notre Dame, Kansas over UCLA.
Texas A&M takes the Big Dance 69-66 over Kansas in an exact repeat of their regular season game.
I never do well in these brackets, I always pick too many upsets and ride the wrong horses into the championship game. We'll see how it goes. Good luck to all of you.
There's nothing wrong with debate, I encourage those who are interested in basketball to debate. You are welcome to use this forum, or the Wins of Wages blog. But what I don't want to see is any personal attacks on here. We don't need anyone calling other people "hacks" and other such nonsense.
My favorite comment from the previous post came from "Anonymous" (of course) and said this:
"the point is now people can evaluate the predictive power of "pseudo"-wins produced. So even you, anonymous hater, can examine how well win-score does over the course of a season and determine whether it's something you're willing to embrace or not."
The point is exactly that. Now you've got the data available to you. And I'll be building more options into the site and more ways for you to access the information that you can use to form your own opinion. I'm not affiliated with David Berri or his colleagues in any way. I just read the book and enjoyed it enough to use some of my personal time to work on this project.
Now you can choose to use your personal time to formulate an opinion on this. And if you have something polite and intelligent to say, please share it here. If you prefer petty bickering, there are other places on the internet that thrive on that sort of thing.
Thanks again to all those who are showing interest and contributing by clicking Google ads or purchasing Amazon products. If the average for the last few days keeps up, I may have revenue enough to switch the site over in a few months. Have a great day and enjoy the NCAA tournament everyone. In case anyone is interested, here is my bracket:
Sweet Sixteen: North Carolina over Marquette, Texas over Arkansas, Vanderbilt over Oral Roberts, Georgetown over Boston College, Ohio State over BYU, Tennessee over Albany, Texas A&M over Louisville, Nevada over Memphis, Florida over Arizona, Davidson over Butler, Notre Dame over Oregon, UNLV over Wisconsin, Kansas over Villanova, Virginia Tech over Southern Illinois, VCU over Pittsburgh and UCLA over Gonzaga.
Final Four: Georgetown over Texas, Texas A&M over Ohio State, Florida over Notre Dame, Kansas over UCLA.
Texas A&M takes the Big Dance 69-66 over Kansas in an exact repeat of their regular season game.
I never do well in these brackets, I always pick too many upsets and ride the wrong horses into the championship game. We'll see how it goes. Good luck to all of you.
Monday, March 12, 2007
Finally, something to play with!
I've got a beta version of the stats ready to go (as in so beta, that it's alpha). So those of you interested, go take a look.
However, PLEASE read the rest of this post before you click on over to it.
Couple of important things to know before you go crazy.
1) Like I said, this is not finished by any means. I've gotten the basic functionality there, and I would like to hear from you ideas on what to add to this. The only thing I've really thought about alot but haven't implemented yet is a way to look at the schedule of games and then a page for each individual game, with the two teams and the players involved. Past that, I'm wide open to hear what you guys want to see. Also, if you notice any bugs, things that don't work right, missing players, etc, please let me know.
2) Right now this is just on my own personal site. Shared hosting, shared database, the works. I'd like to move it off of this. Preferably soon. However, to keep the wife happy it has to pay for itself. So you'll notice a few ads. I've tried to keep them out of the way so as to not interfere with usability, and hopefully they won't be too bothersome. If you appreciate the work being done, that's one way to show it. And as soon as the page produces enough to purchase a domain name and a few months of hosting, I'll move it on over.
3) Not that I'm too worried about it, but lets not publish this too widely just yet. Tell a few friends or whatever, but don't post us on Digg just yet.
4) All comments can come back here to the blog. That way I can keep it all organized 'n' such.
5) Oh yeah, you'll notice that some of the numbers are a little bit weird. Mainly that the WP48's don't match the studies done over at the Wages of Wins blog. I've used the math from this post to estimate WP48. The issue is with the assigning of positions. When DBerri and company calculate Wins Produced, they manually go over a team and assign minutes based on who is playing what position. This is a somewhat complicated process, but it ends up with a good approximation of what position each individual player plays. Since I don't have a good automated imitation of this process, I've just pulled the players' positions from the ESPN.com site and used that. This affects PAWS, PAWS/min and WP48. You'll notice large changes in some players, especially those listed as "forwards" (PF/SF) and "guard forwards" (SF/SG), since those respective positions have greatly different position adjustments. I'm not sure how to get around this issue. If any of you have any ideas of a way to automatically calculate this, it would be appreciated.
Thanks for all the supportive comments thus far. Hopefully this will turn into a useful tool for everyone.
Here is the link. Enjoy.
However, PLEASE read the rest of this post before you click on over to it.
Couple of important things to know before you go crazy.
1) Like I said, this is not finished by any means. I've gotten the basic functionality there, and I would like to hear from you ideas on what to add to this. The only thing I've really thought about alot but haven't implemented yet is a way to look at the schedule of games and then a page for each individual game, with the two teams and the players involved. Past that, I'm wide open to hear what you guys want to see. Also, if you notice any bugs, things that don't work right, missing players, etc, please let me know.
2) Right now this is just on my own personal site. Shared hosting, shared database, the works. I'd like to move it off of this. Preferably soon. However, to keep the wife happy it has to pay for itself. So you'll notice a few ads. I've tried to keep them out of the way so as to not interfere with usability, and hopefully they won't be too bothersome. If you appreciate the work being done, that's one way to show it. And as soon as the page produces enough to purchase a domain name and a few months of hosting, I'll move it on over.
3) Not that I'm too worried about it, but lets not publish this too widely just yet. Tell a few friends or whatever, but don't post us on Digg just yet.
4) All comments can come back here to the blog. That way I can keep it all organized 'n' such.
5) Oh yeah, you'll notice that some of the numbers are a little bit weird. Mainly that the WP48's don't match the studies done over at the Wages of Wins blog. I've used the math from this post to estimate WP48. The issue is with the assigning of positions. When DBerri and company calculate Wins Produced, they manually go over a team and assign minutes based on who is playing what position. This is a somewhat complicated process, but it ends up with a good approximation of what position each individual player plays. Since I don't have a good automated imitation of this process, I've just pulled the players' positions from the ESPN.com site and used that. This affects PAWS, PAWS/min and WP48. You'll notice large changes in some players, especially those listed as "forwards" (PF/SF) and "guard forwards" (SF/SG), since those respective positions have greatly different position adjustments. I'm not sure how to get around this issue. If any of you have any ideas of a way to automatically calculate this, it would be appreciated.
Thanks for all the supportive comments thus far. Hopefully this will turn into a useful tool for everyone.
Here is the link. Enjoy.
Monday, March 5, 2007
Long time, no post
I've learned that if I try to concentrate on two things at once, they both end up not getting done. So I've been only concentrating on getting the win score stats up and online. For those of you who are interested, that's why this blog hasn't seen a new post for a week and a half. We've seen what happens when I create a post without doing the proper research, so I won't subject you to that again.
I've got the database set up and got my daily stat pages created, so I just have to organize this into a nice user interface and we'll be ready for public consumption. Please be patient, and I think you'll enjoy what I'm preparing. Thanks to any of you who are still checking into my progress. I should have something up and ready for you to play with by the end of the week. Keep your fingers crossed.
I've got the database set up and got my daily stat pages created, so I just have to organize this into a nice user interface and we'll be ready for public consumption. Please be patient, and I think you'll enjoy what I'm preparing. Thanks to any of you who are still checking into my progress. I should have something up and ready for you to play with by the end of the week. Keep your fingers crossed.
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