Championship Shares

[Tim Lehrbach]

I have mentioned in a couple of places recently my belief that we should find a way to apportion credit for playoff success that is neither 1-or-zero, ring-or-no-ring nor merely waving at playoff accomplishments with an often disqualifying caveat that it was in a losing effort or small sample size. I'd like to think this has broad appeal. We rail against RANGZ arguments but still point to playoff wins and losses as at least somewhat determinant of team and even player legacies. We laud heroics by players but do not have a translatable way (crude, box-derived Win Shares measures aside) for saying just how much of a championship they won (unless, again, we accept 1 or 0 as the only correct answers).

Shouldn't we fairly distribute credit to players and teams for how much they do towards winning the title?

Shouldn't we recognize that all championships are not equal, nor all conference titles, nor first-round outs?

Shouldn't we accurately assess the value of each ring?

Shouldn't we quantify all this and employ it in our team and player comparisons?

If we should, I need help because Tim doesn't math.

I'd like to start at the team level. The simplest way I can think of to give credit for winning in the playoffs is to count the number of wins for each team and divide by 16, or the number of wins needed to win the championship (15 wins prior to '03, etc.). So, in contemporary times, the winner of the Finals gets 16/16 or 1.0 championship share, while a finalist losing 4-1 to the champion gets 13/16 of a championship, or 0.8125 championship shares.

With simplicity come problems aplenty.

1. Are all wins equal? Do the Finals matter more or less than the Conference Semis? Does the increasing probability of taking home the ring make each successive win worth more? Are elimination games higher-stakes? Is my team's lone win in a gentleman's sweep worth anything at all?

2. How do we adjust for strength of opponent? Surely the 2003 Nets do not deserve as much credit for 12 wins as the 2003 Spurs prior to the 2003 Finals beginning. 80s Celtics vs Lakers also comes to mind.

3. What credit is due, if any, for regular season success? Does my team really get 0 championship shares for winning enough to qualify for the playoffs but, for whatever reason, getting swept in the first round? If nothing else, you would think some share is due for providing an obstacle to another team's accrual of shares.

4. Should there be any penalty for losses? Is the '01 Lakers' romp through the playoffs worth more than the '08 Celtics' unexpected struggle?

5. How do we make the shares a more digestible or elegant number, such that, say, only 1.0 share is divided amongst the playoff participants each year?

6. What else has my non-mathing self not thought of?

Has this work already been done? If so, I haven't found it.

I usually leave drafts of ideas in development unfinished and never submitted. That never gets me anywhere. This time I'm just going ahead and floating my immature idea. Anybody have thoughts or wanna help? If yes, I'd love to work towards a formula for team championship shares, then proceed with a minutes-weighted and/or impact-based metric for further dividing up shares among players. This is meant to be distinguished from CORP-related analysis insofar as it looks (initially, anyway) at only actual wins and losses, then works backwards to adjust appropriately for agreed-upon factors. It is meant to be a way of properly rewarding actual wins, rather than looking at how each player contributes to "winning," all things being equal. It may not be the most important or fruitful project, but it could improve on the usual ring-counting or series-record counts, which might have utility in general discussions.

Any takers?