Professor, ratings guru help Mavericks owner

Professor Wayne Winston attended a Dallas Mavericks game during a trip to Dallas last spring break and bumped into a former student. It turned out the student was Mavericks' owner Mark Cuban.\nCuban casually approached Winston. The owner told his former professor that if he had any ideas to make the Mavericks better, Winston should let Cuban know.\nA day later Winston was swimming in a hotel pool, and a thought crossed his mind: "People rate teams, so why not rate players."\nWinston, who teaches decision sciences in the Kelley School of Business, returned to Bloomington and developed a system to individually rate each NBA player. Winston's friend and Bloomington-based sports ratings guru Jeff Sagarin fine-tuned the system.\nWinston and Sagarin submitted their system to Cuban last summer. Cuban decided to hire them for one season. Throughout the 2000-01 season, Winston and Sagarin have submitted daily player ratings to Cuban. The Mavericks missed the playoffs last year, but they had a 31-19 record at the All Star break. If the playoffs started today, the Mavericks would be the seventh seed in the Western Conference.\nWinston said the Mavericks are the only team in the NBA receiving the daily player ratings.\n"We feel our information is so good that we don't want everybody in the league to have it or it would be worthless," Winston said.\nWinston and Sagarin perfected the ratings system last summer using different database programs. Winston wrote the system in Microsoft Excel. Sagarin used Fortran, a DOS system similar to Excel. A few days after they developed their respective programs, Winston and Sagarin converged their processes. \n"We were getting the same answers on a real difficult math program," said Sagarin, whose college football and basketball ratings appear in USA Today.\nInstead of rating a player by using common statistics such as points, rebounds, steals, assists and blocks, Winston and Sagarin's system has sub-games within a contest. The system rates players based on how a team performs when they are in the game. The computer isolates the impact each player has on his team.\n"A basketball game is actually like an experiment," Winston said. "We are trying to find good and bad combinations, so you don't play your bad combinations and (do) play your good combinations."\nHockey is the only other professional sport that has a system to rate individual players. The NHL's plus/minus system gives points to players when their team scores and subtracts points from every players' rating when a team allows a goal. Sagarin called the system he uses for NBA players more "sophisticated" than plus/minus.\n"Our system takes into account who are your teammates and who are your opponents," Sagarin said.\nNBA teams are beginning to use plus/minus systems similar to the NHL's. The Pacers post plus/minus ratings on their Web site. During last June's NBA Finals, NBC also showed players' plus/minus ratings. Sagarin is aware of other attempts to rate players and he said "nobody has the mathematical ability to take it to the level that we are."\nWinston and Sagarin both said they would like to rate football players, but it would be impossible because some players never leave the game. Both mathematicians said their system would work in hockey, but added that they are too burned out from basketball to compile NHL ratings.\n"We have just scratched the surface in what our information can do," Winston said. "There are many more things that we can do. We hope with Mark and hopefully with some other people we can do some other things. But if we just keep doing this with Mark we would be happy."\nWinston's former student, now an audio-Internet pioneer, NBA owner and billionaire, said he is also rating officials to help determine tendencies that the Mavericks can use to their advantage.\nCuban wanted to analyze officials just as Winston and Sagarin are doing players.\n"Like any other good student of Wayne Winston's stats class at IU, or anyone who has taken quantitative analysis, numbers can be very informative," Cuban wrote in an e-mail to the IDS. "We wanted to analyze officials just like we do players. This allows us to know how great a job they are doing, and to also scout them, so where warranted, we can alter our game plans to accommodate the officials working the game"