NBA Stats: Win Shares

Win shares sound more complicated than they actually are. To make a very simple explanation of it, a win share tells you how much any individual player contributes to a team’s wins. This calculation incorporates stats on individual players and teams in addition to the entire league. To get a sense of a team’s win share, you simply add up the win shares for all of that team’s players. Win shares can be offensive or defensive. To find out the offensive win share, you take the points a player made and their offensive possessions, and you divide that total by the marginal points per win. To find out the defensive win share, you take a player’s defensive rating, and you divide that number by the marginal points per win. A total win share is the sum total of both the offensive and defensive win shares.

Win Shares Are A Valuable Tool For Determining A Player’s Value

Why go through all of this effort to calculate win shares? It is worth it because win shares are a valuable tool for determining a player’s value. Compared to PER, win shares are actually based on wins, and they take both the offensive and defensive outputs into account. For these reasons, analysts find win shares to be a useful tool. On top of that, another reason win shares are a great tool is because they also factor in how much time players actually play. Going by PER, sometimes players who get very little court time have higher ratings than the top players have. Thus, win shares are a more accurate tool for determining player value. A good example of this was when Grizzlies players Marc Gasol and Mike Conley had win shares of 11.5 and 9.9 respectively while being ranked sixth and 11th respectively among all players. Their win shares showed that they had value beyond what money traditional metrics may have missed.