Jeff Sargain's Work in the NBA

Ryan Corazza of the Indiana Daily Student, wrote a feature in February 2006 on Jeff Sargain. Sargain is a mathematician wo studies sports. Since 1985, he has been doing work on NCAA football and basketball. Sargain has also developed rating systems for other sports, including: boys' and girls' Indiana high school basketball, NASCAR, MLB, individual baseball players, men's and women's college golf, and MLS.

An excerpt from the article can be found here:

The story of Winval goes back to spring 2000, when Winston took his son, Gregory, an Indiana Pacers fan, to see the team play in Dallas during spring break. He ran into Cuban, a former student of his in the business school, in the stands and Cuban asked if there was any way Winston could help the team through mathematics. After Winston and Sagarin bounced ideas back and forth, they came up with Winval, short for "winning value."

Sagarin said Winval evaluates players based on the "rows" they play in during a basketball game. A row consists of a time frame a player participates in within a game -- his time on the court in between timeouts, a break at half time, or player substitutions during free throws. Play-by-play data is supplied to Winston and Sagarin by the Elias Sports Bureau."Each one of these rows is a little mini-game," Sagarin said. "A typical NBA game has about 30 rows."

Sagarin said during the first year of Winval, Cuban would be up at 2 or 3 in the morning e-mailing back and forth with him on specific features of the program.

"We've evolved towards a better routine," Sagarin said in regards to the duo's relationship with the Mavericks. "We understand what they want now and what's useful to them. We didn't know that when we started because they're coaches and we're math guys.""Jeff is your typical eccentric genius," Cuban said via e-mail. "He locks himself away for months at a time with no human contact just to come up with great formulas for evaluating sports. It's fun to work with him, and his stuff is amazing."

Currently, Winval rates Lebron James as the best overall player in the league, with Tim Duncan, Dirk Nowitzki, Tracy McGrady and Andre Iguodala rounding out the top five. Although he ranks first offensively, Kobe Bryant ranks a surprising 27th in the overall category.

"A lot of people think Kobe Bryant is good defensively, but he's really not," Winston said. "When's he's in the game, they give up a lot of points, so that's why he isn't higher.

In addition to providing Cuban and the Mavericks coaching staff with Winval, Winston gives them scouting reports of opposing teams as well as which lineups and player combinations have worked best and worst for the Mavericks during the year. He can easily mix and match player names in Microsoft Excel to see point-margin differentials and ratings when a certain lineup is on the court.

The Seattle Supersonics and Toronto Raptors have both used Sagarin and Winston's services for a short period of time, but Winston says they would rather not help out another Western Conference team because it creates a conflict of interest with the Mavericks. The New Jersey Nets is one Eastern Conference team that has expressed interest in Winval. Winston added that both he and Sagarin would like to help out the IU basketball team, but because Big Ten stat sheets don't supply substitutions, the key ingredient to their system, they are unable to do so.

The article in its entirety can be found by going to:
http://www.idsnews.com/news/story.aspx?id=33683