Wednesday, September 10, 2008

Does Any Dream Player Have a Shot at 5000 Points?



With nothing going on until Thursday night's Dream/Sparks game, I've been surfing the internet, and have found a great web page from frequent RebKell poster "pilight".

He mentions a tool originally created by baseball sabermetrician Bill James called "The Favorite Toy". The Favorite Toy is a tool to determine what chance there is of a player hitting 400 home runs or 2000 RBIs or whatever, based on the player's age and previous three years output.

pilight shows us that the tool can be adapted for basketball. So I used data from the current seasons and previous two seasons for all active Dream players on the roster and set a very high benchmark - 5000 points.

There are only a few players in the WNBA who have scored 5000 points - among them Lisa Leslie and Katie Smith. As the league has only been around for 12 years, one expects the number of players with 5000 career points to naturally increase over time.

According to the Favorite Toy Metric, do any members of the Atlanta Dream have a realistic shot at 5000 points?

Betty Lennox is 31 and has scored 3,454 lifetime points. The metric puts her chances at 75 percent, which is pretty damned good. There is only one other player on the Dream roster with even an outside shot - Iziane Castro Marques, who has an 11 percent shot given her age (26), the number of points she's scored already (1,305) and her output from her last three seasons.

Everybody else? Sorry. The chances are less than 1 percent. Out of these ridiculously small percentages, the best chance would be Ivory Latta - but I'd bet money against it.

P. S.: I just finished some other projections. Katie Feenstra has a 3 percent chance of reaching 3,000 career rebounds. The closest assist benchmark any Dream player can reasonably reach is 1,000 career assists - best chances are Kristin Haynie (31 percent), Betty Lennox (23 percent), Ivory Latta (18 percent) and Iziane Castro Marques (13 percent).

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

??? I could have sworn there was a blurb the other day that said Katie Smith (Detroit) scored her 5000th point, making her "only the third player in WNBA history" with 5000 points.

...and I indeed saw that blurb.

Those ESPN2 announcers were right about one thing: Smith gets ignored much too much. :-)

Anonymous said...

Agh. Time for me to fix the post. Thanks for catching that.