New Post at Swish Appeal

Does Marynell Meadors winning the WNBA Coach of the Year award give her a cushion? New post up at Swish Appeal called "The Invulnerable (?) WNBA Coach of the Year".

You might recognize the author. ::smile::

Rating WNBA Coaches: The Expected Wins Method

One of two challenges given to me by the author of the Rethinking Basketball blog was to rank which coaches have been the best coaches of the WNBA based on the method used by John Hollinger.

Hollinger - who is mysteriously listed as "Dave Hollinger" in the article - uses a very simple method. Figure out how many games a team should win and compare the actual number of wins to that number. If a team exceeds the expected wins, we credit those wins to the coach. If the team fails to meet the mark, we debit the coach.

The first problem becomes determining the number of expected wins for a team. Hollinger uses the following method:

expected winning percentage for a team = (0.25)*(winning percentage of season before last) + (0.5)*(winning percentage from last season) + (0.25)*(.500)

Note that 1/4 of the formula above is based on a .500 record. This serves two purposes - to give the coach of a sub-.500 team something to strive for, and to give the coach of a winning team a reward for continuing to win.

Hollinger examined all coaches that had five complete seasons of experience. However, the WNBA presents a problem with its multiple expansions. The formula does not handle the case of a coach coaching in the first or second year of a franchise's existence. It's probably a good idea that the formula fails, since it's more difficult to judge a coach given the dearth of talent in those first two years.

For example, Marynell Meadors loses three complete years - the first two years with the Charlotte Sting in 1997-98 and the first year with the Atlanta Dream in 2008. Van Chancellor's first two years with the Houston Comets can't effectively be judged as Houston was an "expansion team". Who is to say that he did a great job? Maybe the talent just fell into his lap.

Therefore, the list of coaches below:

a) have coached five complete seasons in the WNBA, where
b) any season which is one of the first two seasons of a new franchise isn't counted.

This gives us six coaches to look at who meet the criteria: the following lists the coaches name, the total number of wins above expected over the number of seasons evaluated, the number of seasons evaluated, and the wins above expected per year.

Hughes 23 7 3.29
Laimbeer 18 6 3.00
Donovan 13 6 2.17
Thibault 8 5 1.60
M. Cooper 9 6 1.50
Chancellor 0 8 0.00
Adubato -1 8 -0.13

For example, let's look at the leader, Dan Hughes. Hughes started out by finishing Marynell Meador's 1999 season with the Charlotte Sting where Meadors was fired midway through. We won't count that season. Hughes was let go by the Sting after that season anyway, replaced with T. R. Dunn.

Hughes then shows up in Cleveland in 2000 and coaches his first complete season. The franchise has now existed for at least two years, so we can use the formula.

expected wins for Cleveland Rockers in 2000 = (0.25)(1998 win percentage) + (0.5)(1999 win percentage) + (0.25)(.500 win percentage) = 0.40125.

The Rockers played 32 games in 2000, which means that the Rockers were expected to win 32 * 0.40125 = 12.84 games, or 13 games. Hughes won 17 games that year, giving him a +4 in expected wins.

Now let's look at Van Chancellor. He started coaching with the Comets in 1997, but we can't start evaluating his seasons until 1999 since the formula doesn't work for any season which is one of the first two in the franchise history.

expected wins for Houston Comets in 1999 = (0.25)(1997 win percentage) + (0.5)*(1998 win percentage) = (0.25)(.500 win percentage) = 0.73575.

The Comets played 32 games in 1999, which means that the Comets were expected to win 32 * 0.73575 = 23.544 games, or 24 games. Chancellor won 26 games that year, giving him a +2 in expected wins.

(* * *)

Do the results meet the smell test? In other words, if I had asked you to order these coaches from best or worst, would the answers be what you expected?

Seeing Hughes and Laimbeer in the 1-2 positions might satisfy some readers, but others might think that Laimbeer belongs on top. Donovan, Thibault and Michael Cooper at least have positive values in expected wins per year, lending credence to the belief that those three coaches are at least better than average. (Some Sparks fans might dispute that about Cooper, though.)

Van Chancellor coming out with zero expected wins above average per year is a bit shocking. Was the Comets dynasty more a function of its players than its coach? Chancellor doesn't get any credit in the metric for the first two years of the Comets performance. Richie Adubato is the only coach on the list with a negative value in expected wins per year, and both he and Chancellor are the only coaches on the list that are no longer coaching.

Heard on Twitter

Accoring to @jaydaevans on Twitter, the league will cut staffs down to one assistant coach this season.

I don't care if they play games in a barn, just as long as they have a league. You'll find me sitting near the chickens.

"Marynell Meadors Makes WHAT Now?"

From an article about the WNBA and overseas play from Sports Illustrated in 2002.

"In the WNBA players' salaries account for less than 20% of the teams' gross revenue, and the league's lowest-paid coach makes far more than the league's highest-paid player."

Mind you, the highest paid player in the WNBA should just be scraping against the barrier of $100K per year. If this is true, this means that WNBA coaches make six-figure salaries.

My question: given what we've seen of WNBA coaching...why is this so?

Best Performances by NCAA Coaches in the Post-Season

I'm going to replicate the work of an interesting blog called, "Yet Another Basketball Blog " and examine the success rates of women's basketball coaches. Like Dan Hanner, I'll look at the current leaders in appearances plus wins in the NCAA, but I'm changing the time frame to five years instead of ten years. The current school of each coach is listed, with annotations if the coach has changed schools

NCAA Appearances - Wins - Coach - School

5-24 Pat Summitt Tennessee
5-18 Geno Auriemma Connecticut
5-15 Tara VanDerveer Stanford
5-14 Gail Goestenkors (Duke 4/Texas 1) Texas
5-14 Sylvia Hatchell North Carolina
5-13 C. Vivian Stringer Rutgers
5-12 Brenda Frese Maryland
5-11 Kim Mulkey Baylor
5-10 Andy Landers Georgia
5-8 Melanie Balcomb Vanderbilt
5-7 Charli Turner Thorne Arizona State
5-6 Muffet McGraw Notre Dame
5-6 Sherri Coale Oklahoma
4-6 Pam Borton Minnesota
5-4 Doug Bruno DePaul (IL)
5-4 Jim Foster Ohio State
3-5 Kristy Curry (Purdue 3/Texas Tech 2) Texas Tech
5-3 Dawn Staley (Temple 5) South Carolina
5-2 Wendy Larry Old Dominion (VA)
3-4 Gary Blair Texas A&M
3-3 Sharon Versyp (Maine 3/Purdue 2) Purdue
3-3 Elaine Elliott Utah
4-2 Jeff Mittie TCU
4-2 Bill Fennelly Iowa State
5-1 Don Flanagan New Mexico
3-3 Deb Patterson Kansas State
4-1 Joanne Boyle (Richmond 2/Cal 3) California

We now want to develop an idea called "PASE", which is used both by Henner in the blog and by ESPN. PASE stands for "performance above seed expectations".

There aren't many benchmarks we can use to compare college coaches. Win-loss record certainly won't do it. A team's win-loss record depends seemingly on two things:

a) strength of other teams in conference, and
b) strength of non-conference schedule.

However, since 1994, the women's NCAA tournament has had 64 teams, with teams receiving a rank from "1" to "16" dependent on subjective assessment of strength (and later, Sagarin RPI). What we can do is compare a team's performance based on their seed with the performance of all the other teams that had that same seed in past tournaments.

We come up with an "expected win" count per seed - looking back over performance, we can say that a "6" seed is expected to win 1.03 games. Your average six seed makes it to the second round. If you're a college coach and can take your sixth-seeded team into the Sweet Sixteen, that's a plus. If you lose your first round game, that's a minus.

First, here are the expected wins associated with NCAA seed in the women's tournament:

1 - 3.73
2 - 2.65
3 - 2.38
4 - 1.78
5 - 1.15
6 - 1.03
7 - 0.85
8 - 0.48
9 - 0.60
10 - 0.35
11 - 0.37
12 - 0.23
13 - 0.13
14 - 0
15 - 0
16 - 0.02

Why isn't the #1 seed worth more wins? Because if you make it to the Final Four, you'll probably bump against the other #1 seeds.

Note that the #8 seed has had particularly bad luck. History shows that the #9 seed does better than the #8 seed.

The #14 and #15 seeds have never won a first round game in the history of the 64-team tournament. As for #16 being 0.02, I refer you to March 14, 1998, a dark day in Stanford history as they became the only #1 seed - in women's or men's play - to lose to a #16 seed as Harvard beat a Stanford team with two injured leading scorers by the score of 71-67 in the first round.

So given their assigned seeds, which coaches have done the best? We will look over the last five years only and determine how well, per year, each coach does above the expected number of wins.

Best Coaches vs. PASE (minimum 3 appearances in five years)

Pat Summitt 1.29
Tara VanDerveer 0.60
C. Vivian Stringer 0.59
Geno Auriemma 0.57
Brenda Frese 0.38
Pam Borton 0.34
Andy Landers 0.27
Muffet McGraw 0.14
Kim Mulkey 0.13
Charli Turner Thorne 0.13

This is pretty much a list of the big names in women's college ball - the best coaches are the ones with longevity, and they have that longevity because they can keep coming to the NCAA tournament and performing beyond expectations. Pat Summitt has won a few championships recently. That helps, and we see that on the average Coach Summitt gets one game beyond where she's expected to finish.

Worst Coaches vs. PACE (minimum 3 appearances in five years)

Don Flanagan -0.16
Wendy Larry -0.24
Tom Collen -0.25
Gary Blair -0.29
Joanne Boyle -0.40
Deb Patterson -0.52
Kay Yow -0.53
Sylvia Hatchell -0.54
Sherri Coale -0.73
Jim Foster -1.24

Flanagan is a good coach at a weak school. Tom Collen wasn't so weak that Arkansas didn't run off and hire him, and the same case goes for Joanne Boyle at California. Surprisingly, Sylvia Hatchell of North Carolina and Jim Foster have had some lousy post-season results. I wonder how well Sherri Coale of Oklahoma will do once Courtney Paris leaves the Sooners.

My next goal is to examine the relationship between a team's success and the number of McDonald's All-Americans it is able to sign. That should be fun.