mrjames
Professor
Posts: 6062
Loc: Montclair, NJ
Reg: 11-21-04
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02-07-18 04:42 PM - Post#246791
In response to SomeGuy
If the rotation is the 7 seniors, the assumption is that they are the best players to play all of those minutes and thus deserve the win shares they earn. I think what you might be missing is that if Harvard had a really strong senior and/or junior class right now, it would probably lose minutes from Welsh, Juzang and Baker and the one combined win share they've produced. At the same time, there'd be more total wins to divide up, so the contribution that Towns, Lewis, Bassey and Aiken would make to the total wins would decrease, but since there are more wins to divide up, win shares would be unlikely to suffer.
The idea that an entire lineup can manufacture win shares because they got to play the most minutes isn't accurate though. Maybe at an individual level (this one player stupidly gets PT and racks up win shares due to defense even though he contributes nothing). But if the 7 seniors comprised the entire rotation, you could argue that the real allocation of wins amongst those players is misapplied, but you couldn't really argue that class didn't manufacture those wins as a whole.
The question of how many wins they "should" earn is a good one, and I believe that the context of the top Ivy classes in history is helpful in that respect. Cornell's 2010 grad class was the most productive in the 16 years of win share data I have and it made it to 64. The next best of any class was 45 (Penn 2007). A highly ranked Harvard class (though not Top 10) was the 2015 grad class and it finished at 44. Finishing somewhere between those and the top class of Cornell seems like a solid estimation of where "should" should be.
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