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The MVP Membership Card is a formula
derived by DuMond, Lynch, and Coleman as an estimate of the decision rule
that the sports writers and broadcasters who vote on the NBA MVP award
use when picking the winner. Obviously, each individual voter may follow different criteria;
however, their collective decisions do indeed follow a pattern. Development of the formula was spurred
originally by the question of whether race played a factor in the
selection of Steve Nash as the winner in 2005. The research published in the Journal of Sports
Economics found that after controlling for player, team, and
market characteristics, there is no statistically significant effect of
race on the chance that a player will get any MVP votes, or on the number
of votes he will receive.
However,
there are many factors that are significantly related to whether a
player will win the award. These
include individual performance statistics such as points per game,
rebounds per game, assists per game, and blocks per game (for centers and
forwards), as well as how many years a player has been in the
league. As one might expect, team
performance also plays a significant role. The number of wins in the current
season, the number of wins versus the previous season, and whether a
player is on the team with the best record in the league are all
significant factors, as is the effect of new players to a team on their
new team's wins versus the prior year.
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MVP
Membership Card Authors
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Mike DuMond is a principal in CRA International, Inc., and
based in Tallahassee,
FL. Allen Lynch is Associate
Professor of Economics & Quantitative Methods at the Stetson
School of Business and Economics at Mercer University.
Jay
Coleman is the Richard deR. Kip Professor of Operations
Management & Quantitative Methods in the Coggin College of Business
at the University
of North Florida.
In addition to the NBA MVP research, all three authors
have published extensively on the analysis of decisions in
sports. DuMond and Lynch's research with
Jennifer Platania on modeling the choice of college football
recruits, also published in the Journal
of Sports Economics, has been featured by SI.com,
as well as by numerous media focused on college football
recruiting. A regularly
updated site using this research can be found here.
Coleman and Lynch's research on modeling the decisions
of the NCAA Tournament Selection Committee, first published in Interfaces,
has been featured by the Wall Street Journal, Forbes,
Investor's Business Daily, the New York Times, the
Associated Press, UPI, and USA Today, as well as over 50
other major media outlets, including CNN Headline News, the Sporting
News, and CBS SportsLine. More information about the NCAA
Tournament model can be found at DanceCard.unf.edu.
Coleman's
development of a minimum
violations ranking for college football has also been published
in Interfaces;
and his research with Ken Jennings and Frank McLaughlin on final
offer arbitration in professional baseball has been published in
Cal-Berkeley's Industrial
Relations journal.
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Special
Thanks to SAS!!
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The
authors would like to give a hearty and special thanks to all
the good people at SAS Institute Inc., the maker of the
software package used to develop the MVP Membership Card. In particular, we
thank Mike Nemecek, Anne Milley, and Trent Smith, each of whom
have been an absolute delight to work with.
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Links
of Interest
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E-Mail
Addresses
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Mike DuMond
Allen Lynch
Jay Coleman
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Disclaimers
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This web site and the research reported herein is not affiliated
in any capacity with, or endorsed by, the National
Basketball Association (NBA). SAS and all other SAS Institute
Inc. product or service names are registered trademarks
or trademarks of SAS Institute Inc., in the USA
and other countries. (R) indicates USA registration.
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Please forward all comments to jcoleman@unf.edu
Jay
Coleman's Home Page
This page last updated on April 9,
2009 at 5:00 p.m.
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