No-brainer of the year

As you might have heard, the Sixth man of the year is Manu Ginobili of the San Antonio Spurs. Apparently, it was pretty much unanimous, too. It is interesting–from an “institutions matter” standpoint, if you wanted a player on your team to win sixth man of the year every year, you’d just pick your best player, make him sit for the first minute, and then sub him in and play him for regular starter playing time. This is, in effect, what the Spurs are doing with Ginobili, and given that he’s their second (or possibly third) best player, he’s essentially a shoo-in for the award. I thought it might be interesting to look at best sixth men according to my favorite value metric, Winshares, and so here is a plot of percentage of games started versus Winshares, for all players who started less than 100% of the games in which they played:

Ginobili sticks out like a sore thumb. In fact, the only player higher on the Winshares dimension in that graph is LeBron James, who started merely 74 of his 75 games played. A reasonable criteria for qualifying as a  sixth man, say, starting less than half of your games, quickly eliminates James, leaving Ginobili as the no-brainer choice. I’ll leave you with a Winshares ranking of the top ten players who started less than half of their games:

Player	Team	startpct	Winshares
ginobili,manu	san	0.311	9.25
terry,jason	dal	0.415	6.30
barbosa,leandro	pho	0.134	5.97
diaw,boris	pho	0.244	5.90
scola,luis	hou	0.476	5.72
outlaw,travis	por	0.073	5.17
millsap,paul	uta	0.024	5.10
maxiell,jason	det	0.085	5.09
posey,james	bos	0.027	5.07
turiaf,ronny	lal	0.269	4.44

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