NET WINS Podcast

The debate between Shaquille O'Neal and Tim Duncan is a classic clash of basketball philosophy. On one side, you have the most physically dominant, apex-peak force the modern era has ever seen. On the other, the ultimate blueprint for low-drama, twenty-year organizational excellence. The full Net Wins database, Every season from 1946 to 2026, is free at willf123.github.io/nba-net-wins . © 2026 Wil...

The debate over LeBron James’ place in basketball history usually collapses into a screaming match about rings versus longevity. But reputation isn’t a number. In this episode, we run LeBron's entire 23-year career through the Net Wins database to see exactly how much his statistical contributions converted into actual team success. The formula strips away the media narrative and evaluates his per...

Discover the 10 greatest New York Knicks in franchise history. See where Patrick Ewing, Walt Frazier, and Jalen Brunson rank in the Net Wins database. The full Net Wins database, Every season from 1946 to 2026, is free at willf123.github.io/nba-net-wins . © 2026 Will Fiore. Net Wins formula and all written content are original works. All rights reserved. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for...

The takes are already everywhere. He’s declining. His legacy is diminishing. Jordan never got swept. Jordan went 6-0 in the Finals. Jordan is the GOAT and this proves it. Here’s what the data actually says. LeBron James has accumulated more playoff Net Wins than any player in the history of the NBA. Not Jordan. Not Bird. Not Magic. Not Kareem. The full Net Wins database, Every season from 1946 to...

In this episode of the NET WINS Podcast, we look at the data breakdown of Boston Celtics legend Bill Russell. While the formula ranks him at #7 all-time, the numbers alone don't fully capture the staggering reality of his career from an unmatched 11 NBA championships to his transformative, historical impact on defensive analytics and team success. The full Net Wins database, Every season from 1946...

His full name is Shaquille Rashaun O’Neal. The nicknames accumulated across his career the way championships did: Shaq. The Big Aristotle. The Big Diesel. Shaq Daddy. The Big Shamrock. Superman. He gave himself most of them. That detail tells you most of what you need to know about who he was. He was 7 feet 1 inch tall and 325 pounds at his peak, with a 7-foot-7 wingspan and hands so large that a...

For more like this netwins.substack.com The Net Wins formula is a backward-looking instrument. It counts what happened. It has no mechanism for what should have happened, what would have happened, what was on its way to happening before something intervened. This article is about the players the formula never got to finish counting. Some careers were ended by injury. Some by illness. Some by choic...

For more articles like this: netwins.substack.com There is a version of Shai Gilgeous-Alexander that the league did not see coming. Not because he lacked talent, everyone who watched him at Kentucky in 2017-18 knew what was there, but because the path from 11th pick to back-to-back MVP, from a team that won 22 games to a championship franchise, required something that cannot be scouted or projecte...

netwins.substack.com The Net Wins formula is a career instrument. It rewards players who accumulate seasons, who build combined totals over time, who sustain their excellence across years rather than flashing briefly. It is precisely the wrong tool to evaluate a 22-year-old who has played three NBA seasons, one of which was taken from him by a blood clot. And yet what it is already finding in Vict...

netwins.substack.com There is a detail about Michael Jordan that gets lost in the mythology. Before he became the most competitive athlete of his generation, before the six championships and the tongue wag and the commercials and the documentary, he was a kid from Wilmington, North Carolina who got cut from his high school varsity basketball team as a sophomore. He went home, locked himself in his...

netwins.substack.com The greatest individual season in NBA history is not the one you think it is. The Net Wins formula measures how much a player’s statistical contributions converted into actual wins and losses, normalized against what their team needed on any given night. When you run every season in the database through it, ten performances separate themselves from everything else. Three playe...

netwins.substack.com There is a version of Earvin Johnson that the highlights show you. The no-look passes. The fast break finishes. The smile that arrived before the play was even over. The showmanship was real and it was spectacular and it made the Showtime Lakers one of the most watched teams in the history of the sport. There is another version that the highlights do not show. The version that...

netwins.substack.com The question of which USA Olympic basketball team was the best is usually answered by reputation. The 1992 Dream Team wins by default because it was the first, because it had Jordan and Magic and Bird on the same bench, because the world had never seen anything like it. But reputation is not a number. So I ran each roster through the Net Wins formula, using each player’s perfo...

netwins.substack.com Before the NBA was what it is today, it was in serious trouble. In 1979, the league was broadcasting its own Finals on tape delay. Attendance was declining. The drug problems that plagued several players were public and widely covered. But the deeper issue, the one that league executives talked about privately and journalists occasionally said out loud, was that a significant...

netwins.substack.com Every ranking system that tries to evaluate Julius Erving eventually hits the same wall. The NBA numbers are excellent but incomplete. He played 11 NBA seasons with the Philadelphia 76ers and produced 48.8 regular season Net Wins — a career you’d expect to land someone in the top 15 all time. But before the NBA there were five ABA seasons with the Virginia Squires and New York...

netwins.substack.com No result in this database is more uncomfortable to write about than this one. Allen Iverson is one of the most compelling players in NBA history. He is a Hall of Famer, a cultural icon, a first-ballot inductee, and the most physically unlikely superstar the league has ever produced. He played at 165 pounds against men who outweighed him by 60 pounds and he never backed down f...

netwins.substack.com No result in this entire database generates more argument than this one. When the Net Wins formula was first posted on Reddit, the response was immediate and overwhelming. Thousands of comments. Most of them about Scottie Pippen at #9. Not about Kareem at #1. Not about Duncan at #2. Not about Jordan at #3. Pippen. That reaction is the most interesting thing about this ranking...

netwins.substack.com Every generation forgets its own giants. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is the NBA’s all-time leading scorer. He won six MVP awards, more than anyone in the history of the league. He played twenty seasons, won six championships across two franchises, and was still a meaningful contributor at 41 years old. He stood alongside Muhammad Ali and Jim Brown at the intersection of the civil righ...

The Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame inducts its class every September. The process is notoriously opaque — committee-driven, lobbying-dependent, and shaped as much by narrative as by numbers. Players who defined their era sometimes wait decades. Others slip through permanently. I ran every retired, non-active player in the Net Wins database through the composite ranking — the formula that weighs...

netwins.substack.com In a recent discussion on r/NBATalk , a reader posed a fascinating mathematical challenge to the Net Wins formula. The argument was simple: If Tim Duncan puts up the exact same elite stats (20/12/3) on a 65-win Spurs team versus a 20-win “bottom feeder” Spurs team, his Net Wins score in my formula would swing from a +9.7 to a -8.3 . The critic’s conclusion? The formula is “sus...

netwins.substack.com Most ranking lists put Tim Duncan somewhere between 8th and 15th all time. The Net Wins formula puts him second. The gap between those two conclusions is not a rounding error. It’s not a quirk. It’s the formula doing exactly what it’s designed to do measuring what actually happened over a full career rather than what the cultural narrative says should have happened. Here’s the...

Get full access to NET WINS at netwins.substack.com/subscribe The full Net Wins database, Every season from 1946 to 2026, is free at willf123.github.io/nba-net-wins . © 2026 Will Fiore. Net Wins formula and all written content are original works. All rights reserved. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Formula Get full access to NET WINS at netwins.substack.com/subscribe The full Net Wins database, Every season from 1946 to 2026, is free at willf123.github.io/nba-net-wins . © 2026 Will Fiore. Net Wins formula and all written content are original works. All rights reserved. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.