David J. Berri (born September 26, 1969) is a sports economist and

professor Professor (commonly abbreviated as Prof.) is an Academy, academic rank at university, universities and other post-secondary education and research institutions in most countries. Literally, ''professor'' derives from Latin as a "person who pr ...

economics Economics () is the social science that studies the Production (economics), production, distribution (economics), distribution, and Consumption (economics), consumption of goods and services. Economics focuses on the behaviour and intera ...

Southern Utah University Southern Utah University (SUU) is a public university in Cedar City, Utah. Founded in 1897 as a normal school, Southern Utah University now graduates over 1,800 students each year with baccalaureate and graduate degrees from its six colleges. ...

, known for his sometimes-controversial analysis of

NBA The National Basketball Association (NBA) is a professional basketball league in North America. The league is composed of 30 teams (29 in the United States and 1 in Canada) and is one of the major professional sports leagues in the United St ...

basketball Basketball is a team sport in which two teams, most commonly of five players each, opposing one another on a rectangular Basketball court, court, compete with the primary objective of #Shooting, shooting a basketball (ball), basketball (appr ...

. He is a past president of the North American Association of Sports Economists, and a member of the editorial board of the ''

Journal of Sports Economics The ''Journal of Sports Economics'' is a peer-reviewed academic journal published by SAGE Publications in association with the North American Association of Sports Economists covering the economics of sports. It was established by economist Leo "H ...

'' and The International Journal of Sport Finance.

Academic Background

Berri graduated from

Nebraska Wesleyan University Nebraska Wesleyan University (NWU) is a private Methodist-affiliated university in Lincoln, Nebraska. It was founded in 1887 by Nebraska Methodists. As of 2017, it has approximately 2,100 students including 1,500 full-time students and 300 ...

with a

B.A. Bachelor of arts (BA or AB; from the Latin ', ', or ') is a bachelor's degree awarded for an undergraduate program in the arts, or, in some cases, other disciplines. A Bachelor of Arts degree course is generally completed in three or four years ...

in economics in 1991, and earned both his M.A. and Ph.D. from

Colorado State University Colorado State University (Colorado State or CSU) is a public land-grant research university in Fort Collins, Colorado. It is the flagship university of the Colorado State University System. Colorado State University is classified among "R1: ...

. He taught economics at

Coe College Coe College is a private liberal arts college in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. It was founded in 1851 and is historically affiliated with the Presbyterian Church (USA). The college is a member of the Associated Colleges of the Midwest and the Associat ...

and

California State University-Bakersfield California State University, Bakersfield (CSUB, Cal State Bakersfield, or CSU Bakersfield) is a public university in Bakersfield, California. It was established in 1965 as Kern State College and officially in 1968 as California State College Bak ...

before accepting a position at Southern Utah University in 2008.

''The Wages of Wins''

Berri is best known for co-authoring, along with Martin Schmidt and Stacey Brook, the 2006 book ''The Wages of Wins: Taking Measure of the Many Myths in Modern Sport''. The book opened to favorable reviews in several major media outlets, including endorsements from

Malcolm Gladwell Malcolm Timothy Gladwell (born 3 September 1963) is an English-born Canadian journalist, author, and public speaker. He has been a staff writer for ''The New Yorker'' since 1996. He has published seven books: '' The Tipping Point: How Little T ...

in ''

The New Yorker ''The New Yorker'' is an American weekly magazine featuring journalism, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons, and poetry. Founded as a weekly in 1925, the magazine is published 47 times annually, with five of these issues ...

'' and

Joe Nocera Joseph Nocera (born May 6, 1952) is an American business journalist, and author. He has written for The New York Times since April 2005, writing for the Op-Ed page from 2011 to 2015. He was also an opinion columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. Early ...

in ''

The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...

''. In ''The Wages of Wins'', Berri, Schmidt, & Brook look at the 4 major

North America North America is a continent in the Northern Hemisphere and almost entirely within the Western Hemisphere. It is bordered to the north by the Arctic Ocean, to the east by the Atlantic Ocean, to the southeast by South America and the Car ...

n sports from an academic,

econometric Econometrics is the application of statistical methods to economic data in order to give empirical content to economic relationships. M. Hashem Pesaran (1987). "Econometrics," '' The New Palgrave: A Dictionary of Economics'', v. 2, p. 8 p. 8 ...

point of view, investigating issues like the relationship between payrolls and wins,

quarterback The quarterback (commonly abbreviated "QB"), colloquially known as the "signal caller", is a position in gridiron football. Quarterbacks are members of the offensive platoon and mostly line up directly behind the offensive line. In modern Ame ...

play in the

NFL The National Football League (NFL) is a professional American football league that consists of 32 teams, divided equally between the American Football Conference (AFC) and the National Football Conference (NFC). The NFL is one of the major ...

, and competitive balance in

baseball Baseball is a bat-and-ball sport played between two teams of nine players each, taking turns batting and fielding. The game occurs over the course of several plays, with each play generally beginning when a player on the fielding tea ...

. The portion of the book that has drawn the most attention—positive and negative—has been Berri's analysis of the

, particularly with regard to player performance. By running a series of

linear regression In statistics, linear regression is a linear approach for modelling the relationship between a scalar response and one or more explanatory variables (also known as dependent and independent variables). The case of one explanatory variable is call ...

s, Berri has developed a model called "Wins Produced", which "explains 95% of team wins". The Wins Produced model is a refinement of an earlier model put forth in a 1999 paper published in the journal "Managerial and Decision Economics''. Berri's work is frequently viewed as a lightning rod for criticism because the Wins Produced model often runs counter to the conventional wisdom of

. Berri has not discouraged such controversy, either, in his posts for ''The Wages of Wins accompanying blog, "The Wages of Wins Journal", which frequently criticizes NBA decision-makers (i.e., coaches and

general manager A general manager (GM) is an executive who has overall responsibility for managing both the revenue and cost elements of a company's income statement, known as profit & loss (P&L) responsibility. A general manager usually oversees most or all of ...

s) and members of the media.

Criticism

Berri has come out in opposition of certain traditional linear weights-style NBA evaluatory statistics like TENDEX and the NBA's official "efficiency" metric, claiming that they overvalue scoring and undervalue shooting efficiency. A similar criticism has been made of

John Hollinger John Hollinger (born May 17, 1971) is the former Vice President of Basketball Operations for the Memphis Grizzlies of the National Basketball Association (NBA) and current Senior NBA columnist at The Athletic. Prior to December 2012, he was an a ...

Player Efficiency Rating The player efficiency rating (PER) is John Hollinger's all-in-one basketball rating, which attempts to collect or boil down all of a player's contributions into one number. Using a detailed formula, Hollinger developed a system that rates every pl ...

, a model that Berri also argues significantly undervalues shooting efficiency. He has also criticized non-box score-based stats like Adjusted Plus-Minus, claiming that the basic box score numbers tell decision-makers most of what they need to know about a player's value. In December 2011, Berri released an updated version that adjusted the defensive rebound weight to account for diminishing returns. Berri has provided data on women's basketball for the journa
''The Ladies League''
as well as several other media outlets.

''Stumbling on Wins''

''Stumbling on Wins: Two Economists Expose the Pitfalls on the Road to Victory in Professional Sports'' is Berri and Schmidt's follow up on The Wages of Wins and was published in March 2010 by FT Press.Stumbling on Wins
FT Press 2010.

References

External links

The Wages of Wins Journal

The Wages of Wins Official Site
{{DEFAULTSORT:Berri, David Living people American statisticians American sportswriters Southern Utah University faculty Nebraska Wesleyan University alumni Colorado State University alumni California State University, Bakersfield faculty 21st-century American economists 1969 births