![average wingspan average wingspan](https://media.sciencephoto.com/image/c0094132/800wm/C0094132-Ornithologist_With_Royal_Albatross.jpg)
Traded players or free agents count for every team they played (e.g. I then weighted the wingspan and height data for each player according to their minutes, arriving at a weighted average for that team. This includes a list of their players and minutes played. I downloaded each team's total year stats from Basketball Reference. This makes the analysis more accurate, given that bigmen are bigger and often have a larger DWS than guards. After doing a full-league regression, I divided the data into three groups: guards, forwards, and centers. I compared each individual player's wingspan and height to his DWS (defensive win shares, downloaded from Basketball Reference). DX data is highlighted in yellow data from other sources are highlighted in blue, and the source is specified next to the player's data and players for whom I could not find data are highlighted in green. "average", "excellent").Īll data not taken from the Combine Anthrometric is highlighted on the master Excel sheet. Finally, when there was no data on blogs or forums, I either estimated the wingspan to be a bit more than the player's height, or estimated the wingspan based on how DX described it (e.g. were used when I could not find data anywhere else. The most credible source except for DX is. For players whose wingspan was not available on DX, I used a variety of sources. Most of the wingspan data was available on DX. His data was taken from this ESPN TrueHoop article. The only player whose height data was not taken from DX was Giannis Antetokounmpo, because he has grown since his draft measurements. This may lead to some inconsistency, because DX sometimes uses height w/ shoes for the player profile. To complete the data manually, all height data was taken from each player's DraftExpress player profile. So, I manually found data for over 200 players.
![average wingspan average wingspan](http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-ccfBB7NvG3E/UoJ0y9oegAI/AAAAAAABAiQ/35bCh__9rOw/s1600/bald-eagle-images-2.jpg)
All the NBA's Combine Anthrometric data is available on the "Combine Anthrometric" tab of the Excel master sheet.īecause not all players attend the combine, the Combine Anthrometric did not have all the data. Height w/o shoes was used because height w/ shoes data was not recorded until the 2004-2005 season. Most of the data was taken from the NBA's Combine Anthrometric page. The list of every active player was taken from Basketball Reference Data collection To test whether wingspan or height is a better predictor of NBA defense, first I created a database of every active NBA player's wingspan and height. METHODOLOGY: Is wingspan or height a better predictor of NBA defense?