while back a writer named Neil Paine set out to determine who was the best National Basketball Association coach of the modern era. He devised an algorithm that used player performance metrics to predict how many games a team should win. He crunched numbers for every NBA coach since 1979 in order to measure “wins above expectation”—that is, the number of times a coach’s team won a game that, measured by their players’ skills, they had no business winning. He then plotted the results on a graph.
