Primer – StatScore and Win Shares: rating NRL players
If you’d like to skip the explanation and see the full list of StatScores and Win Shares, you can go to this Google Sheet.
The biggest off-season story in the NRL was the transfers of Cooper Cronk from Melbourne to Sydney and then Mitchell Pearce from Sydney to Newcastle. From the Roosters’ perspective, for two players likely on similar pay packets, how did the Roosters decide one was better than the other? Then I wondered if it were possible to work out a way of judging value for money in player trades. It’s big in baseball, so why not rugby league? This led me to develop StatScore and Win Shares as ways to numerically evaluate rugby league players.
