Hehe, I was doing my Stats homework, and I noticed on the inside cover was an applications page. So I see a sports thing there, and under it I see NBA Player Salaries. So I turn to the page.</p> Low and behold....</p> Example 4.5 NBA Salaries</p> USA Today (December 17, 2003) published salaries of NBA players for the 2003-2004 seasons. Salaries for the players of the Chicago Buls were</p> Antonio Davis- $12,000,000Eddie Robinson- $6,246,950Jerome Williams- $5,400,000Scottie Pippen- $4,917,000Tyson Chandler- $3,804,360Marcus Fizer- $3,727,000Jay Williams- $3,710,000Eddy Curry- $3,080,000Jamal Crawford- $2,578,000Kirk Hinrich- $2,098,000Corie Blount- $1,600,000Kendall Gill- $1,070,000Chris Jefferies- $840,360Rick Brunson- $813,679Linton Johnson $366,931</p> A MINITAB dotplot of these data is shown in Figure 4.4. Because the data distributeion is not symmetric and there are outliers, a trimmed mean is a reasonable choice for describing the center of this data set. There are 15 observations in this data set. Deleting the two largest and the two smallest observations from the data set and then averaging the reamining values would result in a (2/15)(100) = 13% trimmed mean. For the Bulls salary data, the two largest salaries are $12,000,000 and $6,246,950 and the two smallest are $813,679 and $366,931. The average of the remaining 11 observations is</p> 13% trimmed mean (5,400,000 + ... + 840,360)/11 = 32,825,320/11 = 2,984,120</p> The mean ($3,483,525) is larger than the trimmed mean because of the unusually large values in the data set, and the trimmed mean is closer to the median salary value ($3,080,000). For the LA Lakers, the difference between the mean ($4,367,343) and the 13% trimmed mean ($2,233,061) is even more dramatic because during the 2003-2004 season one player on the Lakers earned over $26 million and another player earned over $13 million.-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p> Kind of brings chills seeing that lineup of players right there, you forget some of those guys were on the team not too long ago (Kendall Gill, Chris Jefferies, Rick Brunson are the ones that I forgot somewhat). Kirk Hinrich is the only player there, that is still on the team. We have had a complete roster turnover since then.</p> Also thought it was pretty cool that they chose the Bulls to be the data set for the problem.</p>
While I agree that the salaries for most of those players were very poor, this season in my eyes was the start of what we have today. Hinrich was the first building block and he shown that promise from the get-go.
