For more like this netwins.substack.com The Net Wins formula is a backward-looking instrument. It counts what happened. It has no mechanism for what should have happened, what would have happened, what was on its way to happening before something intervened. This article is about the players the formula never got to finish counting. Some careers were ended by injury. Some by illness. Some by choices that cost everything. What they share is the quality of what was already there before it was taken away, and the particular weight of imagining the numbers that were never produced. Derrick Rose. Chicago, 2009-2024 Net Wins peak: +6.51 (2010-11, 62-20 Bulls) Career total: +8.54 over 13 seasons He was the youngest MVP in NBA history at 22 years old. In 2010-11 he led the Bulls to the best record in the Eastern Conference, averaged 25 points and 7.7 assists per game, and produced +6.51 net wins on a 62-win team. The formula recorded the best guard season of that year and one of the best point guard seasons in the database. Then April 28, 2012. Game 1 of the first round against Philadelphia. The Bulls were up by 12 with 1:22 left. Rose drove to the basket with no contact and landed on his knee. The ACL tore without anyone touching him. A hush went through the United Center that people who were there still describe the same way thirty years later. What followed was one of the most painful extended sequences in the history of the sport. Torn ACL in 2012. Torn meniscus in the right knee in 2013. Torn meniscus again in 2015. Torn meniscus in the left knee in 2017. Each time he came back. Each time something else gave way. The explosiveness that made him the youngest MVP, the first step that no defender could calculate, the elevation that let him finish over players a foot taller, slowly and irreversibly eroded. He played until 2024. He averaged 17.4 points per game for his career. He was, by any measure, a good NBA player for sixteen years. But the player who won the MVP in 2011 was not the player who retired in 2024, and everyone who watched both versions of him knows it. Rose himself said: “I asked God that numerous times. After a while, I stopped asking. I knew I had to roll with the punches, and that’s part of being from Chicago.” The formula has +8.54. The player the formula was looking at in 2011 was heading for somewhere north of +60. Anfernee Hardaway. Orlando, 1993-2008 Anfernee Hardaway. Orlando, 1993-2008 Net Wins peak: +6.16 (1995-96, 60-22 Magic) Career total: +16.59 over 15 seasons Penny Hardaway arrived in the NBA in 1993 as one of the most complete young players the league had seen. Six feet seven, point guard skills, the wingspan to defend multiple positions, a jump shot that was still developing, and a ceiling that the people around him described in superlatives they usually reserved for once-in-a-generation players. His best three seasons produced averages of 4.84, 6.16, and 2.71 net wins respectively. The 1995-96 season at +6.16 on a 60-win Magic team was among the best individual seasons of the decade for a guard. He was 24 years old. He played fifteen seasons in total but the player in those first three peak seasons was one of the best in the world. Then his knees began to deteriorate. Serious patellar tendon problems in both knees starting in 1997 altered his game permanently. He was never again the player who had pushed Shaquille O’Neal’s Orlando teams to back-to-back Finals appearances. He played until 2007 but in a diminished form, a sculptor who had lost the use of his hands producing work that only reminded people of what used to be there. The formula cannot show you the career arc that was visible in 1996. It can only show you six productive seasons and then a long, quiet decline. The player in those six seasons was one of the best in the world. Vin Baker. Milwaukee, 1994-2006 Net Wins peak: +5.97 (1997-98, 61-21 Bucks/SuperSonics) Career total: +0.18 over 13 seasons The formula ends up with -1.39 for Vin Baker’s career. That number carries a story that has nothing to do with basketball. Baker was a four-time All-Star and one of the better power forwards in the league in the mid-1990s. His 1997-98 season on a 61-win Sonics team produced +5.97. He was 26 years old and positioned as a cornerstone of a franchise that had just reached the Finals. Then alcoholism took over. Not quietly, not gradually. He went from All-Star to waived in the space of a few seasons. He acknowledged later that he was showing up to games drunk. The Celtics, who paid him $35 million in 2001, released him after two seasons when his weight had ballooned and his performance had become unreliable. He ended up working at a Starbucks in Rhode Island. He got sober. He found his way back. The formula records a career total of +0.18 across 13 seasons, essentially zero, because the back half erased most of the front. What that number cannot convey is the quality of the player in those first five seasons before the disease consumed him. Baker at his peak was genuinely excellent. His first four seasons on bad Milwaukee teams produced negative numbers because the losing context dragged everything down, but the 1997-98 season on a 61-win Sonics team showed what he was capable of when the pieces around him were right. The formula only got to see that once. Danny Manning. Los Angeles Clippers, 1988-2003 Danny Manning. Los Angeles Clippers, 1988-2003 Net Wins peak: +5.83 (1994-95, 59-23 Suns) Career total: +10.07 over 15 seasons Danny Manning was the first overall pick in 1988 and considered one of the most complete forwards in college basketball history. He was drafted by a Clippers team that had been among the worst franchises in professional sports for years and arrived as a genuine reason for optimism. Eight games into his rookie season, he tore the ACL in his right knee. He returned in 1989-90 and produced solid seasons, but tore the ACL in the same knee again in 1991. Two tears, same knee, before his career had properly begun. He played eleven seasons in total and was genuinely effective in stretches, particularly with the Phoenix Suns in 1994-95 where he produced +5.83 on a 59-win team. But the player who had been projected as a franchise cornerstone in 1988 was never fully available. The formula has +10.07, accumulated across fifteen seasons interrupted and abbreviated by knees that were simply not reliable. What Manning might have been with one healthy first five years is impossible to calculate. The formula can only count the seasons it was given, and it was not given enough of them. Reggie Lewis. Boston, 1987-1993 Net Wins peak: +5.28 (1990-91, 56-26 Celtics) Career total: +18.54 over 6 seasons Reggie Lewis died on July 27, 1993, during an off-season workout at Brandeis University. He collapsed and could not be resuscitated. He was 27 years old. He had been named team captain of the Boston Celtics to replace Larry Bird. In his final two seasons he averaged 20.8 points per game. He was the next Celtic, the bridge between the Bird era and whatever came after, and he was dead at 27 in an empty gymnasium on a summer afternoon. The formula has +18.54 over six seasons, an average of +3.09 per year. He was still improving. His last two seasons were the best of his career. The formula was looking at a player who had not yet reached his peak. The Boston Celtics had already lost Len Bias to a cocaine overdose in 1986, two days after drafting him second overall. Then Reggie Lewis seven years later. Two franchise-altering players, both gone before the formula could count what they were going to become. The Celtics did not return to relevance until the mid-2000s. The connection between those two losses and that decade of mediocrity is not subtle. Lewis’ number 35 hangs in the rafters at TD Garden. He is one of only two Celtics to have a retired number without a championship. Maurice Stokes. Rochester/Cincinnati, 1955-1958 Net Wins peak: +1.03 (1957-58, 33-39 Royals) Career total: +1.07 over 3 seasons Career averages: 16.4 points, 17.3 rebounds, 5.3 assists per game The formula has Maurice Stokes. Three seasons, career total +1.07, peak +1.03 in his final year. Those numbers look modest and the context explains why, he played on Rochester and Cincinnati Royals teams that went 31-41 twice and 33-39 in his final season. The formula normalizes against what a team needs to win, and on losing teams even excellent individual contributions compress toward zero. What those numbers cannot capture is what the raw averages show. In 1956-57 he pulled 1,256 rebounds in a single season, setting the NBA record. In three seasons he averaged 17.3 rebounds and 5.3 assists per game. Contemporary observers compared him to Magic Johnson. A 6-foot-7 forward who handled the ball like a point guard and rebounded like a center, three All-Star selections in every single season he played. On March 12, 1958, Stokes drove to the basket in Minneapolis, made contact, and fell to the floor, hitting his head. He was revived with smelling salts and sent back into the game. Three days later, after contributing 12 points and 15 rebounds in a playoff game, he suffered a seizure on the team’s flight back to Cincinnati. The plane made an emergency landing. Stokes was hospitalized. He never played again. He was diagnosed with post-traumatic encephalopathy, a traumatic brain injury that left him paralyzed. The Royals removed him from the payroll immediately. There was no pension, no medical plan, no safety net. His teammate Jack Twyman became his legal guardian and spent years raising funds to cover his medical bills, which approached $100,000 per year. Stokes lived as a quadriplegic until his death in 1970 at age 36. He was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame in 2004. The formula has +1.07. On better teams, with his career not ending at 24, the number would look very different. What it cannot measure is a player averaging 17.3 rebounds and 5.3 assists pe
