BEVERLEYYYY. MY OLD FRIEND. Contributes to more wins than Parsons or Asik. James Harden contributes the same amount as Dmo and Dwight combined!
I don't mean to sound simplistic,but when u add a impactful,superstar caliber big like howard, everything goes up twofold. Not so much in win total,that's obvious,but just in impact. I remember people saying a charge is better than a blocked shot cuz the team gets the ball ball. Simple logic says if u drive the lane,you're more worried a getting ur shot blocked vs runing over a guy. That's not to say charges aren't good,but the impactful intimidation of a block is greater. With addition of howard,the entire scope of the rockets change.Howard is a ok post player,but teams will eye and double him 65% of the time. He will not only be a play finsher,but also a play creator which help the team a lot.
Conversely, it's a rather poor defense of the metric to ignore the gaping discontinuities in the list of player rankings just because that's "the only critique". Part of a good ranking system is that when it's applied to rank players, the ranking makes sense. It's not just picking out 2 guys. If you wanted to you could find hundreds of odd flutters in the system. IE: Tristan Thompson produced more wins than Tony Parker Reggie Evans produced more wins than Russell Westbrook JJ Hickson produced more wins than Kobe Bryant PJ Tucker produced more wins than Ty Lawson Courtney Lee produced more wins than Chris Bosh Steve Novak produced more wins than Pau Gasol Steve Blake produced more wins than Josh Smith As a more concrete long-term example, Marcus Camby was by FAR the Nuggets leader in WP from '06-'08, averaging over 15 'wins' a season. They should have been 15 wins worse when he left, right? Nah. They just brought Nene back from injury and won 4 more games despite the fact that Nene and Kenyon Martin combined for only 11 'wins'. Of course you can go into WP's inflation of the importance of defensive rebounding and its favoritism to low-usage shooters, but I don't think a critique is invalid just because it focused on the results. At any rate, I'm sorry OP, but I stopped reading your post as soon as you brought in wins produced.