A win-based measure of player productivity in cricket: evidence from the Women’s Big Bash League between 2016/17 and 2025/26

Player productivity measurement is well developed in baseball, basketball and association football, but remains at an early stage in cricket. Existing approaches either operate at the team level, rely on externally imposed weighting schemes or apply ball-by-ball valuation frameworks that have not been validated against team outcomes. This paper develops the Cricket Win Score (CWS), a unified measure of player productivity that links individual contributions in batting and bowling to team winning percentage through the marginal value of player statistics. The methodology adopts a team-wins decomposition approach adapted to cricket’s two-sided production structure and is applied to ten seasons of Women’s Big Bash League data (2016/17 to 2025/26), covering 80 team-seasons and over 1700 player-seasons. CWS is validated against realised wins, the Pythagorean expected wins framework, and the cricWAR model. Aggregated CWS predicts team performance with a mean absolute error of 0.106 and a correlation of 0.852, outperforming the Pythagorean benchmark in the context of the WBBL. At the player level, CWS shows strong agreement with cricWAR, with Spearman correlations of 0.91 for batters and 0.97 for bowlers, and over 93% overlap in top-decile player identification in the WBBL. These findings demonstrate that a reduced-form, outcome-based metric can reliably capture player productivity in cricket.