Grizzlies Hire John Hollinger as Senior Exec

[e-monk]

and Isiah Thomas had a long and successful playing career so he'd probably be pretty good as an executive ruining- oops I mean running a franchise

[R-Star]

Originally Posted by e-monk

and given all of Charles Barkley's playing experience you can expect that he's always right with his observations too

Well Charles believes that anyways..

[e-monk]

Originally Posted by R-Star

Well Charles believes that anyways..

you could win a lot of money gambling with Charles on basketball game outcomes

[Jamel Irief]

Originally Posted by e-monk

I always suspect that the people who are most vociferously against statistics least understand them - they do have utility in argument - for instance if you say so&so is a bad 3pt shooter and I say he's hit 40% of them for his career that's a fairly solid point in my column

can stats be misused or taken out of context? of course but as a piece of the puzzle they are handy indeed

and as a guy who played 3 sports in high school let me just say that being an athlete obviously gives you some insight into the game and the way it is played but that does not mean that an outside observer who has never played cant figure out that an opponent likes to go right x% or that he likes to get to this spot or that spot on the floor where he hits at a significantly higher clip than otherwise

and that is pretty useful information for a defender to know (in a case like this you're basically talking about quantifying what scouts or film will tell you and there may be even more drill down revealed by the stats than thhat obvious stuff)

I don't know as much about this guy as you, but I believe in your 3rd paragraph what you're describing isn't what Hollinger does. Hollinger likes to invent formulas and %s that all too often people (fans) use to unfairly gauge a players worth.

Maybe per told you tmac was better than Kobe ten years ago. But watching and following the two you knew one had a fanatical drive to win and the other was a whiny pus. It was easy to predict how they're respective careers would pan out.

By the way, what kind of high schools gave you that type of reporting? I couldn't even get that in college!

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[R-Star]

Originally Posted by Jamel Irief

I don't know as much about this guy as you, but I believe in your 3rd paragraph what you're describing isn't what Hollinger does. Hollinger likes to invent formulas and %s that all too often people (fans) use to unfairly gauge a players worth.

Maybe per told you tmac was better than Kobe ten years ago. But watching and following the two you knew one had a fanatical drive to win and the other was a whiny pus. It was easy to predict how they're respective careers would pan out.

By the way, what kind of high schools gave you that type of reporting? I couldn't even get that in college!

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I agree with what you're saying, but I never expected a prime Tmac to flame out as hard as he did.

[e-monk]

Originally Posted by Jamel Irief

I don't know as much about this guy as you, but I believe in your 3rd paragraph what you're describing isn't what Hollinger does. Hollinger likes to invent formulas and %s that all too often people (fans) use to unfairly gauge a players worth.

Maybe per told you tmac was better than Kobe ten years ago. But watching and following the two you knew one had a fanatical drive to win and the other was a whiny pus. It was easy to predict how they're respective careers would pan out.

By the way, what kind of high schools gave you that type of reporting? I couldn't even get that in college!

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no kind of high schools - but the rockets do it (see the articles I posted on the first page) and so now do the griz - hollinger is a lot more than just his PER statistic (which I agree is flawed)

and BTW his PER statistic only told me that for one season McGrady was as good a player as any in the league including KObe for that season (because that's all that PER is any good for at all is player to player comparison in same season)

and as I said previously stats being just one part of the puzzle you could then apply your observations regarding character to your considerations of the trajectories of the two players in question and draw your own conclusions (but PER probably shouldnt be much involved in that consideration)

all you can say with PER is that in 03 McGrady had a more statistically dominant season than Kobe - that's all, it's also pretty damn true - you might stretch it to try to claim that Kobe has never had as good a single season but you could use basic stats for that too and in any event there would need to be plenty of context added to the mix

[Sliccat]

His columns were an absolute must-read for basketball fans, I'm sorry to see him go. He gets unfairly criticized by a lot of people who use him to make blanket claims about stats-based analysts in general. In reality, he always took even his own numbers with a grain of salt, and pointed their limitations out consistently. Now Zach Lowe's probably the best out there.