Juany8: He makes judgement calls on matchups and attempts to adjust for common sense and obvious statistical outliers (when PER had Kevin Love ranked higher than Dirk the year Dirk won Finals MVP, Hollinger was quick to point out that was wrong)

“Obvious statistical outliers.” I really don’t know how you evaluate “obvious.”

Jafa: +1.Please get Shump back ASAP, please keep Felton off the floor, and please play Amare more with Kidd/Prigioni to maximize whatever talent he has left.And yes, 48 wins sounds about right.

Lmao

The Honorable Cock Jowles:
Hollinger still believes in a stat in which you can shoot 33% overall and 25% from 3 and lead the league in it. Why bother with his thoughts?

This is a 48-win team unless Ronnie Brewer gets the bulk of minutes at SG, Felton stays off the floor, and Amar’e starts playing like a role player instead of an idiot who puts up 17 foot bricks several times a game. You don’t need Hollinger to tell you that they’re a middling EC team.

+1. Please get Shump back ASAP, please keep Felton off the floor, and please play Amare more with Kidd/Prigioni to maximize whatever talent he has left. And yes, 48 wins sounds about right.

Juany8: Does he generally still manage to be a smart basketball analyst? Other than when he’s talking about the Lakers or Knicks sure, with those 2 teams he’ll find every possible flaw to harp on while pretending D-Will is suddenly going to go back to his Utah level on the Nets despite lacking any objective proof for either point.

Really curious where this idea that Hollinger hates the Knicks comes from. Here are his forecasts for the last 5 years:

2011-2012: Hollinger prediction: 35 wins, actual: 36 wins
2010-2011: Hollinger prediction: 37 wins, actual: 42 wins
2009-2010: Hollinger prediction: 26 wins, actual: 29 wins
2008-2009: Hollinger prediction: 28 wins, actual: 32 wins
2007-2008: Hollinger prediction: 38 wins, actual: 23 wins

So basically he was way off once, and that was way high. Every other year he has been extremely accurate, although a little low each year. The only year he was off by more than 4 wins was when they pulled off a mid-season blockbuster. I’d say you have to squint pretty hard at that record to convince yourself that he’s consistently dramatically underestimating the Knicks.

The Honorable Cock Jowles:
Hollinger still believes in a stat in which you can shoot 33% overall and 25% from 3 and lead the league in it. Why bother with his thoughts?

This is a 48-win team unless Ronnie Brewer gets the bulk of minutes at SG, Felton stays off the floor, and Amar’e starts playing like a role player instead of an idiot who puts up 17 foot bricks several times a game. You don’t need Hollinger to tell you that they’re a middling EC team.

Because Hollinger is fully aware of his stats faults (the least of which is the way offense is rated, unless you think Tyson Chandler is a better offensive player than Steve Nash like WP48). Since Hollinger knows he cannot dogmatically follow his pet number, he doesn’t try to and has never once tried to pass off PER as “science”. He makes judgement calls on matchups and attempts to adjust for common sense and obvious statistical outliers (when PER had Kevin Love ranked higher than Dirk the year Dirk won Finals MVP, Hollinger was quick to point out that was wrong)

So is his statistical system worth paying much attention to? Not really. Does he generally still manage to be a smart basketball analyst? Other than when he’s talking about the Lakers or Knicks sure, with those 2 teams he’ll find every possible flaw to harp on while pretending D-Will is suddenly going to go back to his Utah level on the Nets despite lacking any objective proof for either point.

The Honorable Cock Jowles:
Hollinger still believes in a stat in which you can shoot 33% overall and 25% from 3 and lead the league in it. Why bother with his thoughts?

This is a 48-win team unless Ronnie Brewer gets the bulk of minutes at SG, Felton stays off the floor, and Amar’e starts playing like a role player instead of an idiot who puts up 17 foot bricks several times a game. You don’t need Hollinger to tell you that they’re a middling EC team.

If only we still had Landry Fields, one of the top 5 rookies in NBA history. =)

btw – Zach Lowe has a new piece in Grantland re: “future innovations” in the NBA. As usual, a good read, but one part that was very interesting, especially in regards to WP48 and Four Factors in general is his point about how offensive rebounding has declined from average ORR of ~33% in the 80s-90s to ~25% now due to coaches giving up chances at offensive rebounds to cut down on transition opportunities – ie. giving up chances on the O-boards makes your defense better. Now obviously in the case of Chicago that’s not true – they had by far the highest ORR last year and had also had the stingiest defense. But Boston has for years not bothered with O-rebounds (last by far last year) and had the 2nd best defense. Interestingly, SA was one of the very worst O-reb teams in the league last year (24th), and yet was the best offense in the league. Just goes to show you that there are many ways to skin this cat.

in principle, it seems like some of the transition opportunities you give up if you hit the O-boards hard would be evened out by better offensive efficiency (ie. fewer chances to run on missed baskets), but I’m not sure what the math is there. If I have time later, I’ll try to plot out ORR vs D-Eff to see if there are any correlations. Certainly not groundbreaking but interesting stuff nonetheless.

ruruland: Another one-sided, cherry-picked, homogenously-sourced hit piece.

lol u

This is a 48-win team unless Ronnie Brewer gets the bulk of minutes at SG, Felton stays off the floor, and Amar’e starts playing like a role player instead of an idiot who puts up 17 foot bricks several times a game. You don’t need Hollinger to tell you that they’re a middling EC team.