Inside John Hollinger
I first got hooked on John Hollinger stuff back in the mid-1990s when he was writing for a Website he had created called alleyoop.com. It’s still there, if you want to go check out his earlier work. It helped that he was living in Portland at the time — a city he’d visited on vacation from New Jersey and fell in love with — and he loved the NBA.
I was always a Bill James-Rob Neyer disciple who loves fresh ways to look at old numbers so I started following his work. Soon, Hollinger junked his day job in market research and became the sports editor of Oregonlive.com and then went from there to ESPN.com — where’s become a guru with his player and team ratings, based on statistics.
Hollinger still loves Portland even though he moved to Atlanta in 2001. He loves it so much he’s bought a condo and spends part of his year here. He was in the Rose Garden Tuesday night and I got a chance to sit down with him and ask him some questions about his PER, his ratings and other stuff that has been gnawing at me. Here’s some of that conversation:
Q: John, you’ve had the Trail Blazers ranked in your top four for quite a while now, but we’re just a little more than a fourth of the way through the season. Is there a big enough sample size here to say these teams will stay pretty close to where they are or is it too soon. How many games does it take to make up a reasonable statistical sample?
A: Good question. I’m not sure. Last year, by the second or third week of the season, the Lakers and Hornets were in the top three and people were saying, “Are you an idiot?” But they never petered out. Is 20 games representative of what teams really are? That’s a legitimate question.
Q: But the thing about your team and player ratings is that they’re based on numbers. You don’t sit back like some people who do power rankings and just make this stuff up, right?
A: If I have the Trail Blazers in the fourth spot, it doesn’t necessarily mean I think they’re the fourth-best team in the league. It means they’ve played the fourth-best basketball. I get this question all the time about PER. Someone will find a player listed ahead of Paul Pierce and they’ll say, “That guy isn’t better than Paul Pierce.” Well, the numbers say he’s played better than Paul Pierce.
Q: It seems to me, John, that turning stats upside down and finding new ways to evaluate teams and players is so much easier in baseball. I mean, baseball is basically a one-on-one game and you can isolate individual performances so much easier, right?
A: Totally. There is so much yet to do in basketball and it’s difficult. I mean, there’s nothing out there about transition right now — we know possessions ending in turnovers result in more points, but we don’t know a lot yet about the transition game.
Q: Where is basketball in regard to “Sabremetrics” compared to baseball?
A: (With a laugh) In about 1985. Actually, more like ’82 or ’83. But this difference is that in basketball we have met with much less resistance than baseball. There is an openness to the work we’re doing that you still don’t find in baseball.
Q: I know you watch a lot of games . . . what happens when you see things with your eyes that differ from your numbers?
A: It’s inevitable that’s going to happen. But a lot of times, seeing things helps you understand the numbers better. You can better see why certain things happen.
Media, NBA | Dwight Jaynes | December 10, 2008
No surprise that hoops is more open to change (ie, new stats) than the stuffed shirts in MLB.
the holinger link links as if the address were in your blog.