Hollinger Rankings

John Hollinger ranks every player in the league based on a formula he has for projecting next season's likely PERs. It seems to me that taking the useful-but-in-some-ways-questionable tool of the PER as a ratings method and yoking it to the useful-but-in-some-ways-questionable tool of using similarity scores to project future performance is not the best way to get value for your number crunching buck. That Kobe Bryant (28.11), Dirk Nowitzki (28.20), and LeBron James (28.17) all did roughly the same on the PER metric last seasons seems like a valuable observation. The projection formula, by contrast, doesn't really add anything beyond what obvious qualitative nostrums ("LeBron's really young, he'll probably keep getting better"; "Kobe's been playing for a long time now, what happens if he loses half a step?") can offer us.

Delving into stats, Hollinger says that Agent Zero "might fare well if he played off the ball more, but the Wizards don't have anybody else to run the point." My strong recollection is that Arenas did play off the ball a non-trivial amount of time last year and that the Wizards do have someone else to run the point, namely Antonio Daniels.