Only John Hollinger, and his wacky ratings system, would rank Ben Wallace as the 11th best center in the league.

With the likes of Mehmet Okur, Chris Anderson, Dan Gadzuric, Marcus Camby and Chris Bosh ranked above him.

http://proxy.espn.go.com/nba/hollinger/rankings?pos=9

http://sports.espn.go.com/nba/columns/story?columnist=hollinger_john&id=2190165

Anyone agree/disagree with this?

Do any of these players deserve to be ranked above Ben Wallace?

How would you rank the top 15?

Hollinger's a lot like Professor Frink from The Simpsons. He has lots of great ideas that are supposed to work based on math and scientific theory...but when it comes down to execution, it blows up in his face. I find very little worth in Hollinger's work, and I've stopped reading his columns.

That's what people who cannot "feel" the game do. They resort to complicated statistical analysis.

Statistics are like a bikini - what they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital. - Aaron Levenstein

Reminds me of a certain "tinfoil hat" poster I would sometimes battle with...

I'm not a big Hollinger fan anyway, and his ratings system is ridiculous. There's a place for statistical analysis, but when it violates common sense it's time to throw it out. I'll second Micro's quote on that one.

I saw Mejia's positional ratings on sportsline.com as well. Another joke, although not quite as egregious as Hollinger. He had Chauncey as the 8th-best PG, behind, among others, Arenas, Hinrich, Baron Davis, and Bibby.

I guess leading your team to an NBA title and nearly to a repeat doesn't count for anything.:doh:

I wish I had the time. I would re-write those stats.

+0.1 PER for each playoff win as starter
+0.05 PER for each playoff win as bench player with over 15 MPG
+0.25 PER for winning a conference title
+0.5 PER for winning the championship

-0.5 PER for each year over age 30 (if you want to use it for forward projections)

Regular season PER is such a waste of time. But that is the lot of a Pistons fan. For 3 years, our season has been defined by the playoffs, not the regular season accolades.

he does concede the blind spot: defense. so admits that defensive players will score lower and poor defenders higher.

I don't know though. Technically you play defense half the game. so its a substantial blind spot

Could someone tell this guy that this is basketball not baseball where statistics don't tell the whole story. Jees.

I don't know how to make this appear in my post, so you'll have to visit the link. But Jack Kirby and Stan Lee did a pretty good job summing up the ambitions of many basketball stats mavens:

http://www.geocities.com/daveconley.geo/ultimatestatsgeek.html?1128046755439

[Roscoe assist to the Big #16]

http://www.geocities.com/daveconley.geo/33ff15e.gif

Thanks, Roscoe.

Only John Hollinger, and his wacky ratings system, would rank Ben Wallace as the 11th best center in the league.

With the likes of Mehmet Okur, Chris Anderson, Dan Gadzuric, Marcus Camby and Chris Bosh ranked above him.

http://proxy.espn.go.com/nba/hollinger/rankings?pos=9

http://sports.espn.go.com/nba/columns/story?columnist=hollinger_john&id=2190165

Anyone agree/disagree with this?

Do any of these players deserve to be ranked above Ben Wallace?

How would you rank the top 15?

I don't even know why Hollinger bothered to submit this analysis. This is complete throw away.

Does Hollinger ever reveal his "complex formula" anywhere? If not, I don't see how anyone could take some secret computer recipe seriously.

http://www.basketball-reference.com/about/per.html

Thanks, Microwave. This formula seems pretty reasonable to me at giving a rough estimate as to how a guy contributes in a game. It would be nice to account for how a guy does during crunch time.

I think what hurts the Pistons PER rankings is the same thing that hurts their chances to make All-Star teams. The team (top 6 guys) is pretty balanced. No one guy puts up the huge numbers. To me, I'll take Championships over high PER rankings any day...

The only rankings I give a rats butt crack about is the final team standings at the end of the year.

The "experts" can make up all the formulas they want. As long as the Pistons win, I'll be happy.

If you want to swim at the deep end of the pool for basketball stats, here's a place to go:

http://sonicscentral.com/apbrmetrics/viewforum.php?f=1&topicdays=0&start=0

Hollinger posts there, as do the rising stars like Dean Oliver (he works for the Sonics) and Dan Rosenbaum, an economics professor who does hoops stats and ranked Ben first in big man defense at his blog:

http://danrosenbaum.blogspot.com/2005/07/defense-for-big-men-what-do-adjusted.html

Only John Hollinger, and his wacky ratings system, would rank Ben Wallace as the 11th best center in the league.

With the likes of Mehmet Okur, Chris Anderson, Dan Gadzuric, Marcus Camby and Chris Bosh ranked above him.

http://proxy.espn.go.com/nba/hollinger/rankings?pos=9

http://sports.espn.go.com/nba/columns/story?columnist=hollinger_john&id=2190165

Anyone agree/disagree with this?

Do any of these players deserve to be ranked above Ben Wallace?

How would you rank the top 15?

worthless.

how's this for a statistic:

100% of NBA teams would take Ben Wallace over B.Miller, Okur, Anderson, Gadzuric, Camby, and Bosh.

100% of NBA GM's who choose B.Miller, Okur, Anderson, Gadzuric, Camby, or Bosh over Ben would get fired from their jobs.

Hollinger needs to sprinkle some common sense into his equations.