John Hollinger leaving ESPN for Grizzlies

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John Hollinger, a fixture of ESPN.com's coverage of the NBA for the past eight seasons and one of the leaders in basketball's rising statistical analysis movement in the past decade, is leaving his role as a columnist to join the front office of the Memphis Grizzlies.

Best known for hatching the formula behind every player's Player Efficiency Rating (PER) -- which attempts to quantify player performance through the use of an all-in-one rating -- Hollinger will begin work as a senior executive in the Grizzlies' basketball department next week.

"It's incredibly difficult to leave ESPN, but the chance to work for an NBA team and the Grizzlies' new ownership was an irresistible opportunity," Hollinger said Thursday.

Hollinger was recruited to the Grizzlies by new controlling owner Robert Pera and CEO/managing partner Jason Levien, who have made upgrading Memphis' analytics department one of their front-office priorities.

The Grizzlies on Thursday declined comment.

Hollinger, 41, founded the website "Alleyoop" in 1996 to launch his online career as a basketball sabermetrician and authored a series of books originally known as the "Pro Basketball Prospectus" and later titled "Pro Basketball Forecast."

He went on to work for The Oregonian newspaper's online site (OregonLive.com) and served as the NBA editor of Sports Illustrated's online site (SI.com) before joining ESPN.com in February 2005

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Pretty interesting.

Good riddance.

Hmm interesting. Going with the Money Ball approach?

PER is an overrated stat. I rarely look at it.

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Originally Posted by Hornets78

PER is an overrated stat. I rarely look at it.

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There is no stat taken by itself with no context that is any good. People use PER wrong a bunch but it doesn't make it a bad stat. It is a pretty nice way of marking the change in a player's offensive production. A high PER with a high number of minutes per game can tell you that a player is good on the offensive end. It is not very useful as a direct comparison between players but can be used to put them into tiers of offensive production.

With all that said, I will kinda miss Hollinger's magic formula that always predicts the Nuggets coming out #1 in the West every year. :3

Underrated move. He was more known for his PER projections, but his best articles and analysis were breaking down how bad teams usually overpaid for modest incremental improvements in transactions or even went backwards, while good teams usually "won" player transactions in ways that most people including front office decisions makers don't usually consider.