I agree, the best way to get his FG% up will be to start converting those inside shots like Durant did last year. Deron Williams also provides a good recent example of a PG roughly his size who converted less than 50% of his inside shots as a rookie and eventually became very efficient inside in his second and third years.

excellent post. I’ve looked into Hollinger’s methodology, but I never knew it weighted the last month so heavily. Thanks.

In a lot of ways this is more of a problem than his decision making. He will never have Paul or Kidd court-vision, but he can learn where his teammates will be without seeing them. However, there needs to be a huge leap in his shooting/finishing for anything to really move along. I think we expect a lot more from him, and he needs to see Durant to figure it out. Durant jumped 7% in finishing around the rim just by being used to seeing a help defender. Russell needs to make the same adjustment.

Obviously I’ll be devastated if RW has such a dip in performance, but honestly, I’ll be a little upset if KD’s point production RISES that much because it means that he’s having to do that to compensate for a lack of production from his teammates.

Any fan would love to see KD explode for a crazy scoring average, but the smart fan knows better, because such a high scoring average means Harden, Green, Westbrook, etc. are not carrying their load and it also means Durant would have to be playing an insane amount of minutes to accomplish that, which then means that the Thunder’s bench is also not contributing. And the last thing this team needs is a step back in depth and offensive efficiency.

So thanks, but no thanks, to Hollinger’s prediction on points. But I’ll take more rebounds, assists, steals and blocks any day of the week.

As Hollinger noted in Brook Lopez’s projection and has often been noted on this site, “players that tend to improve the most as youngsters are the ones who have high turnover rates and strong athletic indicators (rebounds, blocks, steals, free throw attempts).” Russ was off the charts for his position in those categories, so I expecting Hollinger’s projection to have him making a big leap and was even wondering if he would be projected above Rose based on those factors.

Anyway, I’m glad these are just projections as it will be a long season for the Thunder if Russ takes such a big step back.

Basketball is so much harder to quantify statistically than baseball. In baseball, you’re talking about what’s essentially an individual sport. Each team gets 27 outs, so on and so forth.

But with basketball it’s totally different. A point guard getting 10 assists with the Knicks isn’t the same as one getting 10 assists with a slower team. A guy might shoot 40 percent from the 3-point line on a team with a dominant post man who draws attention in the paint, but on a squad without that presence, his percentage drops.

What I’m getting at is that I support Hollinger’s work, because I love that he’s attempting to quantify basketball in a way that goes beyond what can be sometimes misleading stats, but at the same time, you have to look at PER and stats of that nature with a critical eye.

I love that Hollinger will value a player who isn’t famous because that player performs well on the court (statistically). Hollinger’s tendency to look at the numbers first helps curtail the love-fest that the poster kids get from other authors. This is also why I love the True Hoop network; they get into more detail about players other than Kobe and LeBron.

I hate Hollinger articles because I’m not in love with the PER formula, yet most of his articles/arguments center around it. PER is a good tool. In my mind, it isn’t as good as adjusted +/-, but it’s a good tool. But to focus as much attention on it as he does is annoying and repetitive, which is ironic since the reason I began reading his articles in the first place is because everyone else just wanted to swoon over Kobe and LeBron (which was annoying and repetitive).

Hollinger’s right about KD though. His defense and passing needs improvement.