Yahoo! Sports’ Adrian Wojnarowski is one of the best NBA writers working today, yet even he isn’t above taking shots at his media brethren — er, ex-media brethren, in this case. Woj wrote a lengthy piece today about how Rudy Gay’s departure from Memphis is a sign that the Super Team era is fading (at least in its current incarnation), and sandwiched in the middle was a reference to a certain former “cable sports company” statistician-turned-Vice President of Basketball Operations:
Levien is making these deals based largely on the recommendations of John Hollinger, a statistician who worked for a cable sports company. The San Antonio Spurs once used him as a consultant and regretfully took his advice to sign a free agent named Jackie Butler. It was such a disaster, the Spurs had to attach Luis Scola to a trade to get Butler out of town.
That’s a helluva lotta burn sauce in the span of one paragraph, but outside of that misstep in San Antonio, Hollinger hasn’t had time to build up an awful track record of, say, David Kahn (another former journalist-turned-front office man), so it’s anyone’s guess as to where a diss of this magnitude stems from. That being said, inventing PER and writing roughly 3,879 articles about it is probably a good place to start.
[Deadspin]
