No, but he is the *Blazer* player whose rating was under discussion. If you want to pick nits, Maris' observation is also irrelevant to the Westbrook v Rose example that was raised. Neither of those players has been held back by their coaches either.
The Rookie Rankings on ESPN is done by David Thorpe and he is just jerking that list around every week (except Westbrook has been at the top since forever -- I think his justification for that is Westbrook's defense). Hollinger doesn't do subjective rankings, only stats. Rose is ahead of Wesbrook in both VA and PER.
It is more likely Maris' observation was aimed towards the general concept of VA which would make it relevant to the overall picture.
The stat is what the stat is. I like Hollinger's line of thinking in coming up with the stat. A big criticism of PER is that some guy plays 10 minutes a game and has a big PER so people tend to extrapolate that to 36 minute kind of production. It doesn't work that way - at 10 per game, the guy might be playing against opponents' 2nd and 3rd stringers while at 36 per game he'd be shut down by bigger and faster players from the 1st string. The benefit of this stat is also it's biggest flaw. A player's VA is higher if the coach plays him a lot. A guy like Jamal Crawford could rank pretty high if given enough minutes. It's a good thing to "penalize" Oden for his inability to stay on the court or play a lot of games. You do want to quantify that kind of thing. It's not a head to head kind of comparison at all. What Westbrook did vs. Rose or vice versa is irrelevant.
