39. Jameer Nelson, ORL 2005-06 season: Nelson played so well in his second season that it helped force the Magic to trade Steve Francis, and he has established himself as one of the game's best young guards. Nelson adjusted... 48. Grant Hill, ORL 2005-06 season: Another year, another injury. This time it was a sports hernia that ended Hill's season after only 21 games, adding yet another disappointing chapter to his stay in Orlando. What... 53. Dwight Howard, ORL 2005-06 season: In just his second year out of high school, Howard was a dominating force on the glass and nearly became the youngest player ever to lead the league in rebounding. He ended up second... 69. Darko Milicic, ORL 2005-06 season: The Pistons swore they'd find minutes for Darko now that Larry Brown was gone ... only they didn't. Milicic played only 140 minutes for Detroit, mostly in garbage time, so Detroit... 82. Hedo Turkoglu, ORL 2005-06 season: Turkoglu took over as the starting small forward when Grant Hill went out and put together his second straight strong campaign in Orlando. He got fewer shots than the year before... These players round out the top 100 on ESPN's top players. These rankings are a little sorry seeing as Grant Hill is ahead of Dwight Howard.
<div class="quote_poster">CLos Wrote</div><div class="quote_post">39. Jameer Nelson, ORL 2005-06 season: Nelson played so well in his second season that it helped force the Magic to trade Steve Francis, and he has established himself as one of the game's best young guards. Nelson adjusted... 48. Grant Hill, ORL 2005-06 season: Another year, another injury. This time it was a sports hernia that ended Hill's season after only 21 games, adding yet another disappointing chapter to his stay in Orlando. What... 53. Dwight Howard, ORL 2005-06 season: In just his second year out of high school, Howard was a dominating force on the glass and nearly became the youngest player ever to lead the league in rebounding. He ended up second... 69. Darko Milicic, ORL 2005-06 season: The Pistons swore they'd find minutes for Darko now that Larry Brown was gone ... only they didn't. Milicic played only 140 minutes for Detroit, mostly in garbage time, so Detroit... 82. Hedo Turkoglu, ORL 2005-06 season: Turkoglu took over as the starting small forward when Grant Hill went out and put together his second straight strong campaign in Orlando. He got fewer shots than the year before... These players round out the top 100 on ESPN's top players. These rankings are a little sorry seeing as Grant Hill is ahead of Dwight Howard.</div> Love the av!!!!!!!! The rankings are garbage, you're right.
more importantly than grant hill being above Dwight... how about jameer? i mean... he did really well towards the end of the season and i love the guy... but damn... he only started the end of last season and didn't even play much the season before... Dwight should be WAAAYY higher than he was. ESPECIALLY above hill and jameer.
Go to the Nets forum and look at the player rankings and you will see that the rankings all suck. Hollinger is bad writer.
Hey Carter, that's where I got the rankings from. This guy is retarded. I saw Kidd's, Carter's, and Jefferson's rating. They all suck.
realgm rankings: 24) Dwight Howard - Probably the best young big man in the East (on a side note, Bosh is rated higher, but this guy has more "winning attributes" i.e. rebounding, dirty work, and D). He does more window cleaning than your favorite bum at the gas station. Expect that 15.8 ppg to turn into 20 ppg this year. Dwights Ranking is new the rest are from last year thats why Bogans is listed as playing for Houston also why rakings are a little off. 77 J. Nelson ORL 82 H. Turkoglu ORL 83 G. Hill ORL 161 T. Battie ORL 196 K. Bogans HOU 230 K. Dooling ORL 233 C. Arroyo ORL 245 T. Ariza ORL 259 D. Milicic ORL 315 B. Outlaw ORL 317 P. Garrity ORL 341 T. Diener ORL
I think it's funny how everyone looks at the ranking and assumes Hollinger must not know what he's talking about. The problem is all his actual subjective analysis of the players are only available on Insider. What you're seeing may or may not correspond to his actual take on these players. They are computer-generated projections of per-minute statistical production ... not a ranking of the best to worst players. For some players they may be accurate, for others (very young players, for instance) they're much less reliable. Screw it, I'm going to post his explanation of the rankings here, even though it's only on Insider. It was retarded for ESPN to only make this available to Insider subscribers, because it's the people who don't have it that are most likely to misinterpret the rankings. They only did themselves a disservice by hiding this explanation to the public. <div class="quote_poster">Quote:</div><div class="quote_post"> <font size="4">PER: Explaining the Howards and Bowens</font> In the wake of this week's posting of Projected PER stats for every player in the league, my mailbox runneth over. Dwight Howard No. 53? Eddy Curry ahead of Jason Kidd? Bruce Bowen No. 315? And who the heck is Chuck Hayes? Clearly, some folks are confused, so let me try to explain as much as I can in one neat little package. First, let's make sure we're clear: Those rankings you saw were not me saying that Curry is better than Kidd, or Hayes is better than Howard. Thousands of straw men have suffered horrible deaths in the past 48 hours based on this false premise. Here's what the ratings are: A projection of each player's per-minute statistical production this season. Per-minute, for example, Curry is a monster. He just can't play more than 20 of those minutes on a lot of nights because of fouls and conditioning. So in any kind of per-minute rating, he's going to grade out much better than he would if you were just listing players by their overall value. Unfortunately, three kinds of players give the projections problems -- very young ones, very old ones, and ones who haven't played many career minutes. This is where Howard and Hayes come into play. The projections are built by looking at comparable players at the same age and how their stats changed in the following season. For players in most age brackets, this is extremely reliable, but there have been so few players to turn pro out of high school in the past two decades that we have a very small sample to work with for players like Howard and Josh Smith. As luck would have it, one of those players was Darius Miles, who did a barrel-over-Niagara-Falls routine at the same age. As one of just a handful of players used in the projections for both Howard and Smith, he's enough of a millstone that the overall projection foresees a decline in PER. There were two ways I could handle this: (1) "Cheat" by throwing Miles out of my database and having more defensible projections for Howard and Smith or (2) include the projection and explain what happened in the player comments. I opted for (2), not realizing that one consequence of shifting this information from a book format to an online format was that a great many readers would see Howard listed as "No. 53" long before they every got to the explanation of how it happened. (And for the record, I expect both Howard and Smith to blow those projections out of the water.) Making matters worse, Howard is listed well behind somebody named Chuck Hayes, an undrafted free agent who played for Houston and just barely met my 500-minute threshold for being included in the projections. It must be said that Hayes played phenomenally well in his limited playing time -- he finished with the No. 6 Rebound Rate in all of basketball and shot 56.2 percent. I have yet to meet anybody who expects him to keep playing at this level, but right now it's all the information the projections have to go on, so his projected numbers for next year come out looking very solid as well. Keep in mind also that we're not talking about career value here; we're talking about projected stats for next season only. One reader asked why I gave Chris Paul more "respect" than Allen Iverson, but respect had nothing to do with it -- it's the historical trend that point guards in their second season tend to improve and small players in their 30s tend to decline. Either player could be an exception, but based on analysis of similar players, this is my best estimate for their performance this coming season. The projections also don't include defense beyond blocks, steals and fouls, partly because the league has opted to make this area a black hole in terms of stats and so we have nothing to work with. The San Antonio Express-News today wondered why only a handful of players were projected with a lower PER than Bowen -- well, he doesn't score, rebound, pass, block shots or get steals, so where were they thinking he'd rank? Statistically, he really is near the very bottom of the league -- he's just so good defensively that it offsets his lack of numbers. I've noted in the player comments for the Hayeses and Howards of the world where I disagree with the projections, but unfortunately these infrequent examples seem to be dominating the discussion. In the vast majority of cases, we end up with projected numbers that make perfect sense. Curry, for instance, projects to average 22.0 points per 40 minutes and shoot 56.5 percent from the floor; since he averaged 21.0 and 56.3 percent last year, this shouldn't be controversial. The fact this gives him a better projected PER than Kidd may strike some folks as odd based on the two players' reputations, but if he outrated Kidd on this metric this season it wouldn't shock me at all.</div> I'll just post Hollinger's outlook for Howard this season, so you get an idea of what he actually said instead of jumping to conclusions based on some shaky projected number: <div class="quote_poster">Quote:</div><div class="quote_post"> 2006-07 outlook: Howard is one of the most promising big men in basketball, so it might be a surprise to see his projected numbers for this year are so poor. Don't put too much stock in them --most players under 21 have very few comparable players to use for the projections, because leaving high school for the pros has been so uncommon. In this case, Howard's only comparables are Tyson Chandler and Eddy Curry, both of whom regressed in their third season. I'd expect Howard's career to go in the opposite direction. His physical dominance isn't going to decline any time soon, and as his learning and skills increase he'll only wreak more havoc on opposing frontcourts. Provided the turnovers don't swallow him whole, Howard should be an All-Star this year and for many years to come. </div>
John Hollinger sucks!!! Man these rankings are trash. How is Grant Hill higher than Howard?? j/k, John's my hero.
<div class="quote_poster">CLos Wrote</div><div class="quote_post">The ratings are very weird and are still hard to understand but w/e.</div> If you can be more specific about what you find weird or difficult to understand, I'll be happy to help clarify. ESPN screwed up by implying this was a best to worst list. It's not, and it wasn't meant to be. It's projecting PER, a per-minute summary stat and not a "who's best?" measurement, and even at that it isn't particularly reliable for some of the players (like Dwight Howard). The reason is it extrapolates player stats based purely on trends for historically similar players at the same age. Based on Hollinger's method of determining similarity, Howard's most comparable players at his age were Eddie Curry and Tyson Chandler ... you can see, then, why the projections were pessimistic. Perhaps if Hollinger refined his similarity metric to seek out players who intuitively we find to be more similar, then the results would look better.
So their basing the ratings on a system based on what per 48 minutes? or based on their performances on the court?? sorry to bother you with the questions but just wondering why some people are higher than others. Never mind. Did you say that they were based on your age group?
<div class="quote_poster">CLos Wrote</div><div class="quote_post">So their basing the ratings on a system based on what per 48 minutes? or based on their performances on the court?? sorry to bother you with the questions but just wondering why some people are higher than others. </div> Here's how it works. Hollinger defines a stat called PER (Player Efficiency Rating). It's a per-minute stat which incorporates points, rebounds, assists, steals, blocks, turnovers, fouls, ... pretty much everything recorded in a box score. Essentially it adds up the "good stats" and subtracts the "bad stats", with appropriate weights for each stat (e.g a steal is worth more than a block). Furthermore, it is pace-adjusted, so players who play on faster paced teams don't benefit from getting more possessions to acquire their stats. Finally, the league average is set to 15, and everyone's rating is scaled accordingly. So, a player with a PER above 15 is above average, and if the PER is below 15 they are below average. To read more about how PER work see here. Note that PER makes more sense for some player than others. Since it doesn't summarize a player's defensive contributions very well, great defensive players who may not do much on offense could be severely underrated. That's why it shouldn't be considered a rating for how good a player is. It is, actually, a rating of their statistical productivity, which may or may not correspond to how good they are. Here's a rough reference guide to interpret a player's PER, for the general case in which the stats stats correspond well to the player's level of play: <div class='codetop'>CODE</div><div class='codemain'><font size="2"><br/>*A Year For the Ages:35.0<br/>*Runaway MVP Candidate:30.0<br/>*Strong MVP Candidate: 27.5<br/>*Weak MVP Candidate: 25.0<br/>*Bona fide All-Star: 22.5<br/>*Borderline All-Star:20.0<br/>*Solid 2nd option: 18.0<br/>*3rd Banana: 16.5<br/>*Pretty good player: 15.0<br/>*In the rotation:13.0<br/>*Scrounging for minutes: 11.0<br/>*Definitely renting:9.0<br/>*On next plane to Yakima: 5.0</font></div> Ok, that's PER. These ratings on ESPN are projected PER for every player. They aren't subjective ... Hollinger didn't just pick a number based on what he "feels" they'll do next year. They are computer generated projections: based on what the player has done statistically in the previous year(s) and how "similar" players have progressed historically. Taking these two together, he can generate a projection of their stats next season. The difficult part is coming up with a similarity metric ... how do you judge if two players are similar, after all? What Hollinger does, I presume, is first he looks only at players who were the same age. Then he sees how those players who's height and stats are very similar progressed. This method works OK for most players. Obviously, some players are unique enough (for instance, maybe not many player historically in their age bracket, like Dwight Howard or Dikembe Mutombo) to where the projection isn't very reliable. Hollinger acknowledges this in his player profiles (which aren't freely available on ESPN).
WOW, that's complicated. I understand it though. Thanks for clearing that up durvasa. Your the man as always!
