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Posted by Kelly Dwyer 

This is getting pretty silly.

John Hollinger put together a pretty sound breakdown (as is usually the case) regarding the relative fortunes of each of the NBA's 30 teams, using personnel shifts and other criteria to determine just which teams have the bestest or worstest chances at improving in 2007-08. That last point, about the breakdowns only taking into account the 2007-08 season? He made a point to point to that point. He even italicized that point, four paragraphs down, on the first 15-team breakdown published on Wednesday. When a huge heap of readers missed the point, he made a point to pointedly address that point head-on in the first paragraph of his second breakdown, which came out yesterday:

To reiterate a key point, we're looking at how the teams' moves affect this coming season only -- judging from the comments on Wednesday's piece I'm not sure everyone followed that. So for example, the Raptors might regret paying so much for Jason Kapono three years from now, but it undoubtedly will help them for the 2007-08 season.

He shouldn't have to do that. We should be better than that. He shouldn't have to end the column like this, and his SuperSonics breakdown, either:

Figuring out how to improve their deficient defense might not be easy, since it's an area where most young players learn the hard way. The return of Robert Swift should at least shore up the interior a bit, but in terms of what they gained and lost in the offseason, the 2007-08 Sonics don't appear as strong as the 2006-07 version.

That's OK in this case -- it's the 2009-10 Seattle Sonics (or Las Vegas Rollers or Oklahoma City Tornadoes or whatever they're calling themselves then) that other teams should fear, and Seattle's offseason was a strong step in that direction. Again, we've just been looking at 2007-08 here -- if we're rating long-term impacts, Seattle zooms way up the list.

(Read: This is for next season, which is the 2007-08 season, which starts in October and is the upcoming season - the only season I'm talking about here - for the National Basketball Association. 2007-08, that is. Next season. Just that one. Please read the words that I'm typing out. About the 2007-08 season)

And yet, this doesn't stop us. "The Trail Blazers haven't improved? You didn't like the Ray Allen deal? Luis Scola and Mike James are more important than Greg Oden and Channing Frye? Why don't you put down the calculator and watch a game for once!"

Ugh.

Let's put it this way, so you know where the K-Dizzle is coming from: I don't know John Hollinger. I'm 27, and I haven't passed a math class in ten years. Do that math. I watch the games, lots of them, mainly because (for over a decade) I've been doggedly trying to accrue insight and offer the sort of analysis that I don't often see media (local, national, the world and elsewhere) giving you, dear reader. I tape hundreds of games a year, and have stacks and stacks of DVDs filling up my living room of Rocket/Trail Blazer contests from mid-March. I've never seen Lost, never spent a second on 24, haven't touched Survivor, and my girlfriend is the only woman here in the western world between the ages of 21-42 who hasn't seen a minute of Grey's Anatomy. I watch tons and tons and tons of games.

So I have a pretty good idea, when I read someone's column or listen to them wax on the tube, whether or not a member of the media is doing his or her due diligence and watching the games. Beat writers (usually the best analysts out there, anyway, because they're forced to watch all those games courtside) are excluded from this scrutiny, but suffice to say some of the finest writers in America are usually just tuning in to the TNT gang on Thursday, and the odd ABC games on Sunday. You can tell. That's their prerogative, and most of them have forgotten more about the NBA than I'll ever know, but you can tell.

That means I can tell you that John Hollinger watches the games. Tons of them. Stats aside, his scouting reports have long been the most insightful and objective bits of NBA breakdown available. I know what I'm talking about on that end; because for the first few years of reading John, I had NO idea what the hell he was talking about, statistically. The digits that were stuck in between Cuttino Mobley's name and his scouting report on John's legendary Pro Basketball Forecasts/Prospectus might have well been hieroglyphics to me until 2004 or so. I understand and use the numbers now, but it took a while. In fact, ten years ago, when you entered "NBA" into Yahoo's search engine (who used Google back then?), John's site and the site I wrote for (the late, great OnHoops.com) were two of the six NBA links Yahoo would spit up. He's been working at this for a while.

So I can say, almost without hesitation, that nobody in this field works harder at offering the sort of knowledge and insight than John Hollinger. So the, "put down your calculator and watch the damn games!" bit just doesn't work. The fact that he's intelligent enough to do great things with that accrued wisdom and funny enough to keep you riveted as a reader even while discussing Adonal Foyle just adds to it.

That's one angle. The actual statistical angle, that's for another day. Hopefully I'll be invited back.