I Don't Care What Wojnarowski Thinks Of Hollinger, Which Is Precisely The Point

James has helped to make it so profitable to be an NBA owner that Robert Pera bought the Grizzlies, hired a front office of novices [Ed. Note.: Emphasis mine.], ran out a successful scouting staff and began to unload genuine assets for pennies on the dollar. Just recently, James tweeted, "What the hell we have lockout for?" upon learning of the $525 million selling price of the Sacramento Kings. [...]

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. 

This wasn't the '86 Celtics broken up in Memphis today, but, still, a contender became something far less over the past week. All of this didn't need to happen so fast. Between an owner guaranteed to make a profit and a front office guaranteed to believe it's smarter than everyone else, the Western Conference has one less contender to come chasing the defending champion Heat in the NBA Finals. 

--Rudy Gay trade shows LeBron James the future: Super team era ending, Adrian Wojnarowski

Adrian Wojnarowski - known as "Woj" for short - seems to bug NBA bloggers more than he does anyone else. Woj's exceptional sourcing and prose belies an occasionally-condescending, over-narrated, over-opinionated style. And bloggers - with our overdeveloped acuity for social signalling in writing - read right through to that style.

But we'll get to that in a moment. In Woj's take on things,  the NBA is one big soap opera with heroes, villains, kingmakers, and insiders whispering in everyone else's ear with clammy intimacy about where to sign in July. In this version of reality, Woj's presence becomes quite valuable. You see, Woj then becomes the guy that hears all of these insiders and can see through the fog of public relations to the true heroes, villains, and kingmakers. In his own mythos, Woj is not only the expert but the foremost expert of what will transpire the NBA, and not only that, but the ultimate moral arbiter of what transpires and who is to blame.

On the darker end of things, Woj's "sources" lick the reader's ear with poisonous thoughts about NBA players, coaches, and executives, but notably stay quite anonymous, almost without exception. See, being one of Wojnarowski's sources no doubt would carry ignominy, distrust, and disrespect if revealed, and so clumsy, hard-to-parse descriptions like "one high-level associate of James' inner-circle said..." emerge with disturbing frequency. And that's before getting into my impression that agents abound at every level of this process, both in Woj's mythos and in all likelihood, in his sources and motivations.


Whether or not Woj is consistently right in all of this - or in particular with his opinions - is almost beside the point: Woj clearly has a lot of sources in the NBA, and therefore, assuming even the most basic journalistic competence (which we have no reason to doubt), then Woj has valuable information. But take it all together and everything Woj says clearly has to be taken with at least of a grain of truth and at least a grain of salt. And no one knows quite the proportions of this mixture.

Let's get back to the style that touches bloggers so unkindly, because I'd say it touches us unkindly precisely for the reason that it gives us an uncomfortable window into the proportion of truth and salt, uhh... look, this metaphor got out of hand. You get what I'm saying.
'
Read that second paragraph from the excerpt above again:

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. 

In the most charitable interpretation, an editor at Yahoo! scrubbed mention of ESPN and Wojnarowski knows far more than the public record indicates about the NBA bust Jackie Butler, who earned about $2 million a year for the Spurs before being dealt and only affected the Spurs' fortunes in a tangential way. In a way I sort of see (or think I see) what Woj might be saying: On the margin, Butler's salary could have instead been used to pry Scola from Tau Ceramica. Luis Scola is a talented big that likely was a huge value proposition for the Spurs, but they couldn't afford to pry him from his team, and the two parties parted ways as Scola requested the trade. So, in a vacuum, there's some truth there: If the Spurs hadn't spent 2 million dollars on a guy that played 103 minutes in a season for the Spurs, they might have Luis Scola. So technically speaking the signing of Butler is a disaster. But well, busts happen. And in the NBA, singular $2M busts are not the end of the world. You can't always get what you want for players, and you don't always know what you're getting. An injury alone can set a player back years. A quarter-second of unknowable std. deviation on a slasher's 40 could mean the difference between a decent and a mediocre player. So no, the signing of Jackie Butler was not a disaster for the Spurs.

What's disastrous for the Spurs is that they are a small-market playing a game of arbitrage (or "Moneyballing the league" if you will), and, if they slip up, their mistakes are magnified by business realities. Small market teams are much more sensitive to ordinary big-market problems like trade requests and buy-outs. The Lakers and Knicks can keep firing coaches with guaranteed contracts until they've each gone through every Mike in the league. The Spurs can't just spend $30 million to have a guy doing nothing on the roster. Jackie Butler's signing might have cost them Luis Scola, on the margins. Systemically, what cost them is that they were too thrifty to risk $2.7 million just to buy out a probably-good, maybe-brilliant NBA player of unknown skill. In retrospect, we can say that the Scola signing is one of the Spurs' biggest front-office regrets, right up there with Stephen Jackson walking after 2003 and the Richard Jefferson Experiment.

But even if this is what Woj meant to tell us, then Jackie Butler had almost nothing to do with any of that if we're being honest. And in any case Woj captured none of these subtleties. Luis Scola's loss was the disaster, not Jackie Butler. But we're left with the impression that John Hollinger ruined the league's model small-market franchise, its masterpiece of arbitrage, solely with his bad advice. Which is absolutely, 100% untrue. Every first round draft bust is a disaster if Jackie Butler is. Every negotiation when a player plays slightly above their level for a year is a disaster, if Jackie Butler is. Richard Jefferson is the apocalypse if Jackie Butler is a disaster. And he's not. He's just one of hundreds of bad contracts and players that don't quite pan out in a position of uncertainty. It's a laughably Platonic view of management which abides no experimentation and uncertainty.

Let's get back to Hollinger, though, because it was that paragraph that really got bloggers hot and bothered. We're already working in a realm where Jackie Butler is a disaster, so let's double up on the mischaracterizations: In Woj's view, it's fitting that Hollinger gives bad advice. After all, Hollinger's a novice (though apparently by Woj's own logic, Hollinger advised the Spurs going back to 2006). Of course he gives bad advice. And after all, Hollinger is just "a statistician who worked for a cable sports company," which is a brilliantly petty way (one supposes) of making it seem like Hollinger is digging up those nonsensical infographics about Brandon Jennings going 41% and getting 16 points the last 7 games... instead of inventing a metric, making playoff odds and power rankings, and writing a well-respected column for years and years. Basically, it's fitting that Hollinger gives bad advice because we can point to Jackie Butler as his one defining front-office-consultation Bay of Pigs, a cheap characterization of his business card, and from those two pieces of information we can wildly generalize his entire acumen in player evaluation going forward. On another note, rookies never get better, skills from one field never translate to another, and-

Okay, let's back up.

Because we got sucked in. See, that's what Woj does. He sucks you into a convincing-sounding narrative with a few holes and either you notice the holes and get upset at them or you don't notice the holes and assume he's really got a hold on the truth. When you agree with Woj he seems like a genius that sees into the underbelly of a situation. And when you disagree once in awhile, he seems like "the guy I sometimes disagree with and is off-base but overall is a genius". And when you habitually disagree, he seems like "the guy that is settling a bunch of personal and agent-driven vendettas. Geez.".

But none of this is quite right. The underlying truth is that Woj sucks. First and foremost, that is the statement that Lincoln's eastern monarch would have us keep ever in view with Woj. Why do I say this? Well, I say this because - in the fog of all his dozens of anonymously-sourced interpretations and questionable player evaluations (it's hard to honestly discern how good Woj thinks Rudy Gay really is) - we are given only one especially tangible claim: That John Hollinger consulted with the Spurs to get Jackie Butler, and it was a disaster. This one claim is empirically impossibly wrong and demonstrably factually foolish, and so the only thing Woj says that's actually a matter of "outsider" parsing... turns out to have no substance or merit or journalistically-valid conception. The one thing we can discern is that Woj sucks about the single claim we are allowed to pierce the veil and observe. Maybe it's just a blind spot, but from what I can tell, Woj is batting 0-for-1 in that column in things that are easy to get right, and he also comes off as over-generalizing, over-moralizing, and pushing a petty vendetta against a former colleague. Maybe it's just a blind spot, but uncomfortable reports from friends about "Wojbombing" (searching social media and privately attacking critics) indicates a level of pettiness I'm uncomfortable with. Maybe it's just a blind spot, but, in the space of a few sentences, Wojnarowski reveals that a schema of characters and motives and vendettas - his domain of expertise which he shorthands the NBA - may reside (in part or entirely) within his skull. So why should we trust him with the business of vendetta and agenda? Why should we trust his petty, biased judgment with faithfully executing the unfathomably difficult business of navigating a system of trust between hundreds of competing entities and thence giving the public valuable and unbiased information?

I don't care what thoughts Adrian Wojnarowski has on John Hollinger, at least without some real, substantive reasoning to that effect. Thoughts sit in space in our heads and wait for situations to emerge and inform and be altered. Thoughts are harmless. But when those thoughts Woj has for Hollinger allow him to distort the truth to convey them? Then we have a problem, because it makes me question next what he says about Kobe Bryant or LeBron James or Chris Wallace or Mike D'Antoni. This little bit of pettiness, far more than the "Jackie Butler disaster," is a true disaster of credibility, because this disaster in one stroke makes me question whether those sources Woj is pushing actually have good information, or if they're just the juiciest lead for Woj's pre-existing opinions. I want to trust people. It's in my nature. But I feel uncomfortable knowing that one of the bulwarks of journalism can't sell me this most basic level of trust, and the resident expert at Yahoo! might consider that more than pettiness is at work in his critics.