In January, under Hollinger’s direction, the Grizzlies executed the biggest and most controversial trade of this season, getting under the tax and substantially remaking their on-court personality. And he was involved in discussions over potential trades. “He’ll run the draft,” Pera told me, and indeed, last week, as the Grizzlies fought the Thunder in the playoffs’ second round, Hollinger was in Chicago for the combine, where prospective draftees do drills before the glares of scouts, coaches, and general managers. (Hollinger speculates that he's also the first NBA executive who knows his way around a blogging content management system.) The Grizzlies immediately entrusted Hollinger with much responsibility. Even Bill James, the unassuming Kansan ex-pork-and-beans factory security guard who 30 years ago essentially invented the advanced statistical analysis of baseball, is merely an advisor to the Boston Red Sox. In mid-December, Hollinger joined Memphis as vice president of basketball operations, making him the highest-profile outside analyst ever to be poached by a team-in any sport. ESPN turned him into a brand, posting daily updates to “Hollinger’s NBA Playoff Odds,” based on proprietary “Hollinger Power Rankings.”
A statistic Hollinger invented, player efficiency rating (PER), attained such currency that either using it or criticizing it (it favors bad shots! it doesn’t accurately measure defense!) was as big a part of other NBA writers’ jobs as having an opinion about LeBron James. He had established himself as one of the most incisive and influential basketball observers of an advanced-analytics bent-the kind who prize data, and especially certain kinds of data, over gut intuition. At the time, Hollinger, who had done stints at The Oregonian, the New York Sun, and Sports Illustrated, was suiting up for his eighth season at ESPN. That analysis was pure Hollinger: sharp and sardonic. “If Memphis is going to contend with this nucleus,” he wrote, “now would be a good time to start.”
1 ESPN writer John Hollinger summed up the team’s situation in a preseason preview in October. Meanwhile, they were spending big bucks on their talent, especially all-star big men Zach Randolph and Marc Gasol and wing man Rudy Gay, placing them above the luxury tax threshold-an unsustainable position if you are not the Los Angeles Lakers, the New York Knicks, or another major-market one-percenter who can laugh off a $30 million penalty. Coming off two consecutive playoff runs, they were bound to compile a record sufficiently strong to fail to qualify for a lottery-high draft pick, yet not improved or even different enough to be likely to emerge from the super-competitive Western Conference to play for the championship. With two extra months, Gay should be ready to go for San Antonio come late October.The Memphis Grizzlies entered this NBA season as a good basketball team living in the worst of all possible worlds. Wesley Matthews, one of the most recent Achilles injury cases, started the very first game for the Mavericks after suffering his in March. Still, he should be ready by the time the season starts, or shortly after. Gay is 30 and appears to be on the decline, but there’s a chance that he won’t even be the same player that he was last season when he averaged nearly 19 points on 46 percent shooting in the 30 games he played. An Achilles tendon injury is one of the worst muscular injuries in the NBA, and there’s a long history of players who suffer them never being the same.
The other major concern for Gay is his ruptured Achilles, an injury he suffered last January. For a player going into his 12th NBA season with $118 million in career earnings, it’s understandable if winning was more important to him. On the other, though, the Spurs are one of the league’s top four or five teams, while the Kings are. On one hand, his new Spurs deal is up to $6 million less than he could have made.
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Gay declined a $14 million option this summer to become a free agent, opting to choose his own path rather than return to the Sacramento Kings. The second year of the deal will have a player’s option.
Rudy Gay and the San Antonio Spurs have agreed to a two-year deal worth $17 million, according to ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski.