If you follow me on Twitter and were listening to me today, you’ll already know the story to this and could probably skip ahead a couple paragraphs. If you don’t, then here’s why I’m about to apologize.
Early today, an article from Joe Nelson of KFAN surfaced where he was arguing that PER, or player efficiency rating, should not be trusted as much as it should. His reasoning was that you could create a team with the leaders of PER at their respective positions, and on name and star power alone would not be as good as another team that Nelson cherry-picked. His team was made up of Steve Nash, Monta Ellis, Kevin Durant, Blake Griffin, and Greg Monroe, while his “Stats Team” consisted of Jeremy Lin, Sundiata Gaines, Nic Batum, Ryan Anderson, and Nikola Pekovic.
Nelson (at least I believe this is what he did) added up the average points per game for the starting five players on each team, and reasoned that his team could beat the “Stats Team” 103-72. He then added that the reader might argue that Sundiata Gaines plays less than 20 minutes a night, and with more time could be a better scorer. After all, Gaines has a PPG of 5.7 this season, but a points-per-36 minutes of 14.9. However, Nelson argued that there’s a reason why Gaines doesn’t get more playing time, and that it’s because he’s not as good as Kevin Durant (I feel a more accurate comparison would have been with Ellis, as they actually play the same position).
Regardless, I set to work on tearing Nelson’s article apart, Fire Joe Morgan-style. I copied and pasted his text, bolded everything, and started filling in my own words in between each of Nelson’s paragraphs.