The battle for internet readership is what dictates most of the content you read online today.  Writers, bloggers and forum junkies alike, post as much controversy as they can dream up in hopes that their writing will start a debate that brings the eyeballs to their post (which is how most bloggers and online sports columnists validate their meaningless existence). 

While it is understandable that the landscape of online content is clearly skewed towards the promotion of shock-content or wild assertions in an effort to capture audience, John Hollinger goes just a bit further than the rest of us.  Hollinger, who first made a name for himself by inventing the largely unreliable PER rating system (a system that laughably lays claim to the “fact” that a guy like Kevin Martin is a more efficient ball player than Kobe Bryant and Steve Nash) is now making a name for himself with his “scientific” power rankings, rankings that as of yesterday had the Los Angeles Lakers as the 11th best team in the league, behind not one, two or three, but FIVE teams the Lakers have defeated already this season.

Being a sabermetrician at heart myself, I have tried to understand Hollinger’s futile attempts at doing to Basketball what Bill James and Paul Depodesta/Billy Bean successfully did to baseball. No matter how hard I try, however, each time I try to dig into Hollinger’s “science” I get about 20% of the way through the equation before getting lost in my own personal list of arguments against his formula.  Rather than waste my time trying to lay the arguments out here, let me just save you all some time, he is flat out wrong……and an ass who will forever be labeled on this website as a douche-tool.