New Grizzlies controlling owner Robert Pera and CEO & Managing Partner Jason Levien had been surprisingly quiet since taking over the franchise roughly six weeks ago. But an expected shake-up of the team’s basketball operations staff finally happened early Thursday evening, and in an unexpected way.
When I spoke to Levien last month about his organizational plans, he indicated a desire to bolster the team’s use of statistics and also spoke of seeking out “black belts” to add to the mix.
Along both of those lines, the Grizzlies threw the NBA community into a tizzy with the eye-popping announcement that they’d hired ESPN.com writer and “advanced stats” pioneer John Hollinger to an executive position.
Hollinger achieved NBA-media fame through his work at ESPN, which began in 2005, and is most often associated with his self-invented “total stat” PER (which stands for Player Efficiency Rating), but his work was highly regarded in NBA circles well before his ESPN platform and extends far beyond the oft-misunderstood PER.
Making the hire even more momentous is that Hollinger isn’t merely being brought in to run the team’s now automatically enhanced analytics component but will apparently, as reported by Hollinger’s ESPN colleague Marc Stein, have “a prominent front office voice” beyond merely providing data. Hollinger will take the title of Vice President of Basketball Operations and, per a Grizzlies press release, will work in conjunction with General Manager Chris Wallace.
