Layups: What if… Grant Hill, the Sequel
Posted by Neil Paine on March 13, 2009
This past week, I collaborated with Eddy Rivera of the Orlando Magic blog Third Quarter Collapse for an extension of my earlier post about what Grant Hill's career would have looked like if it had not been decimated by ankle injuries. I found that the Magic would have been a 50-ish win team with a healthy Hill, and a pretty good threat to win the East in most seasons; compare that to where they are now with Dwight Howard (a 60-ish win team with a very good chance to do damage in the East), and it's possible that the Hill injury and T-Mac trades were actually the best things for the franchise in the long run.
March 13th, 2009 at 4:27 pm
Yeah, I think it's safe to say that Orlando Magic fans can thank Grant Hill, ultimately, for bringing them Dwight Howard.
March 14th, 2009 at 12:07 am
I'm not a fan of these inane statistical gymnastics which are all a whole lot of nothing, but this is an interesting point. If those guys hadn't gotten hurt, they would never have been in a position to draft Howard.
But all in all, this is also a point which does not require statistics. Which is the very problem with nearly all of this dopey statistical games you see all over the place, they almost always fail to take the real world into account, not to mention good old-fashioned common sense.
The knucklehead Hollingers of the world spray-painting their graffiti all over the place, only it's never referred to as such.
March 15th, 2009 at 9:58 am
In the long run? You mean, because they are benefiting now. Who knows what would have happened if Hill weren't hurt? It could easily be that the value of Hill would have gone way up and they could have pulled in other talent that would have increased the success of the team. It could be that they pulled in other talent interested in playing with Hill.
One cannot judge the value of an unknown purely because the value of said unknown is just that. Unknown.
March 15th, 2009 at 9:59 am
people we must not forget how good grant hill really was before his injury in detroit.