David Thorpe: Certified Moron

Between the two of us, I'm the one who's deemed as Honey, but seeing as Vinegar writes for the blog about as often as Vince Vaughn does a good movie, I'll have to assume the role, because something's got the vinegar boiling up inside of me.

I'm thinking of maybe wanting to get into sports writing as a career, so when you want to get into that kind of a profession, you read a lot of different sports wrtiter and sports journalists. Inevitably, you have ones that you like and dislike.

For me, then there's my lower ring of hell for sports journalists. It's reserved for the likes of Skip Bayless, Jemele Hill, Skip Bayless (yes, he's that bad), Jim Rome (is he even a sports writer?), and a few others, but for the sake of brevity, I'll end the list there.

The point I'm trying to get to is that I'm adding a new name to the list: David Thorpe of Scouts, Inc. whose work is featured on espn.com Insider. I don't actually have Insider because out of principle I refuse to pay for it, but upon seeing a trick you can pull to it, I can now view most Insider article.

Moving on, Thorpe has been posting NBA Rookie Rankings since the beginning of the year, ranking the NBA's crop of newcomers from one to fifty based on a bizarre series of stats.

Don't call me a Louisville homer for being mad about this, but he currently has New Jersey Nets guard-forward Terrence Williams ranked 24th among fellow rookies.

While 24 may not seem too bad on paper, Williams is a guy who's averaging about 11 points and 6 rebounds a game. If there are 23 rookies doing better than those stats, then we should be talking about a historic class here.

But it's not. Do I think Williams is the best rookie? Absolutely not, I'd put Brandon Jennings, Tyreke Evans, Johny Flynn and probably Stephen Curry ahead of him, but after that, I don't see anyone who's putting up better numbers than Williams.

But far be it from Thorpe to let his series of obscure stats tell him that, for he has Williams ranked behind the likes of these people:

Jeff Teague: 2.5 ppg
Serge Ibaka: 3.8 ppg
Austin Daye: 4.2 ppg
David Andersen: 5.9 ppg
Derrick Brown: 4.7 ppg
Jonas Jerebko: 5.0 ppg

Again let me reiterate: Williams 11 ppg

I know that his shooting percentage isn't the greatest thing on Earth, but he's been producing and showing some great signs of promise on top of putting up some very good stats.

I believe that statistics are a very valuable tool to use in sports analysis, but sometimes when you dig deep to find the most useless, obscure numbers a la Mr. Thorpe and his comrades at Scouts, Inc., there is this conclusion, evidenced by these rookie rankings:

Statistics obscure common sense, so therefore Mr. David Thorpe (I usually don't revert to this kind of name-calling), you are a moron.