NBA Player Comes Out of the Closet

The story of the first pro athlete to come out, this one is the very heart of her career and earnings potential. I remember this and I know it cost her millions of dollars in endorsements.

This is her essay on Collins.

In 2005, Collins headlined a group of unsung players whose value was only beginning to emerge via a new metric known as adjusted plus/minus (APM). Controlling for every other player on the court (for both teams), APM attempted to determine how much effect an individual had on his team’s per-possession scoring margin. And Collins, whose meager per-game averages would normally render him invisible to statistical analysts, had a far greater one than his conventional stats would suggest.

“According to [APM expert Dan] Rosenbaum’s calculations, Collins is not a stiff at all but one of the NBA’s premier defensive centers: the fourth-most effective in the league over the last three seasons,” SI’s Chris Ballard wrote before the 2005-06 NBA season. “Over the last three seasons the Nets have been remarkably more effective at the defensive end with Collins in the lineup; they foul less, allow fewer free throws, rebound better and allow fewer points. ‘He’s very consistent and consistently very good,’ says Rosenbaum, ‘meaning he’s either the luckiest center alive and teams just fall apart when he’s on the court, or he’s doing something.’”