Rose's case for MVP?

While you have a point, the fact that a player like Rose is accepting the challenge and actually playing like an MVP warrants him being so. Being the leading scorer on a #1 team thats basically a defensive team is also something some players couldn't do. Not only that, the fact that he sort of called it at the beginning of the season adds more of a media story.

You don't think A.I's Philly team was anything like Lebrons Cleveland team?

 

The only two players who this year, their team would fall apart without them is Dwight and Dirk.

 

Volume scorers are rare, but EFFICIENT volume scorers are much rarer. Hence the difference between AI and Lebron.

 

That's a pretty good way of looking at it.

 

Rose's MVP stock is rising since the all-star break, and rightfully so. The Bulls continue to win even with injuries to key offensive players. They've clamped down on defense, true, but Rose has been carrying the offense more than ever and the "he's only shooting 40% since all-star break" argument is entirely misleading.

basketball-reference.com provides advanced boxscores where they show USG% and ORTG (offensive efficiency metric which takes into account points, assists, turnovers, offensive rebounds) each game. If we look at Rose's last 13 games (taking away his first 5 games after the break), Rose's USG% has been 35.0% and his ORTG has been 120. That is MVP-level offensive production, and he's doing it for a team that sorely needs his offense and is 12-1 in that stretch. By comparison, over the same stretch of games LeBron's USG% is 27.9% and his ORTG has also been 120, his team going 7-4 in that stretch.

I still think Dwight Howard is the guy I'd give the MVP to, but Rose is a respectable candidate.

 

I think the Knock on Dwight is that the Magic will finish with a worse record this year than the previous two years. There is no doubt that Dwight is a better player this year on the offensive end, but the team's lack of success drags him down.

The Bulls were expected to be a middle of the pack of team in the East, along with teams like Atlanta. Instead they will likely finish with the best record in the entire conference. That more than anything else helps Rose's MVP case.

At the end of the day the MVP award almost always goes to the best player on the best team. In that sense Rose is the leading candidate, with Kobe Bryant perhaps the second at the moment.

 

The over-emphasis on D is adversely affecting Rose's offensive efficiency, most likely. The same happened w/Francis when JVG/TT came here. Not sure if OP realizes that.

 

I'm not faulting Rose, just that I don't feel him as the runaway winner the media claims he is. On years like this one, when no player really stands out, it's hard to pick someone with conviction. And I can't pick Rose with conviction because of the way I feel about the award.

But of course, every player is a victim or beneficiary of his circumstances. So I can understand why he's garnering so much support. And if he wins, good for him.

 

am i missing someone from their team? outside of noah and boozer, who have been back for a while, it doesn't appear they have lost almost any other games to injury among the rest of the team for the entire season. 54 games lost to injury is basically it for the whole team.

unless it has some huge team component, how in the world could ORTG for lebron and rose be equal over that stretch? i know lebron is playing more minutes over that stretch (well all of march, i know you weren't counting the first game) so rose would actually be leading pts and ast by a little per minute but lebron is winning TS% by almost 10% (63.7 vs 53.9). that seems pretty enormous. i haven't looked at it in depth, but it seems like every time i see someone's ORTG it seems to be at least moderately correlated to their TS%. i can't see how the gulf from average efficience to way above elite efficiency can be traversed with a small pts/asts advantage that is somewhat offset by rebounding and TO's in lebron's favor (unless the bulls' pace just fell off a cliff). i don't see anyway to claim rose is using possessions as efficiently as lebron over the past month, unless i've misunderstood ORTG and it's basically just a duplicate of USG%.

 

I think Clutchfans would be a better place if t_mac1 would just come out and admit that LeBron is his choice for MVP. I'm just saying... not insinuating anything, no, not at all. Just my dos centavos...

 

Dwight Howard turned a lineup with Jameer Nelson, JJ Reddick, Gilbert Arenas, Hedo, into a top 5 defensive team in the league.

Add that to a 23/14/1/1.5/2.5 stat line, and it's no question its Dwight.

That said, Rose is getting all the ESPN hype, so he will get it, but I don't agree.

 

There is no team component. TS% was 63% vs 56% in James's favor. But Rose beat LeBron in assist-rate, turnover-rate, and oreb-rate. Net result was that they both had a 120 ORTG. After the Houston game, LeBron's might have gone up.

 

i'm still not seeing it. i'm looking through people's pages on B-R.com and it seems like ORTG is approximately 200*TS% no matter who you look at (like kobe and lebron's whole careers). looking at rafer, tmac, and battier, guys with very different production rates who played on the same team (so same pace), over the past several years with the rockets, their ORTG's line up pretty close to their TS%'s. battier is by far the highest (high 110's with TS% in the high 50's) with very little production, alston is quite low, and tmac, despite all his scoring and assists, comes in right around 105, which is pretty close to 200*TS%.

just for comparison, i looked at lebron vs battier in '06-'07 and '07-'08. you can barely find a points and assist differential this big, and yet battier wins ORTG 118 to 114, almost exactly the ratio between their TS%'s of 57.5 and 56.0. so unless this is some different ORTG, i'm having trouble seeing how rose has apparently maximized small production differentials to overcome a massive efficiency differential for an efficiency stat that seems to basically be a stand-in for TS% when seemingly nobody else can overcome this difference. even cherry picking their latest games to knock off 2 good lebron games and 1 bad rose game to make it 63 to 56 on TS% lebron should be winning ORTG by about 14.


but whatever, rose has clearly not been as efficient over this 11-13 game stretch. but the good news is, i just noticed B-R added 85-86 box scores so that's good. one more year and we'll have the whole hakeem/jordan era.

 

Why not just look at their ORTG for the current season instead of comparing players with different statistical profiles? So far this season, LeBron's TS% is 59% and his ORTG is 116. Rose's TS% is 54% and his ORTG is 112. But your ORTG estimates would be 118 vs 108.

So, for the season, Rose is doing other things that makes his efficiency closer to LeBron's outside of just shot-making. Those other things would have to be related is assists, turnovers, and offensive rebounding. Its also possible that other factors like % of field goals assisted or % of misses offensive rebounded plays a role somehow. I don't remember the precise formula. In a shortened sample of games, its possible those other things were enough to fully offset the difference in scoring efficiency.

I took Rose's most recent games -- after the first 5 coming out of the break. I compared that to LeBron's games over the same stretch -- what LeBron did before or during that stretch had nothing to do with my selection of the games. I don't consider that cherry picking. You can look at the ORTGs given game-by-game at b-r.com for yourself, if you like, and verify my calculation. I took a weighted average of the supplied ORTGs, weighted by USG%*MP.

 

Can you define efficiency?

I can very clearly tell you that Chauncey Billups was one of the most efficient scorers in the league for the last decade even though his FG% was routinely around 40%.