Score More Points Than the Other Team
Bill Simmons hasn’t yet said that he thinks Derrick Rose is the MVP, but he puts forward a case for it and then summarizes the opposition as arguing simply that “his plus/minus and true shooting percentage weren’t quite good enough.”
While this does capture the views of some stat-oriented basketball writers, who really do think that shot creation is a black box and that we should weight efficiency uber alles, it seems a little dubious to put things that way when you could simply state the case for Dwight Howard as: “he has an amazingly high shooting percentage and is arguably the best defender in the league, moreover, he makes his team’s defense much better.” This, of course, is what Simmons is saying to — plus/minus captures defensive contributions and true shooting is the best way to measure shooting — but it does not connote the kind of stat-fetishism that anti-stat people tend to attribute to those who like to used advanced statistics. Simmons is making the rhetorical moves of the most retrograde stat-bashers who everyone stopped listening to a long time ago.
The reason Derrick Rose is not indisputably the MVP is because defense is very, very important. And evaluating defenseive contributions in anything like a rigorous way is very complicated and requires using stats that, when talked about, have the air of numerical fetishism about them (“adjusted plus-minus”).
The thing is, everyone has always known defense is important, even the most anti-advanced statistics, intuitive basketball writers and fans all know this, but whenever I try to tell my Rose-besotted friends that Howard’s defensive contributions make him arguably the second best player in the league (behind Lebron, of course), I’m just a “stat-geek.” Simmons, who is something of a forward thinker on these issues, or who is at least open to the arguments made by stat-types, should be above this silly rhetorical flourish.
Couldn’t agree more and I’ve been trying to tell my friends this as well. The problem is that people conflate scoring numbers with how good a player is. IT explains why Carmelo earns the same amount as Lebron even though Lebron is a much better player. Statheads have found that turnovers, efficient scoring and rebounding are extremely important in generating wins. Carmelo and for that matter Rose, do not do any of these thing well.
Rose’s numbers are less impressive in light of the fact that he plays the 2nd most minutes in the league and when you see his shooting percentage and include his mediocre defense, choosing him as the MVP would be a huge mistake. Dwight Howard is simply a much, much better player than Rose and given his terrible teammates, should be given his due even more.
Simmons should be better than this.
Ton
April 1, 2011 at 2:46 pm